Time within turns.

For what's not in 'Top Priority Game Design'. Post your ideas, visions, suggestions for the game, rules, modifications, etc.

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Carbon Copy Man
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Time within turns.

#1 Post by Carbon Copy Man »

One of the things that sticks out in my mind about Moo2 is that a turn would be a turn and that's all there is to it.

For example, on colony Sol III, I've got my workers building me a missile base. But while they're doing that, I notice an enemy ship is moving in to attack!

They're not building that missile base fast enough. So I buy it.

And then I take my workers and put them on research for the rest of the turn, because they can't do anything in industry until my bought structure appears on the next turn.

I check Sol II. They're building a transport ship, and it'll be finished in 1 turn. I reassign a quarter of them to research... Still 1 turn. Half and it becomes 2 turns, so I tweak it so that I only have the minimum number of workers I need for it to be finished by the next turn.

It's a pretty weird thing to have to do.


Another thing that I'm sure many of us are interested in having is multi-opponent combat. And shorter combat.


So I wonder whether perhaps you could "subdivide" the turns. Gah. It's hard to find a short description for it.


Basically, say your ship is 1 parsec away from colony X. Your enemy's fleet is 10 parsecs away from it, but because engine technology is so advanced, you'll both get there by the next turn.

Well, I think that your ship should still get there first. You go into combat, attack their starbase, and *tada* a little while into combat their fleet suddenly appears.

And to extend the concept, combat only lasts so long... If a battle drags out, then it rolls over to the next turn... so your other ship, which was 14 parsecs (2 turns) away actually manages to arrive before it's all over.


And I think you could use this to control the intervention of third parties. Rather than battles being carefully organised and gentlemanly with ships fanning out from row formation, they're chaotic with ships appearing and retreating all over the place -- and this fits with the added chaos of multiple opponents.


And while I'm at it, I'd rather like having the ability to waylay ships in transit. ^^


Back to the bit about buying buildings:
Buying a building could consume the cost, and perhaps 10-20% of the total farming/production/research/whatever of the turn in the colony. Where you assign your minions is where you'll get the remaining ~80%.

I'm not completely sure about the issue with excess workers -- perhaps the remaining time of the turn could automatically go into something like "Trade Goods"?



Note: I haven't yet played the Alpha (sorry, it seems my computer is too sucky for it), so I don't know how much of this is still relevant. I'm sure a lot of it will be, at least.

Note: Also, my experience with Moo3 is fairly limited. I tried to play it, but I found it absolutely impossible to continue a saved game. I hope I'm not repeating anything you already would have considered due to its implementation in that game.
Last edited by Carbon Copy Man on Sat Aug 27, 2005 4:49 am, edited 1 time in total.

MareviQ
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what moo3 does

#2 Post by MareviQ »

What moo3 does is that if your builders have a higher "constructing power" than required to complete the current project, the overhead is used for the next project in queue (this caused me to have lots of those non-fighting army units, couse ai put them just after what i wanted to build and by that time in the game those were completed in under one turn - namely, the system would make what i wanted (lets say one huge battleship) AND the unit AND start working on the next project (maybye even complete it...)). What was nice was that if you devoted more resources to the construction than could be used (namely the whole queue would be built in one turn, and there would be potential for even more construction to be done) it was showed in the system menu (in that left-side expandable thingummy... OK, so maybe that wasn't really convenient place to do that, but it DID inform you of such situation... if you bothered to check every system each turn ...)

Carbon Copy Man
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#3 Post by Carbon Copy Man »

Hmmm...

Maybe on the build queue, the game could colour-in your build progress, showing how much will be completed before the next turn.

And if you're going to finish constructing 5 buildings by the next turn, it could colour in all five buildings in the queue, so it doesn't seem so random. It'll also save you from having to analyse the numbers to predict your progress.

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Geoff the Medio
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#4 Post by Geoff the Medio »

Take a look at the tech screen screenshot:

http://freeorion.sourceforge.net/screen ... reen_2.jpg

On the tech queue at the left, which is similar to how the build queue will work, I believe, there's a number of turns remaining (estimated) for each tech. For build projects, anything with "1 Turn left" would be (expected to be) done the next turn.

