The Bears Pit: Jagged Alliance: Back in Action (by Coreplay)

Home » BIT COMPOSER GAMES » Jagged Alliance: Back in Action (by Coreplay) » Actiontime-Based Strategy?

Show: Today's Messages :: Polls :: Message Navigator

Actiontime-Based Strategy?[message #315083]

Sat, 02 February 2013 16:03

vume5

Messages:13
Registered:August 2011

Hello,
currently if you turn a corner and see an enemy looking your way
(you see eachother simultaneously)
either the enemy gets an interrupt or not; if he does he can shoot at you lots of times before you can do anything; if he does not it's the other way around, though you'll propably have less left of your turn.
So I'm thinking making JA action-based would solve this.

EDIT:
I found a better way to describe what I mean by "action-based":
Realtime with auto-pause.
As long as there's a soldier who has no assigned task the game is automatically in pause;
Once all have sth to do the game runs till one soldier is finished;
then it auto-pauses till you assign a new task to him, etc.
Of course you'll have tasks like:
"Wait up to 5sec" or
"Wait till sth important happens" (he spots an enemy, hears sth, unspotted enemy starts shooting etc.)
When you give a command that contains multiple sub-commands like
"move to the tile 5 to the left and 9 below"
important events interrupt its execution once the current sub-command is finished.
What events are to be considered important can be set in options.
Realtime with autopause would offer the advantages of both realtime- and turn-based strategy.

FORMER EXPLANATION:[color:#666666]
Instead of turns with more or less AP per soldier you'd choose actions that take more or less time, depending on the soldier.
Generic:
You give your soldier the command to perform a specific action.
Once he's finished you choose the next action.
No turns. Everyone acts simultanously (sort-of).
(I think Autoresolve and FinalFantasy battles work this way.)
Back to above example:
You reach the corner tile and thus move into LOS of the enemy while enemy is now also in your LOS.
Say both you and the AI decide to shoot.
Say it takes you 560ms to raise your gun, roughly aim and pull the trigger.
Say it takes the enemy 430ms to do the same.
This means he will always fire first.
Let's say both have bad guns and are bad shots;
they will miss the first few times so we don't have to consider the effects of getting hit. We're also ignoring suppression for now.
Say it takes the enemy 180ms to shoot again while your gun is on auto and shoots every 70ms.
Then the no-hit shooting exchange will look like this:
430ms: him
560ms: you
610ms: him
630ms: you
700ms: you
770ms: you
790ms: him
840ms: you
910ms: you
970ms: him
980ms: you
1050ms: you
1120ms: you
1150ms: him
1190ms: you
1260ms: you
1330ms: him
etc.
If the same exchange was turn-based
(say a turn is based on a 2sec-slice)
it would start (chance-based) with either 9 times him or 21 or less times you (since you won't have a whole turn).
That's why I think that making JA action-based would be a good idea:
it offers the advantages of both turn-based and realtime play.

Of course you'll want to have composite actions:
e.g. instead of having to tell your soldier each time to which neighboring tile to move
you can simply specify finish tile and speed/posture/care of movement.
If sth. happens (he spots an enemy/item, hears sth, unspotted enemy starts shooting etc.) you get the chance to stop executing the action chain and do sth. else.[/color]

[Updated on: Tue, 05 February 2013 10:41] by Moderator