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Turn-based combat is not fun

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Horvatii

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Threads like this are button harvesting and should be bannable offense!
 

Sheepherder

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I like giving them buttons. They put in time and effort making an entertaining thread. Might as well stroke their autismal cock a little.
 
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Not gonna lie, when i started playing old turn-based RPGs back in 2016(i was a casual oblivion/diablo clone player before 2016) i had a hard time getting into turn-based games, especially JRPGs/blobbers(non-grid combat) games. The slowness and low interactivity made hard for me to concentrate while playing and i ended up getting bored. I have several attention deficit disorders(i still can't sit down and read a book, i've tried several times). But my taste has changed since then, after playing Secret of mana, some RT blobbers and some diablo clones i've come to the conclusion that i despise most real-time combat RPGs.

Funny how much my taste has changed since then. I used to hate JRPGs, nowadays i play more JRPGs than WRPGs. I still like real-time with pause combat from infinity engine games though.
 
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Metronome

Learned
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Jan 2, 2020
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277
Turn-based combat originates from hardware limitations, but mere nostalgia keeps it around. What - are you supposed to roleplay some retard Chosen One that is given some extra time by every NPC to plan his next punch? It breaks immersion, and we all know it when we take off our rose-tinted glasses.
Turn-based combat is still relevant because it prevents your reflexes from being a factor. One example of where this becomes a problem is RTS games. In a more competitive setting your reflexes become very important in deciding if you win or lose. But in real life battles are not decided by how quickly someone can click around a screen. That's not a problem for some people but it's a very "meta" experience as a result. Another example of where this happens is if your character in an RPG has dexterity higher or lower than your own. Using your own reflexes to determine if they are successful or not is inaccurate.

Though you are right that giving the player infinite time to decide their move is a problem. I've noticed that you can pull off very impressive combinations of actions that the character probably could not have managed to think of in the time given. It could also imply foresight that the character does not actually have. If they have "wisdom" higher or lower than your own, then it is not accurate for them to go by your decisions. This isn't usually noticed by people, but it is no less of a break from roleplaying than the issue with reflexes.

There is no good way to solve this problem. Even if we strip all of the player's input beyond character development, then we have something like progress quest. It would be a "perfect" rpg, but lacking much of the gameplay that makes the typical RPG enjoyable. It's always going to be an issue of sacrificing accuracy for challenge. It's just that some people want to be challenged in some ways, and other people want to be challenged in other ways.
 

Glop_dweller

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Sep 29, 2007
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Spoiler for Barry Lyndon inside.


I remember a fellow on the Bethesda forums who simply couldn't have it explained to him; inconceivable to him... so much so that he started making video parodies of it; to make light of the arguments.
Here is one; it's a better [flawed] example than the movie clip IMO:



While these scenes clearly show them taking turns, this has bullocks to do with Turn Based Combat systems.

This misinterpretation comes of assuming that the combatants experience the event in realtime /with (voluntary?) paused turns—as though they would actually stand there taking turns to attack; it's nonsense. Turn based combat is an extrapolation of the event, presented with turns & rounds, or in some games just turns. This affords the player(s) time to consider their PC's situation, and the best use of their options; IE. what the PC can do about it.

For example: Say that the PC is like Bruce Lee in an alley, with seven attackers. The fight takes place in a matter seconds, but the player is not Bruce Lee, and doesn't have that kind of command of ability and experience in HtH combat to size up the situation instantaneously (as required). Certainly they are not able to execute their commands to the game in that blink of an eye. So time is sliced into segments, and the event is carefully stepped through. The player is allowed to scrutinized the course of events, and to speculate on the coming events. The can know everything that has occurred leading up to their current decision on what choice of action to make.

*Choice being the operative word; turn base systems are wasted and made pointless if the player has only one action... as exemplified by that movie clip above. The strength of the system is in choosing an action from among several options; where such choices can crucially affect the outcome. It really does compare well to Chess, Go, and Othello. The object is not button mashing (like Diablo), but rather like the game Minesweeper , where for the most part the challenge is winnable if you carefully figure it out—and yet just like in Minesweeper there can be unpredictable chance to it in some situations, so it's no guarantee; one can do it entirely right, and still fail—just like Poker.

Turn based systems do not try to please the action & RTS crowds. Their intended experience is more in the nature of a puzzle, and requires the time to think.
 
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King Crispy

Too bad I have no queen.
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I don't even think this is a Drog alt.

















































7B4i.gif
 

Artyoan

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Turn based allows for maximum control of your own party members while also being clear about what transpires in battle. I also like RTWP, but the AI needing to fill in the gaps has always brought about some frustration. I don't care if the enemy AI fucks up. I do when my own party members run into each other or have pathing issues. Real time is great for single character non-party based rpgs mostly. Dragon's Dogma is a real time party based rpg done right though.
 

ProphetSword

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TB is inherently inferior to real time simply because as an abstraction it will never be able to emulate the real deal to the extent that a real time system can.

What the fuck are you on about? Turn-based can emulate it the same as real-time. Probably better.

Do people not realize that RTWP is actually just turn-based combat sped up and without the individual choices? Games like Baldur's Gate still track rounds and only gives each combatant the appropriate number of actions per round, and even allows you to pause at the end of a round. Neverwinter Nights used a real-time six second timer to emulate the six-second rounds in 3rd Edition D&D and still locked you into the appropriate number of attacks or actions. So, if anything RTWP is an even worse emulation of what you can do in turn-based combat.
 