As for how much will be complete each turn, build projects, like techs, have a number of turns and a cost per turn. The maximum amount of progress you can put towards something in a turn is 1 turn's worth of cost, which is indicated on the build progress bar by one little box there. So if tech X or building Y costs 5 PP / turn and takes 6 turns, you can put at most 5 PP a turn towards it, and it will take at least 6 turns to build. It's also been suggested to indicate exactly how many RP or PP a particular tech or building is getting that turn, and whether this is equal to or less than the limit that project can use each turn.

See here and the posts a bit after:

viewtopic.php?t=1006&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=86

Carbon Copy Man
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#5 Post by Carbon Copy Man »

Interesting. I'll have to look into that further.

Although I want time-within-turns mostly from a combat viewpoint. The stuff with buildings is odd, but not really a big problem.

It's those battles that have the potential to save or destroy a colony -- and I don't think the decision should ever be made by one measly parsec.

Damn. Played the v0.2. It doesn't tell me much. It's a pity I don't have hardware good enough to handle compiling the uptodate version.

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yaromir
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#6 Post by yaromir »

Well, I think that your ship should still get there first. You go into combat, attack their starbase, and *tada* a little while into combat their fleet suddenly appears.
I would like that too. It is really the matter of time-interval size difference.

If a ship typicly spends 10 days in flight and then fights for 1 hour, it is unlikely that such situations would occur.

What I would like is for combat to be limited to 10 turns or 2 minutes or whatever, so arrival of re-inforcements is possible.
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#7 Post by Argus »

I like the idea about multi party combat. I also like the idea that if combat takes too long it gets completed the next turn.

As far as building things goes. I'm a little bit confused about the image Geoff the Medio linked to. If you're building a project which normally takes 10 PP/turn but you're only supplying 9/turn it going to take extra time. All that makes sense but what happens the last turn. If the project costs 100 PP to complete the last round you'll have contributed 99 PP to it and you're supplying 9 for that turn where does the extra 8 PP go? Isn't this the same question/problem as CCMan had with Moo2. Also why would we ever have wasted points when we could just add another under funded project? Heck what happens when we don't have any projects to complete? Do all those PPs go to waste or is/was that the idea of the stockpile?

I think that extra points not used should be carried over to the next round at the least. So if I had a 5 PP/turn project then I'd get to be able to say I actually started that one right after completing the last so I'm 1 turn into making it or if it takes 100 PPs to finish over 20 turns I only have to provide 92 PPs over 20 turns (not pretty math but you get the point).

Argus

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utilae
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#8 Post by utilae »

I always wanted space combat to involve multiple players and also wanted it to pause and carry on next turn if time ran out. The best way to do this would be with the phase time method of space combat. See my space combat proposal in my signature.

Argus
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#9 Post by Argus »

I just had a thought though! Oh wait yaromir already said it:
It is really the matter of time-interval size difference.
If a ship typicly spends 10 days in flight and then fights for 1 hour, it is unlikely that such situations would occur.
Thankfully it can be ditched due to one of the FO rules perhaps both. The thought was that if a turn is actually a some large interval of time (like years) then the chance of combat not being finished is kind of silly. But to hell with reality! Who needs it!

Like I said I would like for ship combat to span turns. It has lots of nice things about it. Like the sending and arriving of reinforcements and the possibility of diplomatic resolutions. Also I can picture a front line of stars all bitterly fighting for several rounds with reserve ships giving reinforcements and all it would take is for one of them to fall and an empire would lay exposed to enemy forces! :twisted:

Argus

Note: I posted this last night but it somehow managed to end up on another thread. I sure hope it don't happen this time!

