Big battles show the necessity of real time with pause combat

[grom]

I don't understand why everyone doesn't make turn based RPGs? Divinity OS2 is the most popular TBRPG ever but not many people try to recreate it?

I don't understand why everyone doesn't make open world first person RPGs? Skyrim is the most popular RPG ever but not many people try to recreate it?

 

[Reinhardt]

If there is big battle - just fucking form squads and give orders to them. Who cares about every single peasant spearman.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

The party aids in the defense of the great city against the dark lord, a hundred allies prepare for the breach of the gates.

In real time with pause: you see the chaos and control your party, allies handle themselves. You are manually selecting area of effect spells for your wizard to use while your ranger and fighter automatically auto select nearby enemies with you occasionally intervening to let them use their special abilities. When you need to - you pause the game for a brief moment to organize your party then continue the action. The game can auto-pause when one of your companions is low on health for example.

But why would developer go for that when they could do awesome cinematic about battle instead?

 

[Excommunicator]

Having the ability to strategise your group in a huge sea of units and make every single action count, overcoming vast odds and using clever tactics one after another to methodically win. That's a pretty amazing scenario to be a part of and only possible in turn based.

But it also won't ever truly feel like a war. It's not chaotic, it's not overwhelming and stressful and it doesn't force you to act under pressure and see how your actions lead to a butterfly effect in the greater scheme of that battle. That's an amazing thing only really possible in real time.

RTWP is the unholy mixture of the two, sometimes too chaotic and not strategic enough, sometimes too slow and tedious to feel exciting, and almost never as fun as either of the above.


It's no surprise at all why turn based is preferred here and it's also no surprise why RTWP is what most devs "settle" on, because they usually want to appease everyone and don't have a clear direction of what they want.

 

[YanBG]

Did you know that Diablo 1 was first designed as turn-based and later changed to real-time but still uses the turns under the hood? You just can't pause them and cheat, which is pretty good end result i think. You can have as many creatures on your screen as it can cover.
However in a game with party it's more difficult to keep track of each character and most people would hate to have a cool hero die on them. Something to think about for solution as a dev.

Heroes of course is a great example of combat, it has tactics and strategy. Also autocombat for when you are lazy or sure of victory.

There is this other game where you have armies made up of squads of soldiers, before combat you can arrange them in formations and give orders what to do later but can't control them once the battle starts, the AI does it for you.

 

[jewboy]

In Arx Fatalis I had to smoke meth before fighting even a single Ylside and it was some of the funnestest combat ever. So real time does have its place, but generally turn based is more fun if you have a brain. If I made a game I'd probably want to do some hybrid thing with turn based as default, but with an optional real time mode as well and I would totally want to copy the Ylside thing and make opponents so fast that it is very difficult to click fast enough in return unless both you and your character are on stims. I really miss Arx. What a great game that was. Any other games with Ylside-like fighting?

 

[Sacred82]

Turn based combat can not be used in epic large-scale battle events.

individual initiative bro. You don't have to sit there for 10 mins because only allies move.

And the point of turn based is exactly that you don't have to "watch your allies move". You're engaged in the process. I'll assume you're describing a very specific scenario, with hordes of enemies, lots of allies and just a small party under your control. But even then, that doesn't mean your party has to act totally independently of your allies.

In Suikoden Tactics (SRPG) e.g. you could change the elemental affinity of the Terrain; think D:OS. But because you tended to have lots of allies, each with their own elemental affinity, you could use your turn (or some of your turns) to assist your allies with elemental buffs/ elemental debuffs on the enemies they were facing (not even counting regular buffs). Because each elemental buff affected several squares, you had to think quite a bit about how allies and enemies are going to spend their turns and where they're going to move; you don't want to end up buffing the enemy and debuffing your allies.

In fact, this offered up two routes: either let your allies distract and bind up some enemies while your party works together to do the actual killing, or spend your turns buffing allies and debuffing their enemies while some of your own do a bit of striking as well.

If anything, all of this became way more nuanced than anything you could do in real time.

Also, if 'large scale battles' are a thing in your game, why not allow some rudimentary ally control on parts of the player? In the Goldbox games, supposedly Paladins (or anyone with high Charisma?) could make a leadership check to see if allies fell under their control. Super simple, but it already breaks up the monotony of a large scale battle if the combat system wasn't actually designed for those.

 

[Tavernking]

Ok this thread summed up so far

Good arguments:

TOEE where AI can move/attack in groups

Shit arguments

Big battles do not belong in RPGs

Just form squads

Just make the big battles appear as cinematic cut-scenes

 

[Riddler]

Turn based combat can not be used in epic large-scale battle events. If a turn-based combat game wanted to cover the invasion of the city, the developers would have you trying to escort the princess through the sewers or some equally lame shit, and 'oh it's just a coincidence that you happened to miss the big battle!'

The Heroes of Might and Magic series is all about waging large-scale battles and its turn-based battles are significantly faster than RTwP fights. Granted, it uses stacks to represent potentially thousands of creatures, but you still control more units on average than you do in most RPGs.

