Fucking RTwP in Project Eternity? HOW DOES IT WORK? TB vs RTwP

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Fascinating stuff. It's interesting to learn about how it looks from dev's perspective.

 

[Raghar]

Captcha for this image was underpants. Here you can see two girls who are conducting massive firefight with mixture of various weapons at 7-15 m range. Lets use it for talk about advantages and disadvantages of various systems.


Lets look at problems these systems must solve.

TB: The large problem of TB combat is a situation where one person is using machinegun and two other are trying to kill it. A simple implementation allows these two appear simultaneously and fire at machinegunner. Two likely hits would equal kill, which funnily is quite different from real live situation. The machine gunner would fire immediately when these two would pop from cover.
So how to solve this problem? A simple solution is interrupt. A machine gunner can interrupt based on 1. flat chance. 2. contest between reaction. 3. chance based on machinegunner reaction and additional test for the attacker. Now the machine gunner can kill the person, but the second one is unengaged and if he want he can close to machine gunner and kill him even by knife. In contrast to real live, the second person know he can get away with that. In real live the choice who would be attacked would be at machinegunner side, and he would try to attack both, TB combat allows to know important fact before hand, thus makes things much easier for attacker.

How to solve this problem? One solution practiced by S^3 was to decrease movement allowance in comparison to S^2, which gives the machine gunner opportunity to engage the second person before he would kill him by knife. Because machinegun has better range, and accuracy at range, they are about in same situation as in real live. The trouble is decreasing number of movement per turn would slow down gameplay and can make things tedious. Funnily it can work for 4-6 squad members like in XCOM/S^3, but it'd be PITA for 20 squad members.
Other solution would be to give machine gunner a chance to engage multiple targets.


Now lets look at goals of properly designed RTS.

The system must allow to accurately and quickly select elements, and allow to do required action. It should restrict number of possible micromanagement actions, however it should allow concentration on tactical and strategic decisions. When soldiers can take care about themselves at least partially, and effective combination of action can be done by elite soldiers, who needs even less babysiting, the player has a choice: do tactical and stragegic decisions, and only push few things where needed, or do micromanagement of a poorly trained unit on a local area (for example to save resources that would be otherwise spend on elite unit). Main complain against this is the game plays itself.

Of course RTS combat has nothing to do with RPGs.


Now we have action combat like Diablo. It's obvious the machinegunner problem from the above example disappeared completely, but it also doesn't allow tight control of a squad members. D like combat should be smooth, the accuracy of selection of opponents should be high and player mistakes compensated for, and it should be tested for problems with speed differences. (This was problem of both Inquisitor and Kult. They didn't bothered to solve problems with weapon speed differences, they simply multiplied things without thinking and it resulted in combat that was significantly worse than Diablo 3 combat.)


So TB is bad. Realtime is impossible for multiple characters. What about use pause in combat, plan actions, and resume? It has also its problems. Proper implementation works when all squad members are close together, you can see everything important on screen, and can issue appropriate orders. Attack from multiple direction is PITA to set up, and coordinate. On the other hand it solves problems with tediousness and TB combat, a player is overloaded instead.


Then there are various action point systems, and systems with simultaneous execution. They can work better or much worse, depends on game. XCOM problem is too large movenment allowance and/or too small environment. Inquisitor problem is they didn't bother to implement the combat properly. They set something in design document, and when it didn't work they didn't change it.

Conclusion is the combat system should be uniquely designed for each game to work well with each game and should have sufficiently crisp control.

 

[Anthony Davis]

Captcha for this image was underpants. Here you can see two girls who are conducting massive firefight with mixture of various weapons at 7-15 m range. Lets use it for talk about advantages and disadvantages of various systems.


Lets look at problems these systems must solve.

TB: The large problem of TB combat is a situation where one person is using machinegun and two other are trying to kill it. A simple implementation allows these two appear simultaneously and fire at machinegunner. Two likely hits would equal kill, which funnily is quite different from real live situation. The machine gunner would fire immediately when these two would pop from cover.
So how to solve this problem? A simple solution is interrupt. A machine gunner can interrupt based on 1. flat chance. 2. contest between reaction. 3. chance based on machinegunner reaction and additional test for the attacker. Now the machine gunner can kill the person, but the second one is unengaged and if he want he can close to machine gunner and kill him even by knife. In contrast to real live, the second person know he can get away with that. In real live the choice who would be attacked would be at machinegunner side, and he would try to attack both, TB combat allows to know important fact before hand, thus makes things much easier for attacker.

