eleazar wrote:
There is no automatic pause at the end of each turn. The idea is that the player normally gives his commands during the 3-5 sec turn, otherwise this line makes no sense: "Conversely, a TBS system can be too slow and make be unable to capture any real sense of tactics (Example: Master of Orion 2)."
IMO It's likely that the ability to pause will strongly restricted or eliminated during MP games.
Therefore the game should be designed to be playable without using pause.
Well I don`t know how this "not turning into a click fest" and "not being too slow" problem will eventually be solved, but since the pauses are in the game, which was the point of my previous post, I think we could use the extra time they can give to the player. So the damage model wouldn`t have to be as simple as in those non turn based games.
Now to justify this I would like to ask the question of, when would you need the extra time that the pause can give you? The answer, at least to me, would be that the extra time is needed when you come into contact with enemies or are fighting against them and are commanding multiple groups of ships. So you would need the time to come up with a plan how to use your ships or to monitor the situation of your multiple groups already engaged in combat. This way you could avoid situations that you face in real time combat games, where you are monitoring the progress of half of your army, but at the same time the AI defeats the other half and so you lose the battle.
And another question. When do the ships systems suffer damage? The answer of course would be that they suffer damage when you are in combat against your enemy, which is also the time; I would think you will be most likely to use those pauses. Although maybe there will be something like mines, which could cause damage before your ships are in contact with the enemy.
So my point here is that at least to me the time when pauses are most likely to be used and when the ships take most of the damage seems to be the same. And so I think that we could use the time that the pauses give us, to give the player at least a little more detailed information about the condition of the ships than in real time based battle systems, where the information tends to be very simple.
And what comes to the multiplayer I also think that at least the paused time will probably have to be somehow restricted. This is also mentioned in my previous post. However I don`t think that pauses should be eliminated from MP games, since then they would just end up being click fests, which is one of the things this hybrid system was aimed to avoid.
Edit: Removed a not so great example.