Why do you enjoy turn based strategy vs real time?

[what am i doing]

I don't like turn-based, in general. People have mentioned turn-based giving you more time to think - that's actually wrong, 99% (maybe even 100%) of real-time strategy games allow you to pause, and to issue orders while paused. You can actually just pause the game, think it through, issue a few orders, pause, re-evaluate, issue more orders, etc. It's not an advantage TB has over RT. They both allow you to pause for as long as you want, but turn-based enforces an inferior simulation versus real-time. Of course, multiplayer strategy games don't allow pausing (or at least, if you pause, the other players will probably un-pause it fairly quickly), but then, playing turn-based multiplayer sounds hellish, particularly because you're then stuck sitting around waiting a long time. I prefer to think about the state of the game while gameplay is ongoing.

I do enjoy some games that are turn-based; as a recent example Mechanicus comes to mind, but I've never been playing a turn-based game and NOT thought "man, this would be better in real time" - my main thought in Mechanicus was "great units and effects, wish these guys were in Dawn of War." Especially games with a larger, strategic focus, turn-based really doesn't work (case in point, the 4X genre); it's best kept to small-scale tactical games.

 

[Dadd]

Turn based games tend to require more thinking, not because turn based necessarily requires more thinking but because devs tend to emphasize thinking for turn based games more than they do with real time. So I tend to prefer turn based. Also it's easier to play turn based in bed with a trackpad and keyboard.

 

[zapotec]

I bet real time with pause supporter spend more time halting the game than playing the encounter in real time.

 

[Jvegi]

Main gripe people have with tb: "initiative makes combat completely luck based, aoe is op, high level combat sucks".
Main gripe people have with rtwp: "oh my, it's all too fast, I can't control my characters, what's happening, I forgot my glasses".

Because they're senile, arthritic old fucks.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Turn based games tend to require more thinking, not because turn based necessarily requires more thinking but because the devs tend to emphasize thinking for turn based games more than they do with real time.

I'd argue that it's because there's only so much complexity that you can add to an RT title without forcing a gamer who knows his meta into playing suboptimally regardless of how good their reflexes are. Only alternative would be to purposely dumb down the AI so that it doesn't take full advantage of said complexity.

But yeah, personally I just don't like RT gameplay since it stresses me while a hard TB game can be relaxing while also being challenging.

 

[Alex]

I think one of the main differences (again, disregarding issues of time pressure and reflex) is that of dividing time into appropriate pieces. A turn based game is a bit like a jigsaw puzzle. With a jigsaw puzzle, the shape of the pieces themselves set how you approach the game, and the objective is to fit them perfectly together.

With real time, the game is more similar to trying to rebuild a document that was randomly torn up. You no longer want or need perfectly interlocking pieces, but just put stuff together well enough it can be read.

While both activities are similar in a way, they are very different in how they are done. They have different objectives, and I don't think it is fair to consider them interchangeable or one the evolution of the other.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

They have different objectives, and I don't think it is fair to consider them interchangeable or one the evolution of the other.

Definitely. It's a matter of gaming preferences rather than one being better than the other. There's poorly implemented TB and good TB, just as there's poorly implemented RT and good RT.

 

[Grimlorn]

TB is superior. You can have more options than RTWP, which leads to greater ability for challenge, tactics and strategy. With RTWP it naturally leads to a limitation on these options and you have to make the difficulty easier to accommodate people who don't want to pause at all, so the AI ends up being able to help you auto attack to victory.

 

[Grimlorn]

People have complained about the younger generation being dumber, less masculine, less morally virtuous, and less industrious, at least every single generation since the 1860s. Plenty of examples before that too, even down to the Ancient Greeks, though obviously we have less records as we go back. So unless we as a civilisation have an incredible superpower to continue surviving despite becoming massively dumber every generation for thousands of years, which might make a good story, actually...

Well there is data today that we are getting dumber and men do have about half the testosterone they use to on average. So we can prove it. Plus the modern society we live in is relatively new compared to the vast history of humanity, so its effects on humanity as a whole shouldn't be underestimated.

 

[Gilius Thunderhead]

I can't into multitasking, at all. I hate guiding units in battle only to remember 15 minutes later that I haven't built any farms/mines, etc. and all the peasants at my base are standing around like they're waiting for the rapture.

In other words, I'm retarded.

 

[laclongquan]

Turnbased allow for planning much more than Realtime, also pro/con it allow for much more micromanagement.

With TB, you have the possibility of micromanaging EACH of your unit. With RT, you might not, simply because not enough time.

This can not stress enough~ If you cant micromanage, a TB game just lose its attraction. Think about it.

 

[spectre]

If strategy gaming is supposed to be a cerebral pastime, adding any sort of twitch skills into the mix will invariably pollute the experience.
In the extreme case, it will devolve into games being decided by bullshit like actions per minute. This I'd consider a perversion when it allows
the guy with better hotkey muscle memory to gain the upper hand over a guy with inferior motor skills but an overall better strategic plan.

