What do you think makes a game a role-playing game?

[Section8]

Don't believe the marketing lies. Real Time is just turn based with very short turns and and timer for making your move - after which you lose your turn. RTwP gives you the option of stopping the game during any pause. You still have everyone working through a queue each time, and you still have all the reality issues that you do with turn based combat. However, the nasty "You've been shot by someone 9.5 seconds into the future" effect shrinks with your turn length just like error shrinks when you use that fancy math to measure the area under a curve.

Well, true if you want to get pedantic...

Everything happens sequentially as a program executes (disregarding multithreading and whatever else) so in theory, everything is taking turns. But, since that's entirely hidden from the player it's kind of pointless. It's like painting a red car blue, and saying it's still red because there's a coat of red underneath the blue that is visible to the eye.

Also, let this thought fuck you in the brain a bit - the problem with RTwP isn't that it's dumbed down, or not tactical, or you can't control a party. The problem is it's too realistic - and that realism is bought with gallons of tedium. You could implement every tactical feature that made X-COM great and a few dozen more, the problem is the combat would take 10 times as long to get through. After 30 minutes of moving their team up a row of barrels to a building the player says fuck it, and start planning longer moves, doing less scouting etc, to speed things up and then they'd bitch that it was dumbed down.

I disagree. TB can be just as reasonable as a facsimile of "realistic combat" and in some cases more so if you look past the abstractions. The biggest strength of TB combat is that it completely eliminates any latency between the human, the interface and the game systems.

You can argue that adding a pause feature does exactly the same, and you'd be mostly right, since nucking a space bar is a pretty forgiving way to reduce latency in a RT system, but what's the point? RTwP convolutes the simplicity of TB from a design, gameplay and even processing perspective, for what gain?

But hey, who's arguing

 

[ichpokhudezh]

Don't believe the marketing lies. Real Time is just turn based with very short turns and and timer for making your move - after which you lose your turn. RTwP gives you the option of stopping the game during any pause. You still have everyone working through a queue each time, and you still have all the reality issues that you do with turn based combat. However, the nasty "You've been shot by someone 9.5 seconds into the future" effect shrinks with your turn length just like error shrinks when you use that fancy math to measure the area under a curve.

Well, true if you want to get pedantic...

Very Not True.
Time units, queues and priorities are not distinctive features of turn-based combat.

I'm too lazy to search the forum so here the brief:
RTwP is (every case I know of) phase-based.
No turn-based system (that I know of) ends the turn without confirmation of the player.

 

[Section8]

You missed the rest of my post, where I said it was only true from a very specific (and largely useless) point of view. Good point on the confirmation of the player though. There are certain systems that automatically end the player's turn onece they've exhausted their potential actions (generally, used all of their APs), but that's still a conscious decision on the player's behalf to do so.