I think most of the turn based games are underrated because they are usually very serious... really!

I think the gamers must meet other games that are REALLY good and have a very humorous tone. I dare any gamer here who thinks turn-based games are dull to play WORMS (Worms 2, Worms Armageddon, or Worms World Party), and still say turn-based games are boring.

This game has amazed me, it makes you laugh at every detail :D

Mac for productivity
Linux for development
Palm for mobility
Windows... for the Solitaire

I know it''ll still be a problem, but as for waiting for people to finish their turn, make people take their turns at the same time.

Anyway, they''re dying for the oh so obvious reason that I have yet to finish my turn-based wargame.

Also, don''t know where it is in the post, but someone made a comment about the number of players, and I want to thank them for that because I just got this really cool idea.

I call it the miniMMORPG, although someone has probably already done it. Anyway, it''s like this, instead of hosting a multiplayer game of let''s say Quake that''s over in an hour, the software runs as a persistent world on a given server. (Ooh, I can see all the emails from isp''s complaining about bandwidth now.) I don''t think it''d be worth it to coordinate all the games on every server(a distributed MMORPG).

quote: Original post by Argus And yet multiplayer turn-based games, even in simultaneous mode (which I hate btw)

What exactly do you mean by simultaneous mode? It can't be all players planning their turn at the same time, because it makes no difference if it's simultaneous mode or not to any single player. You still get to take "your turn", the wait between turns just gets shortened - you only have to wait the difference between your turn length and the length of the turn of the slowest player. Nomatter how annoying or slow that player is, it would always be worse in player-by-player mode.
So do you mean the style of play where at the end of everyone's turn, everything moves simultaneously? I'll pick up on that style further down this post.


But first I want to pick up on the "attack of opportunity" ambush example that KingRuss brought up.

A few tactical turn-based wargames came up with a solution to this problem: waiting. Instead of expending all your action points during your turn, you can leave a few action points to interrupt the other player's turn if one of his characters wonders into your character's field of view. This works quite well for turn-based games where you do your movement one at a time (i.e. after player 1's turn, all his units have moved and performed actions and the results have been calculated and displayed, then the next player does the same, etc..). Don't forget - this abstracts the whole fighting process, and you're not meant to get FPS-like situations where one player might not have noticed the other player shooting etc... if those effects needed to happen, there would have been mechanics in the game to calculate the chance of it happening.


There's another form, where players take turns (possibly simultaneously) planning their actions for the round. When each player has finished planning, then the action is played out, simultaneously. Diplomacy works on this principle - and it isn't even a computer game! Logistically, this type of game is much harder to get 'right', because the more you can do in a single round, the more of a problem things like interrupts become. Imagine if each round each character could run about 100 meters and fire a single shot. 100 meters would be enough to wander into a completely different section of the map, and possibly encounter a number of targets that you could not plan for. You can't target those new people, because you didn't see them during the planning phase.
To solve that problem, you could try introducing interrupts again, but then you'd get the problem of the simultaneous movement still being interrupted dozens of times to take 'extra' actions.
The other solution is not letting the players plan so far ahead per turn. If each turn, you could only choose to either move or attack, and your move would be limited to a single tile or a short distance, then it becomes less of a problem.


Just a few random thoughts to throw in and save turn-based games



[edited by - MadKeithV on October 4, 2002 3:29:46 AM]

MadKeith - yeah sorry I wasn''t clear on what I meant by ''simultaneous''. There are quite a few turn-based games where you make your actual moves simultaneously (eg. AoW, Warlords3). But it often ends up being a race to move which I dislike since turn-based games typically don''t have a nice interface for it.

Simultaneous *planning* on the other hand, such an in diplomacy as you mentioned and also in MOO2 is fine with me, although of course we do run into the kind of problems you mentioned. Fallout had a nice system I thought.

I really should play fallout, it''s mentioned in a lot of the discussions I participate in! The problem is that I have very little time to play games, and I''m usually posting from work hehe.

I think I like the ultra-short planning phase, simultaneous resolution train of thought... Do you have any comments on that?

Fallout really just has a good (useful) implementation of the interrupt system you were talking about. Jagged Alliance did something similar I think, but then they had to go and make JA2 non-multiplayer. Speaking of which, Civ3 and HoMM4 seemed to have MP issues..

Could you expand on what you mean by "ultra-short planning phase"? If you mean what I think you mean, wouldn''t it be an idea to go for real-time with a pause function? (we are getting a bit off-topic here though, should maybe be a new thread on how to implement turn-based MP).

Good idea, I''ll start a new thread.

First off thanks everyone for all the replies! Second of all sorry about my spelling.

MadKeithV >> Thanks for such a long post.

Ok, say there was a game (yeah right) where player inputs commands while commands from "last turn" were being carried out. The commands inout in the current turn would be exacuted "next turn." So players could chose what to address or mearly watch their lasted efforts be carried out.

I am sure u have all played Robosport for the MAC right?
Urrmmm right, its late, sorry about the rambling.

Here are some links to in-development turn based tactical games:

Paradise Cracked:
http://www.buka.com/games/paradise/
Demo available (in Russian, just guess the buttons if you don''t speak it):
http://www.3dgamers.com/games/paradisecracked/

Silent Storm:
http://www.nival.ru/eng/s2_info.html

Rabid Dogs^2:
http://www.rabiddogs2.com/


Also, the webmaster of X-COMMAND (X-COM news/info site) is making his own turn based game:
http://www.strategyplanet.com/xcom/

Yea, some systems do overcome many of the problems I presented, what I did was just list some common ones, when really the only major problem you have to deal with is balancing... I could probably design a near-perfect to perfect game due to the various training things I have(playing, creating, misc...), but I am on a different path right now. Did you need any help over in your post about turns keith? I have some time to waste.