How to solve this problem? One solution practiced by S^3 was to decrease movement allowance in comparison to S^2, which gives the machine gunner opportunity to engage the second person before he would kill him by knife. Because machinegun has better range, and accuracy at range, they are about in same situation as in real live. The trouble is decreasing number of movement per turn would slow down gameplay and can make things tedious. Funnily it can work for 4-6 squad members like in XCOM/S^3, but it'd be PITA for 20 squad members.
Other solution would be to give machine gunner a chance to engage multiple targets.


Now lets look at goals of properly designed RTS.

The system must allow to accurately and quickly select elements, and allow to do required action. It should restrict number of possible micromanagement actions, however it should allow concentration on tactical and strategic decisions. When soldiers can take care about themselves at least partially, and effective combination of action can be done by elite soldiers, who needs even less babysiting, the player has a choice: do tactical and stragegic decisions, and only push few things where needed, or do micromanagement of a poorly trained unit on a local area (for example to save resources that would be otherwise spend on elite unit). Main complain against this is the game plays itself.

Of course RTS combat has nothing to do with RPGs.


Now we have action combat like Diablo. It's obvious the machinegunner problem from the above example disappeared completely, but it also doesn't allow tight control of a squad members. D like combat should be smooth, the accuracy of selection of opponents should be high and player mistakes compensated for, and it should be tested for problems with speed differences. (This was problem of both Inquisitor and Kult. They didn't bothered to solve problems with weapon speed differences, they simply multiplied things without thinking and it resulted in combat that was significantly worse than Diablo 3 combat.)


So TB is bad. Realtime is impossible for multiple characters. What about use pause in combat, plan actions, and resume? It has also its problems. Proper implementation works when all squad members are close together, you can see everything important on screen, and can issue appropriate orders. Attack from multiple direction is PITA to set up, and coordinate. On the other hand it solves problems with tediousness and TB combat, a player is overloaded instead.


Then there are various action point systems, and systems with simultaneous execution. They can work better or much worse, depends on game. XCOM problem is too large movenment allowance and/or too small environment. Inquisitor problem is they didn't bother to implement the combat properly. They set something in design document, and when it didn't work they didn't change it.

Conclusion is the combat system should be uniquely designed for each game to work well with each game and should have sufficiently crisp control.

This is a good write up and touches on a lot of areas I didn't even cover. As this continues to illustrate, there are many facets to the issue.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

How to solve this problem? One solution practiced by S^3 was to decrease movement allowance in comparison to S^2, which gives the machine gunner opportunity to engage the second person before he would kill him by knife. Because machinegun has better range, and accuracy at range, they are about in same situation as in real live. The trouble is decreasing number of movement per turn would slow down gameplay and can make things tedious. Funnily it can work for 4-6 squad members like in XCOM/S^3, but it'd be PITA for 20 squad members.

I use a full skyranger whenever I can.

 

[circ]

I don't care about your RtWP. Burn in hell!

 

[Infinitron]

 

[octavius]

No, because what you feel is irrelevant. Either you pause constantly in order to play well or you don't to play badly. It is a bad system when players are encouraged to play badly in order to not test their patience. That IS what a RTwP system does and that IS gimping the player.

Diminishing returns, ever heard of them? You absolutely don't need to pause all the time to play well enough.

I don't know about you but I'd rather have fun than be a perfectionist. Do you also reload a saved game if you don't get through an encounter with full HP? Must play perfectly, after all!

Maybe you are used to resting after every encounter or regenerating health, but in Real RPGs (tm) resource conservation throughout an area is of the utmost importance, and not playing to your 100% ability to preserve yourself is setting yourself up for failure later down the road. Playing well is how you avoid the need to savescum, not the cause of it.

Game mechanics that encourage players to play worse are bad mechanics.

Funny, I can play well in both the Gold Box games as well as the IE games. I can complete most areas in Pools of Darkness and Dark Queen of Krynn, as well as the Baldur's Gate games and Icewind Dale, without resting, without save scumming and without maxed characters.
For the Gold Box games it's possible to develop more or less "perfect" tactics, since the total number of "combinations" are limited. Me, I use the thieves' backstab ability for all it's worth, but most players seem to not have the patience or attention span to even learn how it works.
Similarly in the IE games have a stealthed character (preferably a Fighter/Thief for max backstab potential) scouting the area helps a lot to prepare a fight or even to make a battle plan for the whole level. Again, most players are too lazy/impatient/stupid to this and prefers "going all in" followed by resting approach.

