I personally hate auto-combat, I find it extremely boring, but then I am more of a hardcore gamer, I don't like simple turn-based combat either, I love arcade/platformer combat and find the second best kind to be turn-based with complex strategy that must be changed for each enemy and possibly terrain or player's current status. So maybe my opinion doesn't matter because I am not your target audience...

Quote:Original post by sunandshadow
I personally hate auto-combat, I find it extremely boring, but then I am more of a hardcore gamer, I don't like simple turn-based combat either, I love arcade/platformer combat and find the second best kind to be turn-based with complex strategy that must be changed for each enemy and possibly terrain or player's current status. So maybe my opinion doesn't matter because I am not your target audience...

Ofcourse you hate auto combat - if you wanted to watch two characters attack each other with randomly selected generic premade moves you could just watch the presidential debates on TV...

Now seriously - my two cent on auto combat:

Auto combat is not fun. It's not that I personally don't like it - I just think it doesn't meant to be fun. A non-fun combat system could be a great design element - if you know how to use it. This design element is the basic of the browser-based management MMO genre.

For example - you probably heard of Hattrick. Hattrick is a soccer management game where you don't play soccer - you just manage the team. You buy and sell players, interact with other teams etc. But you can't play soccer - the soccer games are auto generated by the server. Do you think that the developers were simply too lazy to develop a soccer gameplay system? that the servers can't support actual soccer gameplay?

Well, this might be true, but at any rate, if Hattrick contained an actual soccer system it would be filled with soccer kids who just know how to play soccer, and the whole community aspect of the game would disappear. Why? because the soccer system simply draws too much focus. Most people would rather play online soccer than to arrange imaginary soccer player transfer from one imaginary soccer team to another imaginary soccer team.

This is the greatness of auto combat - it's not fun, so it doesn't draw focus from the community&management part(in that kind of games, community and management kind of merge into one part) of the game. And unlike unfun turn-based/real-time combat, where you have to do it anyways so you can affect it's results, auto combat never becomes a burden, because the player doesn't have to participate in it, just to read a summary. However, player do have some control over the outcome of the auto combat in the preparations - which are handled in the community&management part of the game, the part where you want to put the focus.

Here is a better example - Gindis. Try to play one of their games - it's pretty boring. Sure, you can build stuff and attack stuff, but it still doesn't have real depth.

Now enter the forums. This is where the real action is. Players form alliances, arrange attacks, declare truces etc.

Do you think that kind of diplomacy would have been possible if the game was had a real-time/turn-based battle system?


I have to admit, I'm not a big fan of that kind of games, but I can see what other people find in them...

If the combat isn't supposed to be fun, it shouldn't be there at all; a boring thing the player is forced to watch is an obnoxious and kind of insulting waste of time. If the player's efforts can't contribute anything to the outcome of the fight, there's definitely no reason to play it out, just roll one random number, report the result, and let the player spend their time on whatever parts are supposed to be fun.

Quote:Original post by sunandshadow
If the combat isn't supposed to be fun, it shouldn't be there at all; a boring thing the player is forced to watch is an obnoxious and kind of insulting waste of time. If the player's efforts can't contribute anything to the outcome of the fight, there's definitely no reason to play it out, just roll one random number, report the result, and let the player spend their time on whatever parts are supposed to be fun.

You have just described the basics of auto battle.

Quote:Original post by someboddy

Quote:Original post by sunandshadow
If the combat isn't supposed to be fun, it shouldn't be there at all; a boring thing the player is forced to watch is an obnoxious and kind of insulting waste of time. If the player's efforts can't contribute anything to the outcome of the fight, there's definitely no reason to play it out, just roll one random number, report the result, and let the player spend their time on whatever parts are supposed to be fun.

You have just described the basics of auto battle.

I've seen games where you have to just sit there and watch your character fight. Also the OP was suggesting generating a log of multiple turns that were taken during the battle.

It's my preference, but I would be totally disinterested, or bored quickly, in a game with auto-combat. But, I have built a turn-based web game, and it seems, perhaps, too complex to keep most players. One even said it was too complex, preferring games like Travian and Tribal Wars (which just give you the results of combat). We chose to try to get the niche market of turn-based, complex combat players rather than try to compete with all the other casual RPGs.

Quote:Original post by Kenneth Godwin
Wouldn't you still want to know what happened tho? (e.g. How effective your character build was.) Assuming you did want to play such a thing? ;)

Part of my point is that there shouldn't be such a thing as character building if the combat isn't meant to be fun and thought-provoking. But no, I probably wouldn't play it at all, and if I did I _definitely_ would not want to read logs describing what happened in a simulated battle or have to sit there and watch a simulated battle.