One of the problems I see in Battles and Campaigns (perhaps to a lesser degree), is that they are both turn-based in terms of military ACTION (actions you take with your troops).

Player A moves/attacks with ALL troops, while Player B waits or is away.

Player B moves/attacks with ALL remaining troops, while Player A waits or is away.

Not a big issue if only 5-10 troops are involved, but in a 20 army Battle, or even larger Campaign battle, thats alot of ACTION going on while the other player can do nothing.
Especially in first contact situations.


I have thought perhaps a system used by many TBS games & the most popular table-top games, could be used here.

ie: each player can only move X armies per turn.

some games use initiative skills to determine which troops ACT first, others allow only X troops per turn.

I dont think initiative would work here with so many troops, plus it could mean you could only move 1 army type before another player's turn is up.

So, i thought that perhaps if we had an ACTION limit of say 5-6 armies per turn. (By ACT/ACTION I mean move or attack)

ie: You can only ACT 5 armies per turn. You cannot ACT the same army more than twice in a row.

This would lead to much shorter turns, and also increase the formation & strategy in gameplay as you have to plan and combat in smaller increments. (especially important in Battles).

this brings me to my 2nd point/suggestion...


with ACTION limits, requiring shorter ACTION turns, we could also have much shorter turns...

eg, we could have 1-2 minute Campaings.
Only moving 5 armies or so means 1 minute per tick is possible, and some turns would be spend managing other things.

with 1-2 minutes per turn, a full game (100 turns) could take less than 100-200 minutes. which i think is playable.

if a game takes longer than 3hrs to play, i dont think its a viable multiplayer option (as some players will always have to leave due to real life).


we could even have 1 minute Battles, or turn-based battles with only a 2 minute timelimit, instead of 10 minutes.

The BIGGEST problem I see with fast tick-based games is when you have 2 players at war, both moving at the Same time.

Every time you go to move in for the kill, your enemy has already moved their troops. Or perhaps when you go to move your army, and cant, you realise its already been killed!

Thats the problem when more than 1 player moves at the same time.

What if each player could only move and attack with one troop per turn? Then have a little signal that it was your turn? More like Chess.

As for battles, I think limited number of troops moved per turn would be an AWESOME extra option, in addition to our current novice battles, auto battles, as well as future planned scenario battles and the "one player selects troops for both sides" battles.

I don't see turns getting shorter in battles though, as most of the time taken in an average battle turn (3-6 minutes) is in THINKING. Actually moving your troops does't take long. Turns would stay the same length, since people would still have to think.

As for campaigns, keep them as they are. I don't see a problem with them. I like them the way they are now. If players want quick action, they play fast games. Even those are too fast for the average player, I'd say. I wouldn't want to sit at the computer for more than an hour, I'm barely finding time for 1 hour battles as of late.

I do NOT like the idea of action limits for campains from a brief glancing perspective... I might think differently later, if I think about it more, but the first thing that came to mind was this:

that 2 vs. 1 fights would be even worse for the one alone. now, we've talked about this so much in these suggestion threads, I don't think anybody has ever wanted it to be worse for the lone guy... lots of threads have been opened on the idea of giving a defender vs. 2 an advantage, not a disadvantage.

this action limit system would be awful for that... you could move five armies, your opponents could move 10!

Last Edited : Friday, 13 August 2004 - 01:36

Well, ^ector I'm pretty sure that Req is talking about 2 player games (obviously with more than that the total time to play 100 turns would go over 3 hours).

The problem I see with this, is basically what Sage brought up. 1-2 minutes per turn isn't enough time. Frankly, when you are in a war with someone you need time to think, especially if this new system will involve MORE tactical play/thinking. Also, factor in lag time from people playing on dial-up, and 1-2 minutes sometimes won't even be enough time to physically move the troops. I know that I've had my ISP kick me off or lag me out, which means I have to try to reconnect, sometimes restart my computer to get a good enough connection.

That said, I think your orginal estimate of 100 turns would be quite high, assuming that each player only started the game with one castle. Just look at how fast anyone attacks and takes out another player. I don't see any game going over 50 turns (unless the players decide they'd rather build up than fight from the start...). Usually a heads up match between two players is decided by then at least, if they haven't actually taken a castle from the other...

[edit:] of course that's not factoring in the changes that only moving 5 troops each turn would have... maybe 50 wouldn't work, i dunno..

Card

Last Edited : Friday, 13 August 2004 - 02:09

I like the idea and in fact I think I mentioned or suggested at one time to divide the hourly increments to every 20 or 15 minutes so that there would be "less quicker on the mouse and faster connection strategy".

Anyway I'm not sure if it is suggested here but along with the idea of faster turns for "X# of units" I think can be implemented "fractional turns"(i.e. e.g. every 5 minutes 5 or 6 units can be moved 1/3 or 1/4 of a full move);
but I think it should be allowed for a player to be able to "acrue or accumulate fractions" (i.e. e.g. if 5 or 6 units are not moved for 15 or 20 minutes they should be allowed to be moved a full turn).

The idea can be scaled down to 2 minutes/fraction and 10 minutes for a full move.
The only purpose would be to avoid the "quicker mouse move", to allow for some quick action with fully ready units and last but not least to allow some flexibility for players to miss moves without being penalized for it.

TR

I like the idea, but I don't think that it would work very well in campaigns. My opponent would especially not like it (turn 23 of a Skirmish, he's attacking one of my secondary castles, I'm sorta losing based on # of stacks). He wouldn't be able to do as much damage to me as I would to him.