And I don't get a nervous breakdown or lie awake at night if I miss a secret door or if one of my characters get chunked.
Actually I think the RTwP haters are more likely to suffer from OCD, since RTwP means less control, and I think the loss of 100% control is why many don't like RTwP. It certainly was why I didn't like the IE combat at first.

 

[trais]

I'd would like to get back to the VD's original statement that sparked this discussion:

RTwP is real time that sucks. The pause is an honest admission that fast-paced, party vs party, real-time combat is too chaotic to be controlled on the fly and that AI is too retarded to be relied on, and thus you have to pause this interactive movie to issue some basic orders and show AI how it's done.

It's pretty strong one, but let's take it apart and see if he makes valid points or is he bullshitting because he's making a TB game or whatever.

RTwP is real time that sucks.

As with everything in our imperfect world, RTwP implementation can suck. I'm sure nobody would question that. But does it always, universally suck?
Well, it certainly works very well in singleplayer RTS genre. Active pause is a bridge between human's and computer's speed, reaction time, precision, etc. It gives you tighter control over your resources, allowing you as a player to create and, more importantly, execute more complex tactics and strategies. So big cheers for active pause. Sure, it still doesn't give you as good/fast/precise control as computer have with his units, but who cares, one slip in your micromanagement usually ain't gonna lose you a game. You can always rebuild that that tank or plane - that's what factories in your base are for.
But this isn't Tacticular Cancer, it's RPG Codex. Is RTwP as good in RPGs as it is in with RTSes?

The pause is an honest admission that fast-paced, party vs party, real-time combat is too chaotic to be controlled on the fly

Let's ask ourselves an important question: "what's the main gameplay difference between typical RTS and isometric party based RPG"?
Two things to note here: a) hack&slashes like Diablo or isometric, but "actiony" RPGs like Witcher are different thing and I'm not talking about them; b) isometric tactical shooters like X-Com or JA are closer in this regard to RPGs that to RTS, so the argument I'm going to make is equally true for them as well.

They have similar camera angle/presentation, same point and click controls but what really sets them apart is the scope. RTS games deals with tenths or hundreds of often replaceable units, while in typical party based RPG you control 4-8 units at the time. Why is this important? Well, for two reasons. In RPGs:
1) units (characters) and mechanics are more complex.
It's important because each character require far attention from the player. In most RTS games units are characterized by hitpoints, armor, maybe extra shields for some units, how much damage they deal, range of their weapons and rate of fire and movement speed. Sometimes there are a bit more to it, but usually not much. And that's perfectly fine, you really don't want to have more.
In RPGs on the other hand, characters have different stats, attributes, skills, weapon proficiencies. They have different attacks, they can cast spells with various effects, use consumables that can change a lot of things. And you need to take those individual traits into account when controlling them in battle to use them as optimally as it's possible. And you want that, because:
2) small mistakes matter more.
RTS game is multifaceted (base-building, unit composition, unit micro, map control, resource gathering etc.) and there's some room for errors in one area, as long as you gonna offset them by tight plays in others.
RPGs on the other hand, combat wise are sets of one encounter after another, so the only thing that matter is good micro of your characters. That's why, to keep things interesting, RPGs are vastly more fleshed out in this aspect. On the other hand, they require far more greater care. If you're gonna take too much damage in combat encounter you will soon run out of healing supplies/cash for healing supplies and eventually die. You can't make up for it by any other means.

So, combining both points together: unlike RTS games, where you can sometimes leave most of your units unattended and they will do their job quite adequately as long as they return fire, when playing RPGs you need to pay full attention to every party member (there are 4-8 of them), all the time throughout the encounter. Because if your wizard is not casting spells, or when you rogue is not backstabbing or positioning himself to backstab, then they are being useless and they are losing your game - either in that particular encounter, or in some future one, when you will lose because you spent all your resources on recovering from botched past ones.