DeepOcean

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Kiting, prismatic orb nuking, skeleton warriors army of rape or nuking shit with skull trap sequencers on IE games, I never knew that such complex Rommel genius style tactics required so much reflexes to pull it off. You know, you have six dudes with prismatic orb or skull trap sequencers, you left click on things and things die, my God, I underestimated my reflexes all those years.
 

octavius

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Do people not realize that RTWP is actually just turn-based combat sped up and without the individual choices? Games like Baldur's Gate still track rounds and only gives each combatant the appropriate number of actions per round, and even allows you to pause at the end of a round. Neverwinter Nights used a real-time six second timer to emulate the six-second rounds in 3rd Edition D&D and still locked you into the appropriate number of attacks or actions. So, if anything RTWP is an even worse emulation of what you can do in turn-based combat.

It's not that simple. The main difference between TB and RTwP is that in RTwP there's simultaneity.
 

ProphetSword

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It's not that simple. The main difference between TB and RTwP is that in RTwP there's simultaneity.

A computer is able to track all those things simultaneously, but it doesn't change the fact that if your fighter can only attack once in a round, he will only attack once in a round, regardless of the animations you see on the screen. A character will only move so far, only be able to cast a single spell, only be able to take as many actions as they would normally be allowed in a single round of combat. With games like Baldur's Gate, it makes perfect sense...it's a sped up emulation of a turn-based system.

What I'm really arguing here is that games using RTWP can actually short-change the player. The computerized enemies have already decided what they want to do and start implementing those actions immediately. By the time you click on the enemies, if you don't have the game set to pause as soon as they appear, they've already gotten a full round or two of actions going. Not sure how that's superior to turn-based.
 

octavius

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Yes, that's a valid point, and certainly a concern in big/difficult fights, where it's easy to screw up if you for example accidentally move your mage while he's already started casting, for example. That's of course the downside to RTwP; it can lead to real clusterfucks where i's hard to keep track of things. But it also means you can react to enemy actions by changing your own current action.
As such it's more challenging than TB where it's easier to have full control.
 

DeepOcean

Arcane
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Yes, that's a valid point, and certainly a concern in big/difficult fights, where it's easy to screw up if you for example accidentally move your mage while he's already started casting, for example. That's of course the downside to RTwP; it can lead to real clusterfucks where i's hard to keep track of things. But it also means you can react to enemy actions by changing your own current action.
As such it's more challenging than TB where it's easier to have full control.

Some Ai rant, shit that I discovered with my RTS project, only worthy because you are a prestigious codexer:

It is worse for the Ai though, in theory should be more challenging but in practice, you are dealing with Ais and you are way more creative and capable to deal with sudden changes in position than the Ai is. Pretty much all RtwP games are a cheese fest because the Ai cant keep up with you unless you do like PoE that pretty much made movement slow as if your characters had disabilities and killed movement so much, that at that point any advantage for RtwP is moot, or just script a bunch of bullshit like BG 2 did to give mages a chance.

Ex: I mean, there is a lich in there, some of my characters have lower initiative than him, some higher, I cant pull out all my characters from the room before him and his henchmen obliterate me in TB, what is perfectly possible to do on RtwP, the Ai also isnt smart enough to give chase to you and they cant move out of the way from shit like fireballs as easy like you. To program Ai for TB games, you only need to update a raycast once per turn so the Ai can update your position, the Ai can avoid AoE easy because you just need to label future AoE damage tiles as a priority to avoid and the pathfinding dont need to be calculated all the time on real time, the pathfinding also has shorter paths to deal with. I mean, on RTwP, every single frame the Ai need raycasts to keep track of you and update the pathfinding. Also, you as player, can do shit like unstuck and reorganize your characters on the fly, the Ai cant, if the pathfinding fails (the more complex the path, the worse is the chance for it failing), the Ai will get confused. One beauty of TB is that constrain the player on shit that the AI cant handle and test player skill on tactics and builds, something that is much easier as Ai builds are decided by humans and the tactics the AI used are scripted based on the arena it is.(I mean, you can cheese in TB if you have space but that is so boring for being painfully slow)

I'm not even talking of collider clustering problems, the bigger is the group of Ai entities (or narrow the path they need to trace like corridors), the harder it will be to navigate between each other if they have colliders, so they will get stuck all the time , IE games avoided this with a pushing algorithm and that is why it was so hard to properly block enemies with your characters, it was a basic solution. On TB, only one can move at the time, so the chances for they ALL deciding to move at the same time and causing a traffic congestion is way lower. You basically need to program flocking and local avoidance on the Ai what works well on RTS (good luck convincing a RPG developer to waste time with that shit like flow fields or any advanced real time pathfinding for a niche game that will sell 300k at best). There is a reason why so many companies are using realtime games to shill for their advanced Ais (nope, maybe by 2077 a RPG developer will get a good real time Ai like that).

Even with all that shit, if you plan for those Ais to do more than navigate on a basic straight forward path to your direction, that will be a problem, complex movement AND everyone moving at the same time doesnt work, you are capable of complex movement, the Ai isnt. PoE Ai was so bad that it hurt and that sort of shit, isnt totally Obsidian's fault and can only be "fixed" with tons of cheating. Anyone noticed how PoE Ai targeting and pathfinding with Attack of Opportunity mechanics was a mess where it was frequent for characters to just choose the worst possible path and eat AoO like crazy? Well...

If you were making a RTS where there is actually two humans fixing the Ai pathfinding errors all the time with perfect real time adaptation, then that makes sense but if there is an Ai on the other side, TB all the way.
 

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