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yaromir
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#10 Post by yaromir »

Well yes, fun factor is more important than realism. I think combat spanning multiple galactic turns would absolutely rock. The battle would resume from where it ended the last turn (preserving relative positioning)

It would open up possibilties for so many things like:

Newly built ships join the fray, reinforcements arive from neighboring systems, a missile base comes on-line...a third party decloaks as the two warring fleets are exausted and blasts them both into oblivion...mwahahahahaha...aherm...sorry, could not help myself.

If you want "realism" we can say that there is a galactic rule that forbids combats from lasting longer than 10 turns per galactic turns. In fact, you could even bring it up with the galactic council to extend or reduce that limit...ah the horrors of democracy.
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#11 Post by Dreamer »

Argus wrote:Like I said I would like for ship combat to span turns. It has lots of nice things about it. Like the sending and arriving of reinforcements and the possibility of diplomatic resolutions. Also I can picture a front line of stars all bitterly fighting for several rounds with reserve ships giving reinforcements and all it would take is for one of them to fall and an empire would lay exposed to enemy forces! :twisted:
That in fact sounds more like a war than a single combat. Also, I don't see any gameplay effect in a continued combat that cannot be done in severla combats, one each turn.

Of course you can send more ships each turn. You cold be given the option to hide your ships to avoid combat (and a combat takes place only if the enemy detects you) or even make your fleet start a guerrilla warfare till reinforcements came, crippling your adversary.

And of course each turn you can tell your ships to avoid direct confrontation and wait for reinforcements . Both of the last option end in combat with a certain probability, only IF the enemy chooses to seek and engage, and even then for a fixed number of combat turns/time (representing the fact that your fleet will avoid direct confrontation and will run and regroup in that scenario).

This is almost the same gameplay you get with a continued combat without altering the game time-frame. As we already have fleets we can give them separate orders turn to turn, to keep some forces behind, make surprice attacks with stealth ships, etc. Also the game complexity is much lower, since you don't have to keep each combat instance in memory from turn to turn. Only a single instance of combat exists at each time.

So in short: I don't think this is a good idea. ;-)

BTW: multi-empire combat? Yes, yes and Yeah!

Carbon Copy Man
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#12 Post by Carbon Copy Man »

I think the trouble is that it's still all very neat and tidy. And I want ships to be able to jump in mid-combat as late arrivals rather than the alternative which is a kind of like forcing guerilla warfare to get a similar effect.

Also, can you tell a starbase to "wait for reinforcements"? In the one extra turn it took for your reinforcements to arrive, your colony will have been completely obliterated, rendering your reinforcements useless.


I think it could be implemented to be reasonably user-friendly. There are really too many options for me to start picking any, but for starters, I think that participating (observer or otherwise) in three combats each turn would be adequate. The other battles would have the that turn's decisions automatically resolved (or resolved without your involvement).

There are also battle summary techniques that could be useful in aiding memory (especially in case you've just loaded a save game).

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#13 Post by Impaler »

I had an idea for just this kind of thing, my idea is to give the Turn a single Decimal place which would represent the "combat turn". 10 combat turns equal 1 game turn. All Arival times and Build times are expressed in X . Y with X being full turns and Y being the Combat turns. So for example if my Fleet will arive in 1.2 turns and yours is 1.8 turns away and the game turn ends. As we go into combat the combat starts at Combat round 2 when my fleet enters the system. I am alone for turns 2 through 7 and can trash your system. On turn 8 your fleet enters and can fight with mine on turn 9. Now at the end of turn 9 (thats a total of 10 turns because the first turn is ofcorse turn 0) the whole battle, system and its partispants get saved and their present conditions update the game world in the next turn. At the end of that turn combat will re-comence at turn 0 and run through turn 9 or untill some other halt (someone wipes out everyone else and their are no other incoming fleets).
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Kharagh
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#14 Post by Kharagh »

Subdividing the turns seems like a good idea IMHO.
Combats spanning more than one turn will be possibe and a 10 combat turn limit will ensure a reasonably short waiting time for the other players in multiplayer games. It would open up a wide range of stratigies and will make combats much more interesting.
We should be able to implement it into the game without too much trouble.

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#15 Post by Dreamer »

Agree, that is a pretty good solution. :D

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