The bottom line is this: it's the decisions that must matter, not mouse latency, miliseconds of reaction time.
If that's your jam, there are entire genres out there based on these factors.
Personally (the old people take), I draw the line at hotkeys: if they're required to play the game competently, sod it.
It's supposed to be a convenience feature, not a requirement.

On the other hand, there needs to be a place for making intuitive plays and thinking on the go, cause not everything needs to be chess (not to mention, there are timers in tournament chess)
or a puzzle that takes weeks to get right. As long as it's not taken to the ridiculous extreme as described above, I'm fine when RT let's me put those faculties to the test.

Personally, it's always important to be able to play a game at my own pace. If I feel like spending 20 minutes entertaining different variants of play for this particular move, I am doing this.
Not to mention, if I want to go to the crapper, I'm going to the crapper. Turn based and RTwP usually accommodate this.

 

[AdamReith]

I find turn based games much more relaxing than real time as the pace of play adapts to you.

The main benefit of realtime is the monents where there are no meaningful decisions and you want to let things play out.

 

[flyingjohn]

Because Tb allows you to execute your plan without a bazillion external elements that can screw you over:
-Reflexes are not a major factor(unless you are playing competitive mp) but they still add a additional layer of stuff that you can fail.And as you get older,your reflexes drop.There was a great old(70+) wargame reviewer,you can't do that with real time.
-Ai in terms of path finding always breaks real time games.You have to constantly nanny your troops because there is always a chance that they will get stuck
-The ability to respond to enemy actions correctly on the map requires you to manage a hundred small fires happening at the same time.
-Slow animations.It is fun to watch combat in real time,but it also gets tiresome really quickly.Just look at sins of a solar empire and how slow battles are there,even speed up.
But,if you speed things up you can end up in a situation where the critical stuff that is supposed to hit missed and now you are scrambling to salvage the situation.In a tb game,you just speed/skip the animations,check results and adjust.

Proper tb is the closest of pure execution of your idea.The problem is that people want a actual "visual" representation of some mechanics(flanking) and the spectacle of a large battle. All of these things are still accomplishable by tb though.
Rt is the pure spectacle execution of your idea with all the downsides.
RTWP is just admitting you should have went real time walking with tb combat.

 

[Gregz]

 

[Tigranes]

People have complained about the younger generation being dumber, less masculine, less morally virtuous, and less industrious, at least every single generation since the 1860s. Plenty of examples before that too, even down to the Ancient Greeks, though obviously we have less records as we go back. So unless we as a civilisation have an incredible superpower to continue surviving despite becoming massively dumber every generation for thousands of years, which might make a good story, actually...

Well there is data today that we are getting dumber and men do have about half the testosterone they use to on average. So we can prove it. Plus the modern society we live in is relatively new compared to the vast history of humanity, so its effects on humanity as a whole shouldn't be underestimated.

I don't know if you have any experience or training looking at data about long-term differences in intelligence, but "intelligence" is an extremely shaky measure that we are still trying to nail down reliable ways to capture in a rigorous way, and it becomes extraordinarily difficult if you're trying to compare anything beyond a generation or two. Of course, this kind of data tends to get really popular even when it's partial or disputed, because you know, it's a good story and confirms older people's pet peeves. But a rational analyst has to consider the most simple explanations first.

Even if whatever data you are referring to turned out to be 100% correct about, say, the last 50 years, we would still find that boomers have complained about dumb zoomers for millennia, hinting that either 'modern society' itself is colossally dumb compared to a random Chinese peasant in the Han dynasty, or that, maybe, a lot of the time, people are prone to thinking young people are dumb and weak as they grow older. This isn't obviously a universal point, but I always enjoy the trivia that Stanford had something like 80% acceptance rate in the early 20th century before dropping to ~25% in the postwar years. Two hundred years ago France had a literacy of about 50% for men and far less for women, IIRC.

Of course, dear old Adorno would just say all of you are retarded degenerates who are not even capable of appreciating jazz properly even if you were to listen to it for 30 years

 

[Alex]

There is a bit of a meme that having both real time and turn-based combat in a game is a sure way to do both badly. But, on an actually serious counter to the idea, a big problem is that having both systems really mean creating two different, even if related, combat systems. If combat is important to the game (and it absolutely is if we are talking about tactics games), then all the subsystems that orbit it, all the various considerations of balancing, of tactics to be used, of AI, etc, have to consider both systems. This creates a lot of extra work.

 

[Dadd]

Quit sniffing your own fart. Zoomers are dumb as fuck.

 

[Gregz]

There is a bit of a meme that having both real time and turn-based combat in a game is a sure way to do both badly. But, on an actually serious counter to the idea, a big problem is that having both systems really mean creating two different, even if related, combat systems. If combat is important to the game (and it absolutely is if we are talking about tactics games), then all the subsystems that orbit it, all the various considerations of balancing, of tactics to be used, of AI, etc, has to consider both systems. This creates a lot of extra work.

Well, in my case I wasn't advocating for a hybrid, just stating that I enjoy both sub-genres.

