The_scorpion
Liturgist
- Joined
- Dec 10, 2006
- Messages
- 1,056
zenbitz said:standing behind something where you cannot be shot (cover). Then in a single turn use 1 AP to move into the open, 4 APs to shoot at enemy and 1 AP to move back into cover is an exploit.
Because there is no interrupt fire in the game.
The lack of an interrupt possibility doesn't prove the system is flawed generally, it only proves that badly implemented combat mechanics can be exploited. 'tis a no-brainer argument. Not to mention pretty circular.
Besides, peeking out of cover, shooting, then dropping back into cover is probably THE most basic firearm technique out there since armies have stopped facing each other in lines on an open field and just wear each others out until one of them retreats.
If you shoot at an enemy and then retreat around the corner in vanilla ja2, the enemy, if he survives it, invariably throws a grenade to the corner behind which you just retreated (unless you retreat some tiles further). This goes to illustrate that counteractions can be implemented against such behaviour, they're not imminent flaws of turn-based systems.
The lack of control in RT combat, however, is immiment and becomes worse as the number of actions, enemies, playable characters, followers etc. increases, so squad-based RT out of necessity has to be so simple that a human, who can only input one decision at a time, can deal with an AI that can input thousands of decisions at a time. This will always dumb down both the AI and the player side of an RT game, even if you add the clutches of giving orders during a pause, because as soon as the situation for which the order during the pause were given changes, the game needs to be horribly dumb again. Plus you can't structure your orders, you need to give them all at the same time (during the pause, mostly)
That's why so many RT and RtwP-mechanics rely so much on "tanking" characters that can take many blows until the player has to hit *pause". that's why they requie crowd-control magic spells because enemy units can hardly be attacked individually for you lack the time to give the necessary orders. That's why you have to keep babysitting your tanks so they don't get stuck due to pathfinding. In turn-based games, pathfinding may be equally bad but has much less horrible consequences for the gameplay.
Rt works for single person controls especially if the game only has moving and shooting. As soon as you have a map, an inventory or something similar like that, you'll typically add a pause. Now the more you need that pause, the more you fuck up the flow of gameplay. So with the pause in there, the "Rt is more dynamic" argument is out of the door.
The other thing that works is making the loss of a single unit no problem, but that's basicly RTS and no longer squad based tactics. Sudden Strike had an interesting RtwP system, but of course RtwP can be exploited to hell and back, and sudden Strike shows this in pretty exemplary ways too. (besides RtwP isn't possible in multiplayer, so before you even think of RtwP, think of having no MP at all or at least no Pause anymore for real-time MP... )