Dissonance between strategy game and the basics of real life time/space

[Princess Rage]

Like usual, I am borrowing my brother's account to post. He doesn't seem to use it anymore and I am too lazy to make my own account (a state of affairs which has persisted for years).

My apologies in advance for not putting in that much time to make the post well written.

I've been thinking about how to make a good strategy game and one thing that came up was basic agreement with the basics of real life time/space (well the basics of real life in general really, but in this post I'll focus on time/space). Don't get me wrong, I do not necessarily think that realism = fun. However, it does seem reasonable that agreement with the basics of real life helps to make a game more intuitive which helps to make it more fun. Mario is hardly realistic but in Mario you are not sucked upwards by some sort of reverse gravity. Instead you are sucked downards as that is more intuitive.

In before autism tag.


Anyway, I've been thinking about how well, or badly, tactical\strategy games adhere to the basics of time and space in our reality.

I don't think I've seen tactical\strategy games that match the basics of real life time\space well and in fact most do very badly.

One area we often see dissonance is in "development" (building construction, research,e.t.c) versus "battle" (shooting, moving, e.t.c). Usually one of these will have time durations that make a lot more sense than the other.

If we assume 1 hour real life time = 1 hour game time then we have typical rts like Red Alert on one end of the spectrum . Here the "battle" time duration makes more sense than the "development" time duration. In the time it takes a rifleman to gun down an opposing rifleman a barracks can train one or two riflemen. In Starcraft, With infinite resources and no opposition, one could probably cover the entire map with buildings in the space of a few hours. Imagine leaving for work and returning home to find your entire street area has been turned into a factory.



On the other end of the spectrum we have games like Civilization V that set the time flow for "development". At the beginning of the game 50 years or something like that (IIRC) pass per turn. Long time durations generally make sense for construction of buildings and the general devopment of a civilization. But they don't make much sense for battle. You order a unit of Inca slingers to fire at an adjacent unit of warriors and they do so but the unit is not completely destroyed. You press the end turn button and the unit of warriors attacks the unit of Inca slingers triggering the Inca slinger "withdraw from melee" ability in which they run one tile away instead of taking damage. The turn has ended and a new one begins... 50 years have passed. So... the warriors were chasing your slingers for 50 years? Perhaps the warriors charged towards them, then the slingers ran and then... both units just sat there for 50 years? I haven't found a way to make sense of it. Basically, a battle with a few units in Civilization 5 can take a few centuries to resolve.

Some games manage to reduce the dissonance by separating "battle" and "development". For example we have Eador. A battle is usually completely resolved in a "fight window". One could suppose that one turn in these windows is a few seconds while one turn in the "strategic window" is a day. It still becomes a bit odd when the battle turn limit runs out and all the combatants simply decide to leave, with the attackers perhaps returning the next day.

The bigger issue though is that I'm not sure if the time durations follow the basics of real life time/space even when we exclude the strategic windows and look just at a singe "fight window". The typical unit moves two or three spaces a turn. The typical unit will also finish a battle with a typical identical enemy unit in 3 or 4 turns (if they're just whacking away at each other). Since a melee unit can hit no further and no less than one tile away I assume one tile is about "sword length". So a unit can move two or three sword lengths a turn. I'd imagine in real life moving such a distance would take maybe 2 seconds at most. So then it would seem a turn is about 2 seconds. But that means that a one on one battle between identical units take about 8 seconds. In fact the whole thing will probably be over in around 20 seconds. In the world of Eador, an undead platoon could invade your village and if you stopped to put your pair of pants on before looking outside the whole thing would already be over. Talk about getting caught with your pants down!





So, have you found any games that do not possess such high levels of dissonance with the basics of real life space/time? Do you have any ideas for 4X or TBS games that would agree more with real life time/space basics?



As a little side topic:

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Of course, I understand that turn based is fundamentally different to real time (or at least, that is how it seems to me). It may be that no matter how small you make the time durations for turns there will still be differences to real life. Imagine for example the following scenario. We have a 10 by 10 grid of square tiles. We have two opposing units (unit A and unit B) at opposite ends of the grid both on the top row. There is a "kill switch" (K) directly adjacent to one of the units which when pressed kills the unit which did not press it. The rest of the tiles are empty ground (X).

AXXXXXXXKB
XXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXX

Unit A has a speed of 10 tiles per turn. Unit B has a speed of 40 tiles per turn and is standing right next to the switch. But unit A get's to it first and emerges the victor because it had an initiative of 101 while unit B's initiative was only 100. This would clearly be ridiculous in real life. Unit B lost the race despite having 1 ninth the distance to travel and a speed 4 times higher just because his reaction time was ever so slightly slower?

And so it seems to me that real time with pause does not equal turn based. I'm not necessarily saying that real time with pause can or can't be a reasonable approximation of turn based though.

