Strange Fellow
Peculiar
- Joined
- Jun 21, 2018
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- 4,031
You know what's a fun turn-based combat encounter? The Temple of Baa.
It's a funny thing with the different systems.
I mean, I vehemently hated rtwp for very long, but then I played Kingmaker, and was actually surprised of how well it could work. Sure, it's not perfect, but it's way better than something like poe 1+2 and even baldurs for me.
I still favor TB over RTWP, just because I like the tactical og strategic aspect of things, I like to plan, and I like to watch shit unfold in combat. RTWP can get real clusterfucky, even with constant pauses, you just don't feel the combat the same way. RTWP just doesn't feel as rewarding and as "good" as TB does.
TB feels more deterministic, because you planned your character so well, you made sure you had enough move and actions points to do this and that, you rely on your skills and feats.
Tb just feels alot less "gamey" and way less cheesey.
Obviously shitty TB implementation is never good. D:OS 2 suffered from this as a prime example.
They didn't even have a combat slider to speed up animations and combat, which is ESSENTIAL to TB combat.
TB can get REAL fucking tedious with trash combat, if you don't have mechanics to mitigate the slowness somehow.
As I said, things like slow turn-order, slow animations, dull UI, unintuitive and shoddy graphics can fuck it up, but that goes for any game.
Limiting an RPG to only small encounters because your system can't cope with more is not a solution, it's a pathetic failure. How many RPGs naturally feature missions involving entire enemy fortresses?Yes, but the solution is to have smaller encounters. Even in RTwP or RT having way too many units can obscure and obfuscate the events. Generally, that is a situation reserved for pure strategy games. In RPGs, you'd want a situation where your small group is going around important missions.
The difference being that for TB ''too many'' is what, more than a dozen? Which is pathetic.Nothing can cope with too many units. That's why it's too many. Nice try twisting the argument. Yes, a crap-ton of individual units is traditionally not suited for TB, apply for your medal at the desk please.Even TB that has very fast animations simply can't cope with too many units.
BING XI LAO what do you make of this?You know what's a fun turn-based combat encounter? The Temple of Baa.
TB can get REAL fucking tedious with trash combat, if you don't have mechanics to mitigate the slowness somehow.
As I said, things like slow turn-order, slow animations, dull UI, unintuitive and shoddy graphics can fuck it up, but that goes for any game.
Even TB that has very fast animations simply can't cope with too many units.
In Avernum 1 my party was quite weak in the lategame (partly because I didn't notice they had three Dread Curses on them), so I had to start spam summoning things to fight for me, and to eat the multi-target damage spells many enemies have. Some higher-level summons in the game can also summon more summons of their own, and the enemy likes to summon things, so you quite swiftly have dozens of summons on each side. Having to wait ten seconds every time the turn comes around for your eight lava bats to fire their missiles is something that just doesn't happen in RTWP. And it's a shame because these summon wars are a pleasant change of tactics from the rest of the game, but it's limited by TB.
If you want to engage masses of enemies in a game, you're playing the wrong genre, friend. That's called Real-Time Strategy.
Technically seen phase-based could be a subcategory of turn-based, as in "your whole party makes a turn" and "whole enemy party makes a turn".
most (*) phase-based combat is usually of the variety where your chars attack groups of enemies, but can't target specific enemies in that group (except of that groups is just one enemy)
Anything like Elven Legacy/fantasy war?Also turn based with many units can work well too.
Case in point:
Panzer General, Fantasy General, Age of Fear, Elven Legacy, Warbanners, Steel Panthers, just to mention a couple. Yes, they're all strategy games, but Age of Fear and Warbanners have significant RPG elements (leveling and unit equipping), and they never feel slow at all because animations are super fast and you get a log of actions that happened so you know wtf is going on even when it goes fast.
Technically seen phase-based could be a subcategory of turn-based, as in "your whole party makes a turn" and "whole enemy party makes a turn".
most (*) phase-based combat is usually of the variety where your chars attack groups of enemies, but can't target specific enemies in that group (except of that groups is just one enemy)
Not really. Phase-based combat is caracterised by a declaration phase and a resolution phase. In the declaration phase, everyone chooses their action(s) for the round, before knowing what others are going to do. Then actions are resolved in order of speed. One interesting thing about phase-based is that the circumstances of execution of an action can be different than when you chose it: the enemy can have moved by then, put up defenses, etc. if their first action is faster than yours.
So it's not "your whole party makes a turn" and "whole enemy party makes a turn", as everyone, allies and enemies, chooses actions at the same time, and then resolves at the same time in order of action speed (and not character speed). A character might make more than one action, the second ones being delayed by the first and happening after others acted in-between.
And the ability to target groups or individuals is an independent consideration from the system being phase-based or not.
Basically, phase-based is about simultaneous declaration of action, and then simultaneous resolution, while turn based is sequential, each player choosing and doing all their actions at once before moving on to the next.
Anything like Elven Legacy/fantasy war?Also turn based with many units can work well too.
Case in point:
Panzer General, Fantasy General, Age of Fear, Elven Legacy, Warbanners, Steel Panthers, just to mention a couple. Yes, they're all strategy games, but Age of Fear and Warbanners have significant RPG elements (leveling and unit equipping), and they never feel slow at all because animations are super fast and you get a log of actions that happened so you know wtf is going on even when it goes fast.
If you want to engage masses of enemies in a game, you're playing the wrong genre, friend. That's called Real-Time Strategy.
The reason TB and P&P don't feature large combats is simply because they can't. It's not a good thing, it's a flaw and a limitation. It's very common for fantasy adventures to involve large armies and fortresses, and it's nice to be able to spam summons too. If P&P could conveniently feature a battle with 100 mundane soldiers on one side and the party on the other, I would happily have that as an option for my players, especially if they decide to go full chaotic neutral murderhobo and anger the entire town guard or some shit.RPGs should be about unique missions, encounters and events, smaller scaled than RTS and FPS, that may or may not feature several enemies. If you purposely design your TB game to include hours-long fights with 90000 enemies, then you kind of fucked up. D:OS 2 springs to mind again, with really long-winded retarded fights with trash tier mobs in the tens and 20s.
How many PnP sessions feature giant encounters for the party?
You say it as it is something bad. And to be honest most of the unwashed plebeians do play TB games,civ games are really popular,also one of the most boring rpgs DOS2 sell millions.Lol Codex only jerks to TB because it makes them feel better than unwashed peasents normies.
The reason TB and P&P don't feature large combats is simply because they can't. It's not a good thing, it's a flaw and a limitation. It's very common for fantasy adventures to involve large armies and fortresses, and it's nice to be able to spam summons too. If P&P could conveniently feature a battle with 100 mundane soldiers on one side and the party on the other, I would happily have that as an option for my players, especially if they decide to go full chaotic neutral murderhobo and anger the entire town guard or some shit.
The reason TB and P&P don't feature large combats is simply because they can't. It's not a good thing, it's a flaw and a limitation. It's very common for fantasy adventures to involve large armies and fortresses, and it's nice to be able to spam summons too. If P&P could conveniently feature a battle with 100 mundane soldiers on one side and the party on the other, I would happily have that as an option for my players, especially if they decide to go full chaotic neutral murderhobo and anger the entire town guard or some shit.
Wrong again. Many P&P have mass combat rules in splats including D&D. The solutions are simple: group individual characters into units
So the grand TB solution for modelling large number of fighters is... to model them as a small number of larger units. Clearly an inferior fudge that's no longer necessary when you're doing things on a computer.