Well, the whole percentages thing is just a red herring. in fallout they call skills percentages, but they are pretty meaningless, since they can be 300%...that makes little sense. I like the idea of keeping much of the inner workings mysterious, though. So percentages like done in fallout are fine.
I think it is a mistake to thinkt hat you are somehow going to get people who don't like statistics at all to play roleplaying games. You might, but nonly by making them braindead and moronic. In DnD you can easily ignore thaco and all that crap so long as the computer takes care of it all for you, but you can also obsess over it and optimize your characters very thoroughly, which is a good thing..
DnD is pretty stupid, really, because there is a marked tendency to either be able to hit every time, or else not at all. The same failing applies to every action you take. I think they really dropped the ball in the 3rd edition because they managed to amplify the failings DnD had before. So you end up being able to wade through armies of monsters that are slightly lower level than you, and get stomped on because soemthing not worth much experience has a resistance you cant overcome. The feats are interesting, though.
As for the action queues, you don't really need multithreading for that. Technically nothing needs multithreading. Even a puppet should be able to deal with semaphores and mutex though...it is not difficult at all to do simple multithreaded programming. I do it constantly.
The action queue and some really clever programming and rules would be necessary to make a phasebased sort of system that really worked. I dont agree that wiz 8 is really phase based. I would like to see a phasebased system if it was not totally braindead, but considering developers can't even handle pathfinding algorithms I am not holding my breath.
Failing that I like turn based games. Fallout was good, I just wish the NPC AI was not sa crazy and you could issue some basic orders ingame to get them to flee or hold their ground. The combat could get slow, but there was no real reason for that...somewhere someone had some braindead enemy AI. It was cumbersome to play fallout tactics for me, but it had a lot of flaws and not just the combat. In realtime mode the combat was just silly and you moved someone close, ran them away, etc. You could win pretty much any battle that way in the infinity engine games too...what a joke. If a game is real time, it should be 100% arcadelike or else it is just a joke...controlling 6 characters in real time with pause is just a tedious waste of time only a moron could think is ideal.
