EEVIAC said:
obediah said:
I'm not catching the redundancy issues. I do think that RTwP is being held back by the sorry state of game AI.
No. Better AI leads to even more redundancy. Remember we're talking about a small-squad tactical game here. If the computer starts making creative tactical decisions for me, why am I bothering to play the game? Do I just point my squad in the direction of the enemies? Is that tactics?
You say redundancy, I say options. It goes to personal preferences. Maybe you would like to carefully position eveyrone around a door and execute every second of the entry. Maybe someone else would like to assigne a sub-team to assault the door and see them use real world tactics to do so.
I think a big challenge facing RTwP is maximizing player control and realism that it can w/o bogging down horribly. There are some nuts out there that once the execute a doorway assault in a good RTwP system, will never want to do it in TB again, and they won't care if it takes them 4 hours to get through 15 seconds of real time. To hit the more moderate crowards, and engine is going to keep the game going while still allowing the player control.
This demonstrates why RTWP is the worst of both worlds.
Theorem:
This statement is criminally wrong.
Proof:
The worst part of RT is that you can't control one person well unless you have the real-world skills and a kick ass interface, and trying to control a team in real time and have any depth at all is hopeless. The worst part of TB is the crappy artifacts of discreetizing time that make tactics from TB combat useless in real life, and tactics in real life impossible to implement in TB.
RTwP solves both of these problems.
QED, bitch. (sorry, I learned geometry from Dave Chapelle)
You remove alot of the gameplay elements of turn based systems...
Like what? What can you do in turn based gameplay that you can't do with RTwP - other than exploit screwey time loops?
...and the free flowing action that you get from a true reflex-determined real-time system...
Good fucking riddance, if I was a ninja or 7 member assault team in real life, why would I play them in a video game?
... while retaining flaws from both.
Some of the flaws, sure. It is a compromise after all. When you take the good, you take the bad - at least that's what Mrs Garrett said.
You get long sections of decision making with no action, and you get stretches of action that aren't under your controll.
Sounds a lot like TB to me. "what to do? what to do? Move characters. Wait for oponent or AI. Repeat."
There's nothing you can do in RTWP that you can't do in TB.
Wow. How about model the flow of time in the real world? How about react to actions as the occur, rather than 15-60 seconds before or after they occur? How about tell two team members to keep an opponent pinned by alternating fire while a third member flanks? How about shooting the bastard charging me from 50 ft away with a spear? Even with overwatch and other patches, you still get stuff like to be able to react to a charge in the next turn, you need to not do something this turn. You can't even do a 100M dash in TB. Whoever gets initiative wins before anyone else moves.
On the other hand, there are aspects of TB that are completely foreign to RTWP.
These are the same aspects of TB that are foreign to continuous time and the real world. They are baggage that came along with TB, sacrifices to reality that gamers made to be able to apply some rules to combat. TB is a hack that has stayed around and gotten good enough for people to forget that it was a hack.
Initiative doesn't work in RTWP and it doesn't generate the same turn-by-turn tension either.
Well you might still have initiave, RT in games isn't really real time, the turns are just like .01 seconds instead of 20 seconds. So if two people go at the same segment their might be an initiative test, or maybe both actions are resolved and the results applied. RTwP generally replaces initiative with reflexes, speed, awareness, and assigning a time cost to actions. I'm willing to give up the tension of watching someone else go through the same 30 second window of time before I even get a crack at the first second of it.
The biggest difference in the three systems is in the presentation and that has nothing to do with tactics or depth.
I think the comments above show plenty of differences that go beyond presentation. RT and RTwP have the same presentation even, RT focuses on reactions, and RTwP allows you to stop and think, which for most people results in more sound and informed decision making.
That's an AI and/or user interface challenge. The engine should be keeping track of everything that happens and allow the gamer to either set conditions to pause on, or maintain a threat level for every character and allow the pause to be triggered by a threshold.
So what's the point in using RTWP at all? Using triggered pauses anytime something happens is precisely the redundancy I've been talking about, seeing that the whole point of a RTWP system is to avoid exactly these sorts of kludgy turn-basedisms.
When I think of the kludgyness of TB, I think of the stuff I mentioned above - not AI redundancy.
You would think someone going by EEVIAC would be smarter than to say something is never going to happen when computers are involved.
You don't seem to realize that the computer is the problem. The better AI gets, the more it automates. I don't watch computer games, I play computer games. If it gets to the stage where my input is superfluous because the AI can do better, there's no point playing anymore.
This is a valid concern, and a definite challenge to how fun these games will be. But it needn't be a genre killer.A computer can play chess better than I can, but if I play a game with my wife, I have a computer play for me. There's also a big step between having the computer say "some say someone is shooting at me, I'd better pause" and having the computer say "someone is shooting at me, and the meatbag is drinking at the keyboard, so I'm executing defense plan zeta-434". A general hint, anything you can do, someone else can do better.
I think RTwP will definitely usurp turn-based in depth and thought. The question is will it do it in a way that is accessible enough for anyone other than Avalon Hill nerds to embrace it.
It won't because the limiter is the player. Players take a long time to make tactical decisions so you can't have fast action with deep tactics simultaneously. Either you ponder a decision or you interact in real time, you're not doing both.
The question isn't either/or - it's where to draw the line. Everyone has a different preference, so it's choosing a market and optimizing for it. Twitch RT w/o depth has a big market, and excrutiating painful planning has a small but bitter market, and their are hills and valleys imbetween. I think a problem facing RT is that to get comparable depth, you have to give up more pacing than with TB. I doubt this challenge is impossible, but it's not trivial.
OS
), I'll not mourn TB at the slightest. It may suck due to completely different reasons (and chances are high), but bury a game because it will be RTwP instead of TB long before you've actually seen how it will work out... 