Also, for campaigns, what if you have other things that you want to do? Not only do you need to worry about any attacks from your opponents, but you also need to worry about getting resources and building walls and defenses, and you won't be able to do any of those if you have a huge battle going on when you might need those to stay alive. By having to choose between fight and defend/gather, you might as well just quit the game if you don't have everything built in the beginning the way that will keep everything safe.

mebe smaller boards, and a chess like turn based, no "end turn" key, but simply you move your piece, you can move or attack, but you get one action, once that action is done its his turn, auto reset the map every 15 seconds.

Something really amazing was that way back when I had an Amigo with only 512K ram there was a "Roman conquest game" that allowed you to attack a province at a time and reconquer the entire "Roman Empire";
but the amazing thing about it was the diversity of enemy army units including war elephants for the Carthagians and the excellent animated battles.

The idea was that when you entered a province you had to win a battle against the "AI" of the computer for that particular enemy.
You could select from about 5 battle formations for the Romans and you could drag a line from each unit to control it's movement.
You could stop action to make adjustments;
but once the units engaged the enemy they were committed to battle by the "AI" for the Romans.
You could still stop action but making close quarter adjustments was difficult where ever the units were under the influence of the "AI" like for example units might begin to retreat and sometimes they could be re-engaged but not always.

Basicly the idea was that you pre-programed the initial movement of your units until they became engaged in battle at which time the "AI" gained control;
and you just watched the battle which lasted a couple of munutes.
I thought it was quite good and this idea we are discussing here seems like it can be adapted to some sort of animation and even "AI".
I think most "gamers" have learned to accept the computers "AI" as fair. The strategy is learning to take advantage of what has been programmed into the "AI" as superior tactics (i.e. e.g. rock, paper, scissors).

PS:
Mention has been made that an animation of arrows and ballista and catapult shots could be added but that it didn't seem worth it.
Well I have always wanted to say that in combination with about 3 of the "popup pictures" showing a few arrow hits for example I think a simple "ranged animation" can put a lot of "wow" into the game.

TR

i'd thought id add this
people will venture more for bigger stacks rather than lots of smaller stacks
p.s.i havn't read evryones comments so don't pester me to tell me this has already been posted

Eh, after thinking about this, I've changed my mind on the importance of disconnects/lag. I had the old campaign system still in mind in that you only get to play like 3 every 2 months or so. So if you get screwed in one it takes a while to get your level back up.

But with quicker games this isn't as big of a deal.

Card

Ok, just to clarify, there will be 3 types of games...

Battles (1v1 with just troops fighting).
Duels (1v1 campaigns)
Campaigns (FFA campaigns).

Clan games are just FFA campaigns split into 2 teams.
So they will score like Duels, but play like Campaigns.

This idea of moving only X troops per turn is probably only usable in Battles & Duels. As those 2 types of games will be Turn-Based.

Campaigns & Clans will be tick-based, which would make it far too slow to limit the number of troops being moved.

so will we now have 3 parts to our level? e.g. #:#:#

I have only recently started playing battles but the way it seems to me so far is that the first player moves and attacks then his half of the turn is up. Then the second player moves or attacks actually completeing the turn. In my opinion limiting the amount of troops moved would actually slow the game down.

I don't know if this is doable but something like they do in battle tech for simultaneous damage. In other words the system would have to keep track of how much damage was done to a unit until the end of the turn, no damage would actually be displayed before the next turn.

Example 10 stack squire unit attacks a 10 stack maceman unit. Both sides deal their damage, but losses aren't removed from the stack yet. Another 10 stack squire unit then attacks the same macemen who having multiple retals. The macemen still have a full unit to defend with this turn. At the end of player 2s turn all damage delt from both sides get added to the units, and next turn they are at their new strength.

This would take away the advantage of first strike. It would also force players to pay closer attention to positioning and troop movement, because they can't count on having a onesided fight.

I agree that it would slow battles down...a LOT. Because you spend most of the time thinking and planning, anyways. This could make battle games 2 or 3 times as long

Found it
If you read Req's posts you all should be able to see here, there is mention of the possibility of a one minute turn and a game is a game is a game (i.e. we have to conform to the requirements of a game). If the turns are one minute to allow movement of 3 units, that's the way it would be for everyone and we would have to be planning our next move while our opponent is making his move. It's simply a matter of how the game is played and I know chess players have been known to dwell over moving one piece for God knows how long but IMO fast thinking should have its rewards also in a game like this.

I'm using 3 units/minute but Req might even have 5 or 6 units/minute in mind. Given two players after 10 minutes each could move 15 units (i.e. 3 units/minute) and 30 units each after 20 minutes of play. I'm not trying to advocate this although I think I would like it and that I could adjust to it.
In any event it seems to me that Req has been thinking about this idea for quite a while and I am of the opinion that I'm willing to deal with some problems in the interest of *game progress*.
I'm sure anxious to start testing the new version.

PS:
I played in a "beta space game" where after months of building up a star system empire with cities and factories, players would log into the game and find that everything they had done had disappeared.

TR

Sounds to me like your other thread where you are attempting to limit movement. The game works very well as it is in this regard, and is quite like others. I think you are barking up the wrong tree here. Please implement nothing of this kind.

Where you may improve the game overall is with a better tutorial or something to allow the new player to play a 1 on 1 vs a robot player. That may keep people here.

Also the request to know for sure if you can move to a hex before you try it due to fractions of movement points would be large. Don't fool too much with the basics. They work!

For those who may not realise it, this is an OLD thread but there is information in it relevant to Requiem's more recent thread entitled "Limited Units per Turn";
So that's why I searched it and added a few comments to bump it forward.

TR