But some people may say: "trais, you silly person, you can't compare RTSes and isometric party-based RPGs. They have some superficial similarities, but they are two completely different genres". Well, I don't agree with that, but let's say that it's true. Fine. But it still doesn't change the fact that you when playing RPGs you want to explore the intricacies of the game mechanics that are available to you and use them to create cool characters, instead of cookie-cutter builds like a fighter that auto-attacks everything to death. And that means using a lots of spells/abilities/etc. and maneuvering to set up advantageous positions. Which in turn demands that you pay a lots of attention to the way you play. And with Real Time you will have to deal with frustrating problems like good plans failing because of fucked up pathfinding etc. so with growing complexity of tactics the necessary amount of babysitting will grow too.

Well, maybe some people can multitask well enough to handle watching and giving orders to ~6 separate units simultaneously, but I can't. I would even risk a guess that most people can't either. So game designers decided to give you active pause to help you with that. But it really help? A bit, yeah, but you still need to activate your pause manually when you see that something bad is about to happen. And with lots of things going on (eg. when you pressed a button and something awesome is happening ) there will be times where you gonna miss that. And then you'll be fucked. Oops, they jumped my wizard while I was occupied with my fighter. Oops, that enemy soldier in the back just threw a grenade right in the middle of my party I didn't told them to scatter because I was busy telling my sniper how to get to the vantage point. Oops, one of my guys almost killed my party with friendly-fire. Oops, oops, oops, I didn't paused quickly enough to stop another retarded shit from happening.

Anyways, that's problem and there are 2 ways to solve it. Either make a game turn based and eliminate the need for any multitasking whatsoever, or make your game easier to accommodate for the lost hitpoints where your twitching skill failed you and you didn't hit spacebar quickly enough. But how much easier are you gonna make it? Hopefully not as much as Bioware did with Dragon Age: Origins, when they completely eliminated any challenge from the game.

"But wait a second", people may say, "there might be a third option. It's a computer game after all, so you can get some help from..."

and that AI is too retarded to be relied on, and thus you have to pause this interactive movie to issue some basic orders and show AI how it's done.

AI can take care of some things, but there are others that it can't deal with. In my earlier example (in my first post in this thread) with Attacks of Opportunity, to prevent RTwP system from fucking my rogue over, AI would need to cancel my directly issued order. Do we want AI to override player's decisions? Well, if we don't then we have to accept that RTwP will fuck the player over from time to time.

And what do we for all of this? Faster grinding through trash mobs? If there's too much padding in the game, then the solution for that is to remove the padding, not to change combat system to make it more bearable. And don't say it can't be done. Yeah, I know is easy to make huge maps and then fill it with garbage, so basically every game developer does that to claim 5/10/20/50 more hours of gameplay on the box, but for fucks sake, if you're not gonna stop eating that spoon-fed bullshit then they are never gonna stop doing that.

In other words, tediousness of TB combat is proportional to the amount of meaningless filler, while tediousness of RTwP is proportional to the elaboration of game mechanics. Pick your poison.

 

[Jaesun]

I'd would like to get back to the VD's original statement that sparked this discussion

Just FYI VD did NOT start this discussion. There was repeatedly discussion about the merits of TB vs RTwP. I just chose VD's troll post to split this topic into it's own discussion. Since Infinitron and Shreck were asking to have this a separate thread. Of which the insights by Mr. Davis were excellent.

TheMoreYouKnow.jpg

 

[trais]

I'd would like to get back to the VD's original statement that sparked this discussion

Just FYI VD did NOT start this discussion. There was repeatedly discussion about the merits of TB vs RTwP. I just chose VD's troll post to split this topic into it's own discussion. Since Infinitron and Shreck were asking to have this a separate thread. Of which the insights by Mr. Davis were excellent.

TheMoreYouKnow.jpg

That's why I didn't say "started", but "sparked", as in "spark that ignited the powder keg". In that PE thread.

 

[mondblut]

games that slow down action time (Drakensang as mentioned earlier or DA as you said) do in fact make RTwP much more interesting.

Drakensang interesting combat? Oh boy, are you on crack or something?

Drakensang is a bad blobber that unsuccessfully pretends to be a third person with movement something. It doesn't even have fucking collision.

 

[Lonely Vazdru]

A good example of this, in the beginning of MotB, the caverns were originally filled with golems and creatures that could not be flanked or sneak attacked. If you were playing as a thief, which meant light weapons, you got WORKED. Play tests revealed this.