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PS: I wasn't sure of whether to put this here or in Tactical Gaming. My apologies if my thread placement was incorrect. Feel free to move it as you please, of course.

 

[thesheeep]

So, have you found any games that do not possess such high levels of dissonance with the basics of real life space/time? Do you have any ideas for 4X or TBS games that would agree more with real life time/space basics?

Well, the "problem" is gameplay, isn't it?

Imagine a game like EUIV and big battles would actually mere take a few hours, which is smaller than the smallest time unit in the game.
It would absolutely terrible to play, there would also be no simulation behind it - it is actually helpful for CPU consumption that the battles last longer as then the simulation can be spread out over multiple frames.

A game like Civ is just total abstraction, real world has little to nothing to do with it. It can take centuries to build something there and years to move a unit a few kilometres away. The whole game concept wouldn't work any other way, though.

Or a survival game in which you have to control the minutiae of everyday life, while at the same time playing for many real world days until you would see a building finished in-game (as it took weeks in-game to construct).
It would be terrible.

Realism is very often in the way of gameplay. And so it isn't even attempted too much.

I think the turn-based game I have played with the most realistic time behavior is UnReal World, but that is a single-person survival game, not really a strategy game.

 

[Galdred]

There is a subset of strategy games dedicated to model warfare more realistically. You should try wargames. Some also cover the production aspects(World at War: A World Divided. Hegemony: Rome...). You still need to make compromises in the end, but these are not as extreme as in Civ or RTS for instance.
Also, note that this scale makes complete sense for space 4X, because of relativistic space travel times.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

I always got a bit disturbed by the time-dissonance of Civilization games, too. They're pretty weird in that regard - turns in the first ages take up centuries, then then decades, then a decade, then one year = one turn.

But honestly, Civilization games are a bit too abstract due to them trying to simulate all of human history. They do fairly more logical in smaller lapses of time and more specific scenarios.
SMAC, for example, has one turn = one year. It works early because early on, its pretty much a bunch of colonists trying to survive on a new world. Even later on, your popullation is simply far lower than any country on modern-day Earth, even if your technology is far more advanced.

Still even then, wars are weirdly slow until Magtubes are all over the place and Hovertanks are common. Civ games in general seem to have problems making modern warfare work.

Pdox games are kinda nice in that regard, they do time pretty decently due to how they work - even if it doesn't entirely work, like how slow armies actually are in CKII and how they simply cannot do things like campaign seasons.

btw, you should really make an account for yourself, dude/miss. Codexers recognize each others' by text and avatar. The mods might frown upon it, too.

 

[Jacob]

Mario is hardly realistic but in Mario you are not sucked upwards by some sort of reverse gravity. Instead you are sucked downards as that is more intuitive.

Not to dis your whole post, but the Mario comparison should be avoided as much as possible when talking about video games IMO.

 

[CryptRat]

Mario is hardly realistic but in Mario you are not sucked upwards by some sort of reverse gravity. Instead you are sucked downards as that is more intuitive.

the Mario comparison should be avoided as much as possible when talking about video games IMO.

What do you mean?

 

[Princess Rage]

thesheep

You're saying that the time/space dissonance is difficult to reduce. That might be true, but some games definitely have less than others. for example:

There is a subset of strategy games dedicated to model warfare more realistically. You should try wargames. Some also cover the production aspects(World at War: A World Divided. Hegemony: Rome...). You still need to make compromises in the end, but these are not as extreme as in Civ or RTS for instance.
Also, note that this scale makes complete sense for space 4X, because of relativistic space travel times.

Pdox games are kinda nice in that regard, they do time pretty decently due to how they work - even if it doesn't entirely work, like how slow armies actually are in CKII and how they simply cannot do things like campaign seasons.

Though, to be fair I actually haven't tried these games and am only taking their word for it. Thanks for the suggestions Galdred and The Brazilian Slaughter. I'm probably going to look into these.

I always got a bit disturbed by the time-dissonance of Civilization games, too. They're pretty weird in that regard - turns in the first ages take up centuries, then then decades, then a decade, then one year = one turn.

This was actually an attempt to make things make a bit more sense I think. The idea is that "everything goes faster" as civilizations advance and grow. A horseman is faster than an on-foot warrior. Automotives tend to be faster than cavalry. Planes tends to faster than automotives. e.t.c e.t.c. In addition we build more quickly, populate more quickly, e.t.c

On the other hand, a unit that was moving one tile every 50 years is now moving one tile every year (for example, if you kept a warrior from the beginning of the game around up to the era of space ships and whatnot). So somehow the unit has now become 50 times faster.

"Still even then, wars are weirdly slow until Magtubes are all over the place and Hovertanks are common. Civ games in general seem to have problems making modern warfare work."

