FreeOrion

In FO, there will can potentially be combats in which a powerful, easily visible fleet is trying to hunt down and destroy a smaller, stealthy fleet. Assuming that the player with the stealthy fleet will want to pause to give orders when the big death fleet is approaching, this would be an out-of-context cue to the death-fleet player that he is approaching the stealthy fleet. Alternatively, the stealthy player could just randomly pause at arbitrary intervals to throw off the death-fleet player... that's not the kind of gameplay we want to support, I don't think.

To avoid this, there should be an option to set a constant frequency and length of combat pauses throughout a multiplayer game. This would mean that no matter how many player-controlled empires are involved in a combat, whether every last one of them, or just 1 (you never know if it's just one - the player could be battling an AI, with a stealthy player-controlled fleet lurking nearby), combat will proceed at the same, pre-defined pace (should the players choose this - more casual players might just set it to manual pause, without regard for potentially giving away their position/presence).

The players should be able to specify a number of combat turns between which pauses will occur, as well as the length of these pauses, and an indefinite number of these settings should be allowed. An example of what this might look like for a particular game:

Every [1] Turn(s): [1] seconds

Every [5] Turn(s): [3] seconds

Every [10] Turn(s): [5] seconds

Alternatively, the players could just set it to manual, which might look like this:

On Request: Maximum [10] seconds Every [5] Turn(s)

Presumably a combination of these settings would be allowed as well, though the latter pretty much defeats the purpose of the former.

If no such settings were set, pausing would simply not occur, and that should be a valid setting in multiplayer as well.

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Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

One point, I'm not sure if in the phased real time you actually Have to pause to give orders... you give orders and then they are executed when the next 'phase' starts. Indeed you should be able to Queue up orders like in an RTS, so that the ship will follow that order of operations.

I've been assuming there would be an option for automatic pauses during combat, which just seemed like a reasonable thing to do. It's a bit of a stretched argument, but this somewhat gives a reason for having it, though.

I hadn't thought about having an option for setting the duration of the pauses, but it could presumably also be added without much difficulty.

are we still speaking about turn-based strategy or am i missed a change of plans?

Neither; we're talking about the tactical combat interface, which will be in phased-real time.

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Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

i hate real-time

please consider some switch to turn it off...

Phased-real time =/= real time. Players will be able to pause to give orders, then all players' ships will carry out their orders simultaneously. This prevents ridiculous first-strike advantages that occur in games such as MoO2.

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Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

but games like HoMM deals with "first-strikes" very well. i heard no complains about it - just add some "initiative" feature.

but if you so badly want "simultaneous moves" i suggest to reconsider this:IMO: one *minute* every one turn will be much more adequate...

Given that the real-time portion of the combat will proceed at a rate of 3-5 seconds per turn, it hardly seems appropriate to have a 1 minute pause between each turn...

Of course, you can play with pauses set to 1 minute long every turn if you want, and in single player, you can always take as much time as you need.

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Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.