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pros & cons of simultaneous turns in a turn-based game

Discussion in 'Game Design' started by JoeStrout, Mar 18, 2018.

  1. JoeStrout

    JoeStrout

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    I'm doing some additional cooking of the back-burner project I mentioned in this thread. It's a turn-based fantasy wargame for up to 12 players. Having that many players pretty much requires simultaneous turns.

    The basic idea is: instead of moving your units, you tell your units where you want them to move and do. Meanwhile, the 11 other people in the game (plus all the non-player races) are giving their units orders, too. You click "done" when finished (and maybe enter some mini-game that can pass the time and earn you some extra resources while you wait). When everybody (or maybe everybody except one?) is finished, the turn entry phase ends.

    At this point the computer moves all units (perhaps in an order determined by some "initiative" stat). You pretty much just sit and watch it happen (though it would all happen very quickly). Attack orders record the target unit, so if the target unit has moved by the time the attacker gets to go, they track that target rather than moving into an empty hex.

    So, there are a lot of pros of this arrangement:
    1. A game can have lots of human players without taking forever on every turn.
    2. In some cases, guessing what your opponent's going to do might add an interest element to the tactics.
    But there are also some cons:
    1. Sometimes a unit may do something stupid, such as follow a target into highly unfavorable terrain and then lose the battle.
    2. The big one: you lose the sense of immediacy, of directly controlling your units, that you get from the standard control.
    I'm worried that lack of direct control will result in a detached feeling, and loss of interest in what's happening. Grabbing a catapult and smashing an invading orc unit is immediately gratifying; ordering a catapult to smash an orc, and later watching it do that, is not as much.

    So, how can I minimize this drawback, without giving up the benefit of simultaneous turns?
     
  2. RockoDyne

    RockoDyne

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    I have a feeling that figuring out how conflicts would resolve would drive me crazy.

    If the game was more managerial, I think I could get behind it. Like if you aren't ordering units directly, rather it's a vague behavior you select, then I think it lends itself better to not having precise input. Having a scout behavior that knows to run away works a lot better than having a light cavalry unit graciously install itself on pikes because you could never make a decision other than where to go.

    Just inherently, simultaneous turns make more sense when you don't directly interact with someone. City management and base building are where I really see it shine, managing stocks and flows basically.

    The only time I think this really works for combat is with (space)ships, and even that doesn't have direct interaction between the players' units. You control movement, but the guns are all automatic.
     
  3. theANMATOR2b

    theANMATOR2b

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    I played a game (can't remember the name) where once the opponent made there selection - the other opponents have a set time (10 seconds) to input there choices - or the AI makes there choices for them. This made the game progress faster (minimizing the delayed/detached feeling) and made it more important to be decisive about your choices. I remember feeling rushed when the timer popped up counting down to zero.
     
  4. JoeStrout

    JoeStrout

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    Well, for an individual attack, we were planning to show a little attack summary before you actually commit. This would show the attack and defense strengths plus all applicable bonuses (terrain, unit status, etc.), and then the outcome (since there is no randomness in our combat system), before you decide whether to actually do it.

    Of course that's just one attack — predicting an entire encounter will resolve (especially when you can't easily predict in what order those attacks will happen) is a much deeper problem, but that's kind of the essence of strategy anyway.

    Yeah. I think that leads in the direction of RTS, though. (More on that later.)

    Hmm. The main reason we want to do turn-based rather than real-time strategy is so that you can make deep tactical decisions in combat. But with up to 12 players, I don't think sequential turns is practical. I think simultaneous turns might be a decent compromise, as you still direct every unit on every turn as to where to go, which attack (or other order) to execute, etc. But I'm not sure.
     
  5. JoeStrout

    JoeStrout

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    Yeah. I wonder if we can somehow have it both ways? Most of the time, most of your units are nowhere near any enemy units. In that case they may as well move/build/whatever as soon as you tell them to, because why not? It's only where a battle is going on that we need to be careful about the order in which players/units get to go.

    So maybe there is an "Engaged with the enemy" flag for each unit, based on distance to enemy units or some such. We could even group engaged units into "engagements" (i.e. there's an engagement involving 3 orcs and 5 humans over here; a separate engagement involving 6 humans, 2 ents, and 12 zombies over there, etc.) Non-engaged units act as soon as they're given orders. Engaged units... I see a couple of options for them:
    1. These units store their orders, and are resolved at the end of the turn, as I originally described in the top post. OR,
    2. You give a engaged unit an order, and it stores it for 10 seconds, during which other players in that engagement are notified that this unit is active, and have a chance to input orders as well (with the time extended each time a nearby unit gets an order). When 10 seconds pass with no units in that engagement receiving new orders, then all those orders are executed (in initiative order or whatever). If there are any units with action points left, they can then start another such encounter. OR,
    3. Units in an engagement area must be given orders in initiative order, and the game manager (that picks what unit to select when you smack "Next Unit") would help/enforce this. So orders are carried out immediately, but if you try to move a slow unit before some fast enemy unit in the same engagement, you can't; it has to wait until the enemy has moved that unit. Or maybe the order is stored and carried out after the higher-priority enemy has done its thing (unless you change/cancel the order in the meantime).
    I see pros and cons to each of these variations. Option 1 would drive @RockoDyne crazy trying to imagine what will happen when the encounter is resolved, and gives up some of the fine tactics I'm looking for (since enemy units may not be where I expect them to be when my orders are carried out); it also leads to that detachment where orders given at the beginning of the turn are not carried out to the end of the turn, when you may not even be looking at that part of the map.

    Option 2 solves the latter problem, by resolving the mini-encounters more quickly, but still drives RockoDyne crazy. Also, if you've got several engagements going on on different parts of the map, you will probably be unable to properly think through all of them, and end up losing the initiative completely in some of them.

