Actually Imperialism II actually had two systems. At the strategic level it was "issue all orders then execute all orders for all players simultaneously". But when you invaded a province, it was standard turned based "issue order and execute immediately". The thing with Imperialism II though is combat didn't take place on the main map, but on a seperate minimap. The world map was actually a combination of a region based system and hex grid tild based. The hexes were used for economic improvements. You controlled entire regions at a time. The sea combat was rather primitive and the open ocean was pretty much useless once everything was discovered. When you invaded a province, you battled the enemy army in the province in its entirety, and had to ddestroy the enemy army or at least drive them off the map. If there was a fort there, I believe you would have to reduce the fort as well (destroy all its guns). I loved that game, and still have the manual. Its too bad my brother took it and never gave it back :-(

It doesn't sound like you want a minimap idea though, so I'm not sure if that system would help too much. I was also thinking about doing a large scale game that combined strategic and operaitonal level elements, as well as economy and diplomacy. I was actually thinking of breaking up game days into hour-by-hour turns, and all movement during the turn would be completed, and then the next . Who moves first during a game turn would be dependent on things like initiative and the speed of the unit, plus a random factor. As for the "unit is retreating so I don't want to pursue them because it might be a trap" or "there are way too many enemy units near me, I should pull back" problem, I was thinking of having stances for units that affected how aggressive they were. But problems like these are the reason I sheleved and tried to do something simpler to start, as I haven't programmed in a while.

As for tiles - depending on the complexity of your system, tiles will help out alot. They make collision detection and path finding a heck of alot easier. And they are alot easier to work with from a players perspective, when there are lot of units involved. What you could do is have very fine grained "invisibile" tiles like they did with Starcraft.

I believe that the best example of a turn based strategy game are the Total War games. You have a big map and everyone takes turns making moves, attacking, moving units, etc. Then if a battle takes place, both players go into RTS mode and control their armies.

Quote:Original post by Adriac Veras
I believe that the best example of a turn based strategy game are the Total War games. You have a big map and everyone takes turns making moves, attacking, moving units, etc. Then if a battle takes place, both players go into RTS mode and control their armies.

Yes, that works quite well for that context, because in the old days forces were very concentrated and you had huge battles(for the time) where opposing armies would face each other for a few days at most, fight each other, one army would be either retreat or be forced to withdraw(in a few cases, totally defeated), and then neither side would do much for a few months or so. This system works quite well in giving you the feel of military engagements durign those time periods. But by the 20th century it became unwwise to concentrate force to that degree, because of a few factors: The accuracy and range of artillery and later, airpower, the development of mechanized infantry, and the advancement of signals equipment (radio) made it possible for a general to give orders to forces that were very far away (and in turn, the ability of the field general to report the progress of his forces) So what you had in the 20th century in large engagements between great powers was multiple armies that are distributed throughout a broad front, whether spread out(WWI) or concentrated(WWII). I'm not saying that there weren't 'battles' but they were spread out to such a large area that a Total War or Imperialism II style mini-combat is probably does not make sense in the scale of the map (i.e the battle would take place over multiple tiles)

I am not really sure if this will fit into your design, but here are some ideas around the topic.

1. Enable an Option where maximum Time per Round is fixed: 1/2/5 Minutes per turn.

2. Dont let the people control too many things. This will decrease the time for the other players to wait. This may be possible with different design aspects. i.e.:
- High Upkeep cost for units and/or Towns to limit Units/Towns
- Fewer decisions to be made in a Town. (Like in Civ: Specialists/Ressource Management) If you dont want to remove such features completly make them more simple maybe with 2 Buttons:
*Optimize for foodproduction*
*Optimize for industrielproduction*
...

3. Helpful tools and automatics for the players like:
- The possibility of setting up a buildorder
- Auto-Building functions, (like in Civ) "Auto-Build"- Army/Economy/Research
Maybe with a notice what happens next round:
"Town X produced: 'Town-Hall' - AUTO-BUILDER will start building a Library next round. <Click here to change manually>"
- Let a player do more things with one click. i.e.: Selecting 5 Armies around and sent them all together to your town or next to an enemy town. In Civ you had to click for every field with an army and send it.
- Introduce waypoints for army production. "If-Army-Production-Ready -> Send it to my town XYZ"

4. To introduce some actions while still using turn based system you may pop-up a tactic-window for both players 5-10 Seconds befor a fight starts. Both now have the option for give some special orders maybe "Fight defensive/offensive/split army and try to attack from 2 Sides"
This can be made very simple and like r-p-s. If you choose the right thing your army gets a 10%-Bonus or something like that.

5. If anyone is waiting for the other player he should be able to do something. Maybe setting up a build order. Do some town management etc.

6. Introduce a Button "Auto-Skip-Next-Round (if nothing important happens)"

Don't know if this has been implemented before but how about this:

Preliminary move planning during the other player's turn? e.g. if you're training units you can queue them to be trained when your turn comes around. Same goes for building etc. Maybe have the ability to move units at this time as well, but obviously this would be undo-able come your move, if the opponent's tactics make the move inappropriate.

I don't remember what game I saw it in in, but a neat gimmick is imposing a flexible time limit. When half or more of players clicks end turn a countdown starts and everybody else's turn is automatically finished after the time is up. This way you do have time for longer turns but can't annoy people by taking ages to finish a turn when there's nothing happening.

Play-by-email games operate on the "everyone issues orders, then everyone executes orders" mechanism. This is a necessity of using email for issuing orders. See Atlantis (http://www.prankster.com/project/), which I wrote, or Olympia (http://www.pbm.com/oly/), which I played, for some examples of empire building games in this style. There are others too.

You can gain some insight from these games by examining how they handle the sequence of orders. For instance, what happens if a unit tries to move in the same turn as it is attacked? Issues like this abound, and there are different ways of handling them.

Geoff

How about allowing each player only a single action per turn? Like in chess, each player moves a piece per turn. So in a TBS, a player would either build or move units, and then the next player would go. If you wanted to allow more moves, you could give each player a fixed amount of "action energy" at the start of their turn and assign a cost to the kinds of actions a player could do.

This would make players' turns go by faster as they wouldn't be able to do more than one or a few things per turn.