Strictly talking about a single player Turn Based Role Playing Game (SP-TB-RPG): I don't play many of these, very few really, so forgive me as I am sure some one has done this at least once. What if instead of turns being wholly separate where you use up your Action Points (AP) each turn (then the turn goes to the next guy), you select your moves using up your AP and the turn progresses simultaneously with all other characters in combat. I am suggesting doing it this way: A turn is counted 10 seconds long and is divided by your AP so that a character with 10 AP uses up an AP every second of a turn, and a character with 20 AP uses up one every half second. In this way, the AP can be counted down, when enough is reduced for the move you select, the move is completed. Example:Grendel has 10 AP Beowulf has 15 AP Beowulf Selects Attack(3 AP) x3 followed by Dismember(4 AP) Grendel Selects Quick Attack(1 AP) x6 followed by Chew Skull(4 AP) 10 Second turn / 15 AP for Beowulf = 2/3rds of a second per AP Grendel has 1 second per AP (10/10) So Beowulf uses Attack once every 2 seconds during his turn (2/3 per AP * 3 AP = 2 second per Attack) Grendel gets off a quick attack every second, twice as fast, even though its a third the AP cost, he is slower by 5 AP. Grendel and Beowulf finish exchanging light blows 6 seconds into this 10 second turn. Grendel Starts his Skull Chew move and Beowulf starts Dismember. Both moves have started 6/10ths into the turn, and both use 4 AP, but Dismember will finish first because Beowulf is faster by 5 AP. His AP are 2/3rds of a second long because he has 15 to pack into 10 seconds, Grendel's AP are 1 second each because he has 10 AP for 10 seconds. Hence, 4 AP from Grendel is 4 seconds, but 4 AP from Beowulf is only 2 & 2/3rds seconds. Beowulf finishes Dismember(4 AP) in 2.66 seconds, ripping Grendel's Arm off before Grendel Manages to Chew Beowulf's head off. So! Guys, what do you think of this as a turn based combat system?[Edited by - JasRonq on October 18, 2009 8:20:33 AM]

I think I'm very very confused.
I really don't understand what you are trying to say.
although the use of time makes me think of Eternal Sonata.

there is also ATB or Active Time Battle that was introduced with final fantasy 7.

I'm not sure what else to say.
I couldn't understand. it seems like you are suggesting time, but splitting the player moves into time segments, it sounds almost like a queuing system that can result in one player moving first depending on what moves they choose.
I think you could also look at grandia for that kind of queuing system and also final fantasy 10.

I love AP systems but I think one compelling charm they possess is that they're pretty simple to understand. If it takes me 2 AP to move and I've got 10, I know I can move 5 squares / hexes / whatever. If I have to spend 4 firing my shotgun, I now can plan for either two attacks and a move or one attack and three moves.

I had to read your post a couple of times to get the gist of what you were saying. It may work if you have a slick interface that does shows all this stuff in parallel to the player, but I think you may lose that compelling charm of nerdy number crunching mixed with careful tactical planning. It's for that reason I even bother with a turn-based system-- otherwise I'd prefer an action oriented animated system where these kinds of strategic delays were implicit in the movement / animation of the characters.

The idea has a lot of potential. In order for it to really be interesting, your max AP per round has to be in some way changable within combat, and the interface has to show the seconds each ability takes in an easy to see way. Abilities that interrupt, stun, or disable would be particularly cool.

As Wavinator said though, you would have to ensure this didn't become a number-crunching duel.

Interface wise, I imagine a bar for each character in battle that depletes with each AP. (By bar, I mean more like, 10 or 15 dots in a line representing 10 or 15 AP) The time could be displayed with regard to the player's current AP total as that probably will make the most sense to the player.

The main idea I am working with here is trying to allow for the thinking time a turn based system allows without having separate turns but instead doing the turns simultaneously.

I think the interface would probably make or break this as I think it could be quite intuitive, but in text here is is obviously confusing.

Look at lasersquadnemesis.com . This is the Gollop Brothers last game (of XCom fame) and is very similar to this. They have a system where you move all your guys over 10 seconds. The opposition move all their guys (its a PBEM). Both send in to the server which almagamates the moves, works out the results and sends them back. You then "play back" the last 10 seconds in the client and watch the action which may or may not have happen what you intended. You then do the next 10 seconds. After 2 minutes (which can take a week or more to play) you can view the entire battle from start to finish in all it's death and explosive glory.

It's a tremendous system and the peak of Gollop's gameplay genius. Blows the tits of standard TBS AP systems.

I like the idea, and I have been enamored of it for a long time. I even had the audacity to think I'd come up with it for a while, but Laser Squad Nemesis, which mongrol just mentioned, is a very impressive example of almost exactly what I had in mind. There's a free demo on the website, which you should absolutely check out as you develop and refine your idea.

They do it a little differently, using more granularity in time and modifying the price per action, rather than giving different units varying amounts of AP. For instance, it might take a rifleman 2.3 seconds to aim and fire, while a sniper needs 3.4 seconds to squeeze off his more powerful shot, or a fast unit could go one hex in .3 seconds while a slow one takes .7 to cover the same distance.

