I guess it had to happen. Years of strategy gaming, in both turn-based and real-time settings and my paradigm has finally shifted. I now enter games expecting them to be real time – or at the very least simultaneous turns, like Combat Mission<\/i>. Turn based games are not only rare, now. They are also not quite what I expect when I learn about a new game.<\/p>\n
I’m not sure how or when this happened.<\/p>\n
I think I finally noticed it last night when I opened a new game, started playing it and immediately asked myself why the developer didn’t go with real time. Real time is more realistic for a battle game, and a number of developers, like Battlegoat and Paradox, have shown that grand strategy is feasible in a real-time environment. Why wasn’t this game doing what I expected it to do? (Fortunately, the designer anticipated this critique and there were answers in the manual.)<\/p>\n
Technology and history kept strategy games in the turn based world for so long that many people still expect their strategy games to be done this way. Every game forum has one or two people who lament the “end” of TBS. They never stop to think that games were done this way mostly because the board game origins of strategy and war games were all based on turns or that the tiny processors of the eighties and early nineties couldn’t handle a lot of stuff all at once. And, except for round based RPG combat or traditional board\/card games, no other genre moves in turns.<\/p>\n
I’ve never been one to look back on the Golden Age of my youth (except regarding baseball) and have embraced the real time strategy world with open arms. I surprised myself, though, when I started picking apart a game design because it looked like it should have been going faster. Real time games seem more alive, the AI isn’t always responding to things that you are doing, and your typical resource collecting RTS games give you enough time to do what you have to do.<\/p>\n
Some games try to blend the two styles. The Total War<\/i> series grafts its brilliant real time battles onto a strategy map that allots moves in turns. The whole “pause and give orders” thing in many RTS is about stopping to assess the situation like you would in a turn based environment.<\/p>\n
And it’s not like I disdain the turn based world. The Civ <\/i>series is my one huge weakness, and from what I’ve seen and heard of Civ IV<\/i>, I may need better ergonomics for my office because there’s going to be a lot of marathon sessions. TB games also lend themselves to the sweet give and take of Play By Email – the inexact science of waiting for the next turn to arrive or wondering if your opponent is mad at you yet for making him wait.<\/p>\n
But I have crossed that threshhold. And, when I play Shattered Union<\/i>, I expect that I will wonder why it’s not in real-time, too. (I already know the answer in that case, though.) I have already decided that flight sims are too hard for me, and that today’s shooters make me dizzy. And now I have “real time” as my default setting for strategy games.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I guess it had to happen. Years of strategy gaming, in both turn-based and real-time settings and my paradigm has finally shifted. I now enter games expecting them to be real time – or at the very least simultaneous turns, like Combat Mission. Turn based games are not only rare, now. They are also not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-3k","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}