To solve it, we added enchanting materials very early and a new enchantment that allowed you crit and flank golems and constructs. (I might have some details fuzzy, this was a while ago).

That actually ended up NOT being enough, so we added a +3 light weapon WITH the enchantment in one of the dungeon portions of the initial starting map.

Now if that had failed, we would have had to change the creatures.

Why didn't you do that right away instead of implementing all the popamole shit ? Flanking and critting constructs is about as unD&D as it comes. Looks like a typical case of the cure being worse than the disease.

 

[Lyric Suite]

The problem with RTwP is that computer AI is shit, and always will be. Nothing like putting the game in pause, give a bunch of orders, and then observe the various dozen of ways in which the AI fucks it all up. Yes, i'm replaying NWN2. You can tell.

 

[attackfighter]

The problem with RTwP is that computer AI is shit, and always will be. Nothing like putting the game in pause, give a bunch of orders, and then observe the various dozen of ways in which the AI fucks it all up. Yes, i'm replaying NWN2. You can tell.

For some reason Bioware/Obsidian started fucking up their companion AI post BG2. It's like they weren't sure whether they wanted the companions to be totally automated like in Fallout, or totally under player control like in BG, and so they took some middle approach where you have control but the AI will randomly override your authority or not listen to you or whatever at random. As a result NWN2, KOTOR, KOTOR 2 and DA all have the most frustrating combat ever. In those games I don't even try to control my party members anymore.

Maybe you're talking about something else tho.

 

[Anthony Davis]

A good example of this, in the beginning of MotB, the caverns were originally filled with golems and creatures that could not be flanked or sneak attacked. If you were playing as a thief, which meant light weapons, you got WORKED. Play tests revealed this.

To solve it, we added enchanting materials very early and a new enchantment that allowed you crit and flank golems and constructs. (I might have some details fuzzy, this was a while ago).

That actually ended up NOT being enough, so we added a +3 light weapon WITH the enchantment in one of the dungeon portions of the initial starting map.

Now if that had failed, we would have had to change the creatures.

Why didn't you do that right away instead of implementing all the popamole shit ? Flanking and critting constructs is about as unD&D as it comes. Looks like a typical case of the cure being worse than the disease.

I understand your point, even if I don't agree with it. DnD has serious problems with a lot of this.

We wanted to have different creatures, and like I said, there even without making BAD character decisions, a lot of characters are completely useless in certain fights. Without a DM there to role-play it all away, it becomes a measurable amount of NON-FUN.

but we are digressing. If we want to talk about how DnD is both awesome and a horrible at the same time, we can have another thread for that.

 

[sea]

For some reason Bioware/Obsidian started fucking up their companion AI post BG2. It's like they weren't sure whether they wanted the companions to be totally automated like in Fallout, or totally under player control like in BG, and so they took some middle approach where you have control but the AI will randomly override your authority or not listen to you or whatever at random. As a result NWN2, KOTOR, KOTOR 2 and DA all have the most frustrating combat ever. In those games I don't even try to control my party members anymore.

KotOR, NWN2, etc. use AI scripts to decide what to do. NWN2 lets you turn off AI if I recall, which lets you command them just like in Baldur's Gate, and Dragon Age has an advanced tactics editor that lets you set criteria for them to do stuff under specific conditions (like heal an ally if his/her health is below 25%), which is way ahead of any of their previous games (you can't switch off tactics entirely with a single button press though). KotOR definitely did have shit AI, which ruined much of its combat, but in the other cases I have to kindly say "learn to play" because I never had issues with them.

 

[Shadenuat]

Yes, i'm replaying NWN2. You can tell.

I am trying to get through Storm of Zehir myself, and I am starting to remember what exactly made me give up on the add-on with my own party and all the neat little features like map, monster encounters and trading. There is just a tremendous gap in tactic between "cast a Daze on a monster" and "win an initiative, act first, cast daze on a monster, move fighter to monster and finish him".

I am starting to feel that RTwP worked in Infinity games only because they had a very simple set of rules. Fighters had like only one attack in BG1 and IWD1, so you only had to look up their health and manage weapons, armor and gulp potions from time to time. Thieves got most management outside of combat. The real choreography with space bar happened when you managed your spellcasters. Then, hello D&D3, and suddenly tremendous amount of shit started to happen. Fighters got all these cool ablities, a lot of which have to be used manually, thieves now backstab every round - you want thief be near somebody when they drink potions, cast spells, get flanked, got knocked down, got stunned... and all these numbers and rules pile up as you level up to the point when you just stop caring about it. You just stay sure that slots are full of empowered magic missile-like storms, and everyone else can do whatever stupidity AI wants today.

