Back in 1994 or so, VGA Planets 3.0 was the first turn-based game I ever played that had simultaneous movement and combat resolution for all players' turns. It was always fun to watch the combat results when you received the turn RST (results) in email from the Host machine.
30 years later and most turn-based games still prefer to use alternating movement + combat resolution.
Do any of you have thoughts on alternating rounds vs simultaneous resolution?
I was just watching at a Let's Play for “Phantom Brigade” on YouTube which is a mech themed game, but the game-play seemed too slow and clunky to me. I believe the problem from my perspective is that the combat between any two units took MULTIPLE turns to resolve. In VGA Planets 3.0, if two opposing ships engaged each other, ONE of those ships was going to get destroyed in that turn (and on some occasion, both could be destroyed.) In fact, if there were many ships on both sides that were all engaging each other at the same point in space, then in the end, only one player's ship(s) would survive or avoid being captured. Combat was very much a zero-sum game… like capturing a piece in Chess. But like Chess, typically you knew which ships would win and which would lose.
For instance, if the Birdmen (aka Romulans) sent 3 Dark Wings to fight an Evil Empire's Gorbie (aka DeathStar) then 2 of those Dark Wings were going to get destroyed, but the third Dark Wing would finally defeat what would be at that point, a heavily damaged Gorbie… unless the player made a miscalculation and didn't put enough torpedoes inside that final Darkwing!
Simultaneous movement and combat resolution just seems more fair to me also.
What do you folks think?
Regards,
-Mike (WWG)
https://www.scificommand.com
P.S. I highly recommend any game designers out there to check out VGA Planets 3.0 if you haven't already. I think the original author, Tim Wisseman, sold it and it's now called VGA Planets Nu.
https://vgaplanets.org/index.php/Where_To_Play
It is a brilliant game really, but Wisseman seemed to lose faith in it's design simplicity (or maybe not fully understand why his own creation was so amazing and beloved) because his attempt at a 4.0 was (in my opinion) a misguided attempt to introduce even more of depth by adding all kinds of complexity to the game which made it impossible to fully grok.
VGAP 3.0 was very much like an asymmetric Chess (but against up to 10 opponents in a single game!). Not too hard to grok, but very difficult to master.
P.S.S. I started some preliminary design on a simultaneous turn based game of my own involving the following 5 factions:
The Spirits
The Ghouls
The Technologists
The Metaphysicists
The Jackasses (yes really!)
I haven't posted anything about the design yet because it's really super early stages, but I'm going for a streamlined 4X+1 eXperience. Im also still working on my “Sci-Fi Command” space simulation and the Keystone Game Blocks framework that supports it.