    Option 3 maintains control and immediacy, but could lead to slow turns as you wait on other players to turn their attention to the engagement you're interested in.

    What do you think?
     
    Last edited: Mar 18, 2018
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  6. JoeStrout

    JoeStrout

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    OK, sorry, two more ways of resolving engagements have sprung to mind:

    4. In each engagement, assign the players a priority order (based on race stats or whatever), and require that each player, in that order, move all the units in that engagement (or click "done with engagement") before the next player can move any units in that engagement.

    5. Don't worry about it... we could let players move all units in whatever order they want. But this would make it a whoever-clicks-fastest-wins game in some cases.​

    Option 4 would actually feel most similar to standard turn-based strategy/tactical games (Disgaea, Wesnoth, Civ, etc.). The only difference is that we enforce this on an encounter-by-encounter basis. So while you're waiting for your turn in one encounter, you might be free to play out another encounter elsewhere on the map, and are certainly free to update all your other units.
     
  7. sngdan

    sngdan

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    I did not read that other thread you linked to and I hope my response is not irrelevant because of this.

    I think it would be important to figure out how complex the decisions per turn are, some complexity drivers:
    - Number of units per player
    - Grouping of units (i.e. armies) and different locations they can be at per turn (i.e. can you have 10 different battles at different locations)
    - how complex are the instructions that can be given to units

    How much the player decisions impact the outcome:
    - how much influence do the unit instructions have on the outcome (i.e. or is a number / stats driven, say if I have 5 attack types, it almost does not matter which one I choose if I have double health than the opponent)
    - how long does a battle take (i.e. how important is it to look at it every turn, micro vs. macro influence)

    I could think of an approach that I think @RockoDyne meant:
    - you do not control each unity but you "program" an AI for each unit
    - if you had something like hero units (big impact on outcome), you could focus the player on only controlling those directly
    - you could possibly calculate a factor that puts the players attention to units / armies that are taking really bad AI decisions and put the players attention to those

    As for keeping the gameplay fast, I guess I would go with a fixed tick per turn
    - this could be started once the first player moves or be continoues rounds (no matter if there is input or not)
    - you could kind of give players a number of "extend turn potions" where they can get extra time for one round (all players would get the extra time, but not all would benefit in the same way)
     
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  8. RockoDyne

    RockoDyne

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    I wasn't necessarily worried about how combat plays out, so much as just what can happen from bumping into each other. Do they burn the turn to wait for new orders, continue on with their original instructions, or automatically respond in some way that the player didn't have control over. What if the factions aren't even hostile to one another? If I put down troops to block a path, can they actually stop anything?

    It's either a choreographed dance or a mosh, and you don't get both.

    I'm gonna go with KISS on this. Anything that interrupts the turn and/or requests addition input while the turn is going should be tossed. Anything that would require more than two or three clicks per unit is likely needless micromanagement. The point should be to make a game that progresses briskly, and anything that slows it down is likely baggage.
     
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  9. JoeStrout

    JoeStrout

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    I certainly agree with those principles. But what are you suggesting for actual mechanics?

    At the moment I'm leaning toward option 4, a couple of posts up. This lets you move your units around directly, and in most cases, at the same time other players are moving their units around directly. And then only where you are engaged in an encounter, you might have to wait for another player to go first — but once they're done, then you get to move all your units in that encounter in whatever order you like.
     
  10. RockoDyne

    RockoDyne

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    At this point anything more complicated than a rock-paper-scissors, all-or-nothing type advantage would overshadow what the basic gameplay probably needs to be. Either a unit immediately gets destroyed, both destroy each other, or they push against each other for the whole turn.
     
  11. sngdan

    sngdan

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    Not sure if this would be enjoyable though...but on the other hand I am a very occasional gamer, so definitely not a reference.

    The games I would look at to get some inspiration that came to my mind immediately were:
    - Pool of radiance / homm (too complicated)
    - paradroid (c64)
    - Hoplite
    - ftl
    - archon
     
  12. Joe-Censored

    Joe-Censored

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    I like how the Civ games do it, where you have simultaneous turns and the unit movement is immediate rather than queued. The only issue I had with it was in an intense battle there would be a rush to get through any pop up windows in order to get movement first with your units.
     
  13. EternalAmbiguity

    EternalAmbiguity

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    Option 4 does sound like the best compromise that doesn't wind up being a Starcraft-eque click-fest. That aside, I REALLY really like the idea of option 2, maybe combined with option 3 (if both players input actions in an engagement, the initiative stat determines the order, but you still have the ability to force their hand). You might have an additional tactical layer with this, where you can overwhelm a player with all of these ticking time bombs of soon-to-be-resolved engagements (and perhaps limit their ability to sit back and think about the best choice).

    However, these do change the type of game. Option 2 is indeed twitch-based, so slower players will struggle. Option 4 or some variant doesn't have that problem, so you don't have a twitch advantage.
     
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  14. JoeStrout

    JoeStrout

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    That's interesting, I didn't know modern Civ games do that — the last time I played multiplayer Civ (which was some years ago) it was strictly sequential. Player 1 goes out for coffee while Player 2 does their turn... and that was only two players; obviously it wouldn't scale to a dozen.

    But nowadays it sounds like Civ has gone with my option 5. I agree, that's not horrible, but yeah, you definitely don't want any pop-ups at the start of the turn if you're doing to do it this way. I'd go for an event list in the corner somewhere, that you can expand and click on any event to see details, or ignore it if you're eager to get moving things.

    But just like @EternalAmbiguity says for option 2, it turns your strategy game into a more twitch-based game in some cases. I'm not sure how I feel about that.