 

[Infinitron]

Shadenuat Good points.

 

[Lonely Vazdru]

I understand your point, even if I don't agree with it. DnD has serious problems with a lot of this.

We wanted to have different creatures, and like I said, there even without making BAD character decisions, a lot of characters are completely useless in certain fights. Without a DM there to role-play it all away, it becomes a measurable amount of NON-FUN.

but we are digressing. If we want to talk about how DnD is both awesome and a horrible at the same time, we can have another thread for that.

I didn't play it since I didn't like the first, but don't you play a full party in NW2 ? Because this sounds more like a problem coming of wanting to make a single character orientated D&D game rather than a problem with D&D itself, since having one virtually useless character in a fight happens constantly and doesn't matter much with a full party. And D&D is a template of "party based".

 

[attackfighter]

For some reason Bioware/Obsidian started fucking up their companion AI post BG2. It's like they weren't sure whether they wanted the companions to be totally automated like in Fallout, or totally under player control like in BG, and so they took some middle approach where you have control but the AI will randomly override your authority or not listen to you or whatever at random. As a result NWN2, KOTOR, KOTOR 2 and DA all have the most frustrating combat ever. In those games I don't even try to control my party members anymore.

KotOR, NWN2, etc. use AI scripts to decide what to do. NWN2 lets you turn off AI if I recall, which lets you command them just like in Baldur's Gate, and Dragon Age has an advanced tactics editor that lets you set criteria for them to do stuff under specific conditions (like heal an ally if his/her health is below 25%), which is way ahead of any of their previous games (you can't switch off tactics entirely with a single button press though). KotOR definitely did have shit AI, which ruined much of its combat, but in the other cases I have to kindly say "learn to play" because I never had issues with them.

The problem there is that in NWN2 and DA it's intended for you to only control your main character the majority of time. If you take over for the AI you'll have your hands full spamming all of the recharging abilities and spells everyone's loaded with. Also while I'm not sure about NWN2, I know that in DA switching off the AI completely turns the game into micromanagement hell, since you'll end up having to constantly reassign attack orders to characters every time they're knocked away from their target or the target otherwise moves out of their range (and that will happen lots). The alternative - giving up and letting the AI play itself - is viable but lame, since the AI is shitty and you're forfeiting most of the game's strategic potential that way.

 

[Raghar]

Disabling AI assistance is necessary for proper and enjoyable NW2 playthrough. It looks like it was designed to spam spells left and right and expect rest after every combat. Basically AI is designed as an action game with swords and whatever.

The only time I played NWN2 as a single character, was the situation: A few thieves are in house... I as wizard remained at the door, the thieves in 3 round moved down the rest of the party. So the next 30-50 rounds of combat it was one wizard with longsword, few spells that remained from previous combat, and L1 blast against two thieves who did attack of opportunity at every potion and spell. The only thing that protected it from disaster was I had party storage of healing potion, so every third potion get through attack of opportunity and because of serious effort, and help of only L1 blast, they were moved down by occasional hit from longsword and these few spells which wasn't enough to deal with all thieves and that fighter/thief that was their leader.

 

[Vault Dweller]

It's pretty strong one, but let's take it apart and see if he makes valid points or is he bullshitting because he's making a TB game or whatever.

Actually, it's the other way around. I'm making a TB game because I dislike RTwP.

As with everything in our imperfect world, RTwP implementation can suck. I'm sure nobody would question that. But does it always, universally suck? Well, it certainly works very well in singleplayer RTS genre.

Does it?

RTS are about thinking fast, making decisions on the fly and under pressure, reacting to things not going as planned, etc. The chaos of war, basically. The pause throws all that out of the window and lets you micromanage and role-play mother hen dotting all over her children.

TB and RT are diametrically opposed systems, each doing a certain combat aspect extremely well. Masters of their respective trades, you might say, whereas any attempt to bridge the gap becomes a jack of all trades by default, be it fast TB aimed to emulate RT or RT with pause aimed to emulate TB.