LSN has too many units active at a time for my taste, making each planning phase a long and somewhat confusing process, and it lacks some of the features I'd like to see, like issuing a sequence of commands that are longer than a turn and having them carry over to subsequent turns instead of being cleared each round. If I want a guy to take a thirty-second walk, I have to tell him to do it every ten seconds, instead of a "set and forget" model.

My favorite AP-heavy turn-based strategy game is an old gem called Silent Storm, which also has a demo out there somewhere, although it was tough for me to find. It's got a great character levelling system and a lot of detail in actions, allowing you to change posture and spend AP to aim more or less carefully on each shot, as well as a well-implemented stealth and perception system and good battlefield interactivity for traps, destructible terrain and tactics involving lines of sight, fields of fire and zones of cover.

Neither game uses melee attacks very heavily, which seems to be your focus. For good, in-depth hand-to-hand combat in single player, the best example I can offer is Dwarf Fortress. DF has two modes, the sim mode where you make a fort and the adventure mode where you control one dude in a roguelike style. It's not turn-based in a conventional sense, since your "turn" is just a pause in the action when your avatar has a chance to act and you can't really queue up actions as in Laser Squad Nemesis, but the fighting is very interesting, particulary the wrestling system and wound modelling, where you can get your spear stuck in a goblin's thigh, let go of it, grab him by the shoulder and throw him on the ground, then twist his sword arm to break his elbow, take his sword away and shove it through his face. The ASCII graphics aren't much to look at, but the combat log and your imagination can lead to some very awesome battles, like the time I pulled an arrow out of my own shoulder and threw it at a charging soldier, then dove off a cliff into a river to escape the rest of his patrol. Since I lost consciousness momentarily when I hit the water, I had to watch a few seconds of my guy floating downstream before I got a chance to pull myself onto the far bank and limp off, arrows whistling around my head, into the woods, where I was eaten by a bear. Damnit.

An idea that comes from a board game (Starcraft the Board game to be precise - actually quite a good game) is of the LIFO (Last in First out) order stack.

In this system each player places (in turn) an order token (face down so no one can see what it is) on a planet and each order placed goes into a stack with the first player's token on the bottom and the last players token on the top (there are multiple planets so not all player will place tokens on the same planets and players play 4 tokens each).

Once all the order tokens are placed, the orders are resolve by a player taking one of their tokens from the top of a stack and executing it. Then the next player takes one of their tokens from one of the stacks and so on.

In a SP-TB-RPG each character (Player character or enemy) is like a player in the Starcraft Board Game. Each character has an Initiative (seating order) and a number of Action points (Order Tokens).

Starting from the worst initiative (high or low depending on how you calculate it) each character places an Action onto a character (who is going to be the recipient of the action - which can be themselves). Each Action placed reduces the number of action points they have (this might be constant or it might be variable between characters and different actions might have the same or different action point costs).

Once all Actions have been placed, they are then resolved in a LIFO manner starting from the character with the best initiative. If a character has actions on the top of multiple stacks, then the controller (player or AI) of that character chooses what action to take.

As the player (or AI) can not see specific action that is going to take place, but can see who is doing the action and who it is being done to, then they can't know exactly what the result will be, but because they know some information, they can guess at what the action might be. Also, because ther eis some forewarning of an action, then the player can plan ahead.

For instance, if they see an enemy, known for using fire, place an action on one of their characters who is low on health, then they could place an action on top of that one on the stack of their character to either heal it or give it fire resistance (to negate the fire attack they think is coming). But if the enemy then places another attack on that (assuming that you are trying to protect that character), then your character might then still be damaged and killed (so healing won't work - but if you places a resurrect on them then it would).

This would lead to a much more strategic battle, but because a player can choose which of the visible actions (one of the actions on top of a stack), then there is also a sense of tactics (ie: If I hold off playing any orders from my heavily damaged character, then they can't do any more damage, and I know I have a heal coming from another stack that I can use to keep them alive).

I think an implementation of this could be really interesting in a Turn Based game (single player or multiplayer even).

I'll definitely have to check out Laser Squad Nemesis, right now though I have an implementation question for you guys.

Suppose the system ran roughly as I have outlined it, how would I resolve situations where an action mid sequence in the round becomes invalid based on actions that have occurred before it, either by the player or other characters?

Examples:

Healing or attacking a dead character
Using a melee move on a character that has moved away from you
Using a ranged attack when the character has moved inside your minimum range
Being stunned delaying moves
etc.



I can imagine a complex conditions based system than comes pretty close to writing your own AI scripts, but I think simplicity is the only way to tackle this system.

Quote:

Original post by Edtharan An idea that comes from a board game (Starcraft the Board game to be precise - actually quite a good game) is of the LIFO (Last in First out) order stack. ... This would lead to a much more strategic battle, but because a player can choose which of the visible actions (one of the actions on top of a stack), then there is also a sense of tactics (ie: If I hold off playing any orders from my heavily damaged character, then they can't do any more damage, and I know I have a heal coming from another stack that I can use to keep them alive). I think an implementation of this could be really interesting in a Turn Based game (single player or multiplayer even).

I think this would work best in a party based system. Six or more party member, maybe up to a dozen, would make that shine, but I think it would be lost on a single player character based game. I tend to like singleton play, to the point of leaving behind party members when I can, so my game will likely be that way. It is a great idea for heavily strategic party based play though.