Yeah, like you said "But honestly, Civilization games are a bit too abstract due to them trying to simulate all of human history. They do fairly more logical in smaller lapses of time and more specific scenarios."

Issues come up when great tech advancement happens. According to the civ 5 wiki, a chariot archer is somehow faster than mechanized infantry (seems to be infantry in APCs in this case) and travels at about half the speed of a jet fighter. It also has more range than the "modern armor" tank unit.

btw, you should really make an account for yourself, dude/miss. Codexers recognize each others' by text and avatar. The mods might frown upon it, too.

Thank you for the advice. I'll probably get to it soon.

What do you mean?

Indeed, care to elaborate Jacob? Perhaps you mean that Mario is not a good example of realism or something? I used it as an example to help suggest that it's not exactly hardcore realism that I'm speaking about. I'm just speaking about basic agreement with the basics of real life time/space which might make the game more intuitive. Mario can jump several times his own height. Obviously this is impossible for any human. Still, the concept of jumping, going up, and then dropping is a very intuitive one which follows what we would expect from real life.

Perhaps what you meant was that even when it comes to just basic agreement with reality Mario is still pretty poor? For example in Mario maker one can make a pipe entrance (pipe part A) in point A which takes one to a pipe exit (pipe part B) in point B. And then they can make it so that going right back into pipe part B, which seemed to be pipe A's exit point, does not take one back to point A but instead to point C. If we assume that what occurred when Mario entered the pipe was simply him walking through a non-branching pipe, then this clearly seems to break the concept of euclidean space. THIS would be an example of the kind of dissonance I'm talking about.

 

[Galdred]

Note that an unit moving much faster in later stages of a civ game kind of makes sense: The main hurdle to movement is supply(ie, setting a new "logistic base" forward and such), not the speed of the soldiers themselves, and supply becomes much easier later on.
The range in Civ 5 doesn't make any sense though, and even leads to strange gameplay decision at times (like not upgrading to modern infantry to keep the advantage of the bow range)

 

[Destroid]

I've been pondering this very same thing lately, specifically with regard to space 4x games. Usually the time scale, distances and travel speeds are a pretty ambiguous so it's not so noticeable unless you think about it. I was thinking the only real way to get around it is to set the game in a very small scale, such as a single solar system like Haegemonia (although it is more of an RTS hybrid kind of game) or down to a single planetary system or comparable scale, such as Fragile Allegiance which is set in an asteroid field. On the other hand that small scale makes it somewhat incompatible with the huge growth scales that 4x typically allows. Stellaris is probably one of the worst offenders around with battles in that game taking a really really long time, or at least they used to.

 

[Jacob]

Mario is hardly realistic but in Mario you are not sucked upwards by some sort of reverse gravity. Instead you are sucked downards as that is more intuitive.

the Mario comparison should be avoided as much as possible when talking about video games IMO.

What do you mean?

It's the "cheapest" way to make a comparison or reference to.

 

[Destroid]

Jacob Isn't it just used because everyone knows Mario?

 

[Jacob]

Not necessary on a forum like this. Should only be done in writings or talks aimed at very casual audience.

 

[vota DC]

Now that I think about age of wonder turns are good for elves and humans only. Tactical turns are good for everybody but strategy turns no.
A new dawn begins blabla, you move troops ,do battle then the turn is finished and you wait the next dawn.
What about goblins? Why they don't attack at night?
What about undead? They never sleep, should they march both in day and night turns? Undead are too slow in strategy and too fast in tactical.
I guess it would be a mess to implement day/night cycle. They did in battle for wesnoth or warcraft 3, still in warcraft 3 human troops never sleep only neutral creatures do....a gnoll is more human than a.footman!

 

[Vagiel]

Well I would suggest taking a look at phase based games. Wego I think is the term. I can suggest Frozen synapse, hopefully frozen synapse 2 is also good and attepmts a more macroscopic approach with city management etc.

In frozen synapse you designate your moves in a five second interval where as press play the round starts and the moves of you and your opponent are simultaneously executed. So really there is no time abstraction at all.

 

[BING XI LAO]

The 'mechanics' of real life can be a good source of ideas for game mechanics. If for example we somehow lived in a world with no day or night and no seasons, then even fewer games would have day/nght and season mechanics, which would be regrettable.
However, I disagree with -

I've been thinking about how to make a good strategy game and one thing that came up was basic agreement with the basics of real life time/space (well the basics of real life in general really, but in this post I'll focus on time/space). Don't get me wrong, I do not necessarily think that realism = fun. However, it does seem reasonable that agreement with the basics of real life helps to make a game more intuitive which helps to make it more fun.

- because humans are capable of seeing three dots on a wall and concluding that two are analogous to eyes, the third to a nose. So how much realism do we really need to feel comfortable?

 

[Damned Registrations]

Aurora.