Active pause is a bridge between human's and computer's speed, reaction time, precision, etc. It gives you tighter control over your resources, allowing you as a player to create and, more importantly, execute more complex tactics and strategies.

Right. So let's throw a pause in shooters. Oh wait, they already did. Can't say I like it. You certainly gain that tighter control, reaction time, precision, and can kill several people (and all the fun) at once.

So big cheers for active pause.

:silence:

But some people may say: "trais, you silly person, you can't compare RTSes and isometric party-based RPGs. They have some superficial similarities, but they are two completely different genres". Well, I don't agree with that, but let's say that it's true. Fine. But it still doesn't change the fact that you when playing RPGs you want to explore the intricacies of the game mechanics that are available to you and use them to create cool characters, instead of cookie-cutter builds like a fighter that auto-attacks everything to death. And that means using a lots of spells/abilities/etc. and maneuvering to set up advantageous positions. Which in turn demands that you pay a lots of attention to the way you play. And with Real Time you will have to deal with frustrating problems like good plans failing because of fucked up pathfinding etc. so with growing complexity of tactics the necessary amount of babysitting will grow too.

You know why? Because RT does well strategy, whereas TB does well tactics. RT can get away with basic tactics (swarm! being its favourite) but the moment you go for something more complex you need the precision that only TB can provide. A pause does provide a temporary relief but it goes against the very nature of RT combat. If tactics get more complex, I suspect even the pause won't be enough, because it creates order but for a moment. Sending your rogue to backstab the enemy without triggering every AoO would require pausing every second, at which point it's no longer real time combat that you're playing.

Well, maybe some people can multitask well enough to handle watching and giving orders to ~6 separate units simultaneously, but I can't. I would even risk a guess that most people can't either.

I agree. If you recall, I said "The pause is an honest admission that fast-paced, party vs party, real-time combat is too chaotic to be controlled on the fly and that AI is too retarded to be relied on, and thus you have to pause this interactive movie to issue some basic orders and show AI how it's done."

Anyways, that's problem and there are 2 ways to solve it. Either make a game turn based and eliminate the need for any multitasking whatsoever, or make your game easier to accommodate for the lost hitpoints where your twitching skill failed you and you didn't hit spacebar quickly enough. But how much easier are you gonna make it?

"But wait a second", people may say, "there might be a third option....

There might be. Now, I'm sure you'd agree with me that most options are sort of redundant and necessary only because AI can't fight its way out of a wet paper bag. As a result you have to go in and micromanage your party to death, which is impossible in pure RT and requires pausing gameplay. A simple (relatively) way to fix it would be giving the player commands on a group level. In a war a general doesn't control each cannon individually and doesn't sit behind every gunner, horseman, and pilot. Instead he coordinates everything, deciding when to use what and where. Something like that might work well with large parties in RPG but such RPG would have to be designed for RT from the ground up.

 

[Johannes]

Well, maybe some people can multitask well enough to handle watching and giving orders to ~6 separate units simultaneously, but I can't. I would even risk a guess that most people can't either.

I agree. If you recall, I said "The pause is an honest admission that fast-paced, party vs party, real-time combat is too chaotic to be controlled on the fly and that AI is too retarded to be relied on, and thus you have to pause this interactive movie to issue some basic orders and show AI how it's done."

And how is that a problem? I understand that you don't like having to pause, but a lot of us don't really mind.

Continuous simulation is still quite different from TB, allowing for a lot of mechanics not possible in TB.

 

[Vault Dweller]

Don't really mind and good feature that fits the core design well are two different things.

 

[Mangoose]

You know why? Because RT does well strategy, whereas TB does well tactics. RT can get away with basic tactics (swarm! being its favourite) but the moment you go for something more complex you need the precision that only TB can provide. A pause does provide a temporary relief but it goes against the very nature of RT combat. If tactics get more complex, I suspect even the pause won't be enough, because it creates order but for a moment. Sending your rogue to backstab the enemy without triggering every AoO would require pausing every second, at which point it's no longer real time combat that you're playing.

...

A simple (relatively) way to fix it would be giving the player commands on a group level. In a war a general doesn't control each cannon individually and doesn't sit behind every gunner, horseman, and pilot. Instead he coordinates everything, deciding when to use what and where. Something like that might work well with large parties in RPG but such RPG would have to be designed for RT from the ground up.

Excellent description of my own unspoken views.