RTwP leads to sloppy game design and sloppy game balance.

If you want me to control 6-8 units in an RTS style, fine. That can be interesting. But don't add a cheat button (pause) when one of your focus group members is bad at the game. That can be solved on the game over screen with two buttons: "try again" and "lower difficulty and try again".

How is pausing inherently a cheat button? That would only be the case if it violates the action enemy, e.g. if you could pause the game and immediately consume 10 potions. Pausing in say, Baldur's Gate to drink a potion still requires your character to spend the next round consuming it.

Constant pausing is kind of a problem though, it grinds what is supposed to be relatively fluid gameplay to a halt and makes balancing a nightmare.

How about making it a limited resource? You get 1-2 pauses per encounter? It should really be like that in turn based games as well, infinite time for turns is fucking retarded.

 

[Darth Canoli]

It should really be like that in turn based games as well, infinite time for turns is fucking retarded.

Just use a fucking timer or a hourglass while playing a turn-based cRPG and as you seem to be quite the masochist, if you fail to play your turn in time, just nail your balls to your chair.
Don't you feel better now ? You found a new motivation to play your turns faster (or slower ? )

 

[kinzadza]

Once the soul of the mindless imbecile that created this thread leaves its body, it will be condemned to an eternal turn based battle of pedophile priests and shitposters armed with dildos in their anal cavities.

 

[laclongquan]

Codexers are generally not very good combat tactic gamers. As illustrated in this thread.

Heroes of Might and Magic series is a strong example of above statement.

HoMM battle is no different than a two side fights, each with maximum 7 units. Oh, the units might be differentiated with different number, like 7peasantX10HPeach so that Peasant unit has about 70 HP total. The concepts of battle with hundreds of units in HoMM is a joke~ And if you dont understand why the joke is on YOU.

As for the original question: "Big battles show the necessity of real time with pause combat"

Jagged Alliance 2 prove the necessity of RTwP in battles with hundred of units. You can have battle with one side overwhelm the other side with number: defenders with tens of militia and party members, against enemies invade from four side, total to more than one hundred (if you script it to happen in 113). In such battle, the time is hugely stretch~ One turn can take 60 minutes.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Ok this thread summed up so far


Shit arguments

Just make the big battles appear as cinematic cut-scenes

Yet cinematic approach would ensure that player wouldn't be burdened by change of making wrong tactical decision.
There could also be some controller prompts mid cinematic to guarantee that they appreciate said cinematics instead of taking a dog to a walk or whatever instead.

 

[Max Damage]

Concurrent turns were already mentioned in the very first reply, why is this thread still going?

 

[anvi]

Real time, rtwp, or turn based, doesn't mean anything.

 

[Riddler]

It should really be like that in turn based games as well, infinite time for turns is fucking retarded.

Just use a fucking timer or a hourglass while playing a turn-based cRPG and as you seem to be quite the masochist, if you fail to play your turn in time, just nail your balls to your chair.
Don't you feel better now ? You found a new motivation to play your turns faster (or slower ? )

Yeah, desiring a modicum of challenge is being masochistic. What is this, Pre-school?
Time control is not some revolutionary concept of masochism, it is a staple in every remotely competitive turn based game.

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

Big battles are for strategy games, combat in rpgs should be short, sharp and limited in scope.

Pretty much. The key is abstraction. RPGs should be about small teams doing focused tasks (thinks seal team 6) while "allies" handle the background battles.

This is actually how D&D was born. They were playing their wargames, and Gygax made some special sabotage missions for a small party. It was such a hit, that the genre was born.

That aside, I don't understand the rift. Harmonizing the two shouldn't be difficult. Essentially, you design a turn-based system with every action having an action-point value. Each value is tied to a literal, real-world, unit of time. In turn-based mode, it limits what you can do on your turn, with AP regeneration triggering each turn. In real-time, actions resolve simultaneously after completion of the timed animation, with AP regeneration occurring continuously. How is this so fucking difficult?

Pillars of Eternity tried to do this, and would have succeeded, but its RPG system design as a whole was a failure.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Another way to make big battles in TB mode is giving you control of squads and managing individual units between battles (or swapping them between squads mid-battle) to keep battles short, sweet and avoid micromanagement hell. A good addition would be the ability to program actions for each unit, save them as a separate command and thus skip most of the micro-management in battle.

It won't work for every game out there, but TB RPGs with large-scale battles could take an advantage of this system.

 

[Darth Canoli]

Fantasy General does pretty well in terms of big scale battles, it's also really fast.

Warbanners also does quite well, even with many friendly non-controllable units sometimes.

Outside of arcade / beat'em all, any kind of combat RT can do, Turn-Based can do better.

 

[anvi]

It is a meaningless discussion. Real Time combat can have plenty of depth, it just requires that you think fast which requires a lot of combat practice. Turn Based just gives more control over movement and more time to think about what you are doing. But the downside is that it removes any excitement, any sense of pace, and any need to get good and think fast. RTWP is in the middle, but if you pause enough it is the same as turn based. Meaningless discussion.