Incline What's a Better Initiative System?

[Damned Registrations]

Team initiative is best. It opens more interesting strategies.

I've always found that teams acting all at once devolves into dogpiling one target after another. It gives you lots of options, but it also makes most of those options blatantly inferior. It's simply too wide a gulf between one character trying to defend themselves and an entire party getting to attack that character at once.

the player decalres moves for all his units and then declares combat

This gives an immense advantage to whoever gets to move second, since you get to move in such a way to completely fuck over the enemy formation. Not saying it can't work, but it's a very unfair system inherently.

 

[std::namespace]

declaring is not moving, hence phase based

 

[J1M]

Team initiative is best. It opens more interesting strategies.

I've always found that teams acting all at once devolves into dogpiling one target after another. It gives you lots of options, but it also makes most of those options blatantly inferior. It's simply too wide a gulf between one character trying to defend themselves and an entire party getting to attack that character at once.

the player decalres moves for all his units and then declares combat

This gives an immense advantage to whoever gets to move second, since you get to move in such a way to completely fuck over the enemy formation. Not saying it can't work, but it's a very unfair system inherently.

Reaction abilities, opportunity attacks, "resolve" mechanics that reduce incoming damage from each successive attack, the ability to block attacks to adjacent squares with a shield, etc.

There are many mechanical ways to address the concern you raised about team initiative.

I like team initiative because it can make positioning more important, both for activating extra damage via flanking, and for positioning your team in a formation defensively. It also eliminates a wide range of exploits related to the ability to delay a unit's turn.

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

What I find amusing, is that all of this is solved simply by using a RTwP system. None of this contrivance would be necessary. Freedom Force is a prime example.

 

[Faarbaute]

I like team initiative because it can make positioning more important, both for activating extra damage via flanking, and for positioning your team in a formation defensively. It also eliminates a wide range of exploits related to the ability to delay a unit's turn

It also just feels very satisfying and fun, to have all your dudes working together as a team.

 

[Damned Registrations]

declaring is not moving, hence phase based

I'm not sure I follow. Are you saying the player and AI will both assign places to move without seeing where the other intends to go, and then everyone moves at once? Vandal Hearts 2 had a system like that and it was a bizarre clusterfuck of AI manipulation and randomness more than anything.

Brigandine has a sort of middle ground between individual initiative and team initiative, where each side is split between 3 squads that each have their own initiative. Of course, this is a game where battles can potentially involve ~30 units on each side. Regardless, when the initiative happens to line up such that your entire army moves at once, it makes for very unhinged battles where you can alpha strike the enemy team and it's basically impossible to defend individual units on the front line from an equivalent level enemy army that wants that unit dead.

"resolve" mechanics that reduce incoming damage from each successive attack

This is an interesting concept, never seen it used before. What game is it from? Anything short of this just means you pick the least well defended target to dogpile. You'd basically need this ability on every single unit to discourage that. I could see it causing major balance issues combined with retaliation attacks as well, if you buff up a single unit and move it forward to 1v10 the enemy army and it can't die because of this mechanic.

 

[std::namespace]

where you can alpha strike the enemy team

phase based systems are literally made to prevent alpha striking on your turn...

 

[Damned Registrations]

where you can alpha strike the enemy team

phase based systems are literally made to prevent alpha striking on your turn...

This mythical form of combat doesn't seem to actually exist outside of card games AFAICT. How exactly would this work? You seem to be implying simultaneous turns without being willing to outright say that. Simultaneous movement is shit, and if it's not simultaneous, splitting the attacks and movement into different phases doesn't do anything useful because you're still left with one team moving into a retarded postion while the other team moves into an intelligent one.

 

[J1M]

The reason you don't often see resolve mechanics is because usually the AI is coded to prevent it from focus firing down targets efficiently and the AI doesn't feel bad when it happens to its units.

 

[baturinsky]

First option works well when battles finish or practically finish in 1-3 turns, so acting first or acting one more time than enemy matters a lot. Example: HOMM3.
If they are longer, it's better to use one side moves - other side moves. It allows for more tactical combinations. Example: XCOM.
Second option is actually quite popular - HOMM5 uses it and most roguelikes (ToME4). It makes it harder to coordinate inside team, but it adds another dimension to combat. Such as having actions of different durations, altering speed of allies and enemies, etc.

 

[std::namespace]

where you can alpha strike the enemy team

phase based systems are literally made to prevent alpha striking on your turn...

This mythical form of combat doesn't seem to actually exist outside of card games AFAICT. How exactly would this work? You seem to be implying simultaneous turns without being willing to outright say that. Simultaneous movement is shit, and if it's not simultaneous, splitting the attacks and movement into different phases doesn't do anything useful because you're still left with one team moving into a retarded postion while the other team moves into an intelligent one.

wiz8
combat mission
frozen synapse

im not implying simultanturns/phasebased/wego/whatever, i though you would know this shit being an oldfag

Simultaneous movement is fine. Its basically real time without the twitch. It tries to prevent the turn based problem of focusing down units who are helplessly frozen in spacetime (there are other options though).
Splitting into a combat phase would be an attempt to give the player more options beyond attack/defend/... at the moment of the resolution.
This works fine in wargames where the unit counts are high and attack options are often limited, and the outcomes often are about pushing the front around. It also fits into the fluff of time delay of order commands.

You can basically play Pillars of Shit 2 in phase based mode, with many combat phases, each on a pause condition.... Its just that it has no game rules to deal with speed/time/phases in an interesting way (eg when how often you can pause).
It breaks on simple stuff like 2 fighters fight and one starts disengaging, so the other one is now standing around like a tard if the AI is not up to par.
Than also you have to ask yourself why you are larping phase based if its just RTWP with pauses on conditions ...
i dont care really...