 

[Alex]

There is a bit of a meme that having both real time and turn-based combat in a game is a sure way to do both badly. But, on an actually serious counter to the idea, a big problem is that having both systems really mean creating two different, even if related, combat systems. If combat is important to the game (and it absolutely is if we are talking about tactics games), then all the subsystems that orbit it, all the various considerations of balancing, of tactics to be used, of AI, etc, has to consider both systems. This creates a lot of extra work.

Well, in my case I wasn't advocating for a hybrid, just stating that I enjoy both sub-genres.

Ah, ok! Sorry, I misunderstood.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

that's what rtwp is

objectively superior, only disliked because of IE abominations

 

[Alex]

that's what rtwp is

objectively superior, only disliked because of IE abominations

I am pretty much considering "rtwp" here when talking about simultaneous movement. True real-time brings with it a whole lot of extra considerations that make the game really a different genre. Not necessarily bad, but I think comparing rtwp with turn-based games is already hard enough.

 

[JarlFrank]

Simulationist real-time games are my favorite strategy games (or, more precisely, tactics games).

Total War (pre-Warhammer, that's too arcadey), Ultimate General, Grand Tactician, Graviteam Tactics, Men of War (especially modded Assault Squad 2).

I love real-time battles that attempt to simulate actual warfare. I only play Total War with realism-enhancing mods, and I love the more hardcore real time wargames like Grand Tactician and Graviteam Tactics. The physics engine of Men of War is great too, with its destructible buildings, projectile simulations where things like angle of impact can determine whether a round penetrates a tank's armor or not, etc.

Those games are quite complex as they try to simulate battles as accurately as possible, going from complete simulation of every unit and projectile in a detailed physics engine (Men of War) to a more abstract ruleset like Ultimate General's cover system (where having a regiment stand in a forest gives them 80% cover or so). This approach means you have to consider everything in your tactical approach: terrain, both your and your enemy's army composition, the condition of your units, etc. Some of these games are even more complex mechanically than your average turn-based wargame! I highly doubt there's any turn-based wargame with more simulationist combat mechanics than Graviteam Tactics, for example (only Steel Panthers is on par).

 

[Grimlorn]

People have complained about the younger generation being dumber, less masculine, less morally virtuous, and less industrious, at least every single generation since the 1860s. Plenty of examples before that too, even down to the Ancient Greeks, though obviously we have less records as we go back. So unless we as a civilisation have an incredible superpower to continue surviving despite becoming massively dumber every generation for thousands of years, which might make a good story, actually...

Well there is data today that we are getting dumber and men do have about half the testosterone they use to on average. So we can prove it. Plus the modern society we live in is relatively new compared to the vast history of humanity, so its effects on humanity as a whole shouldn't be underestimated.

I don't know if you have any experience or training looking at data about long-term differences in intelligence, but "intelligence" is an extremely shaky measure that we are still trying to nail down reliable ways to capture in a rigorous way, and it becomes extraordinarily difficult if you're trying to compare anything beyond a generation or two. Of course, this kind of data tends to get really popular even when it's partial or disputed, because you know, it's a good story and confirms older people's pet peeves. But a rational analyst has to consider the most simple explanations first.

Even if whatever data you are referring to turned out to be 100% correct about, say, the last 50 years, we would still find that boomers have complained about dumb zoomers for millennia, hinting that either 'modern society' itself is colossally dumb compared to a random Chinese peasant in the Han dynasty, or that, maybe, a lot of the time, people are prone to thinking young people are dumb and weak as they grow older. This isn't obviously a universal point, but I always enjoy the trivia that Stanford had something like 80% acceptance rate in the early 20th century before dropping to ~25% in the postwar years. Two hundred years ago France had a literacy of about 50% for men and far less for women, IIRC.

Of course, dear old Adorno would just say all of you are retarded degenerates who are not even capable of appreciating jazz properly even if you were to listen to it for 30 years

They did a study in Europe around 2010ish, excluded immigrants, and determined that intelligence has been dropping since the mid 90s, perhaps earlier. A recent study showed toddlers around 2 to 3 years old that spent a few hours a day staring at a screen had a lower mental development compared to toddlers of the same age that didn't stare at a screen. How many hours a day do you think the average person looks at a screen? You can listen to old speeches, old interviews, old papers from about 100 years ago and the vocabulary is completely different from today. People use to be more articulate vs today's leaders who mumble and constantly lose their train of thought and need a teleprompter. There is definitely an intelligence loss here. Yeah every generation might look down on the next, but that's something else. We have real world research and examples these days and the literacy rate doesn't mean much because just because you can read and write doesn't make you intelligent.

 

[luj1]

I enjoy both equally

the only real answer (even tho I played realtime more)



realtime strategy - Starcraft 1, Dawn of War 1, Red Alert 1-2, Warcraft 2-3, Tiberian Sun, Ground Control 2, Battle Realms, Age of Empires, Warlords Battlecry 4, Myth 2, Homeworld, KKnD 1-2, Generals
turnbased - HoMM 2-4, Alpha Centauri, Dominions 4, Shogun Total War, Civilisation 2, Disciples 2, Etherlords, Age of Wonders, Master of Orion 2



plenty of great games on both sides