[Fyron]

KlausD:

IMO its not only not hard its fully impossible. The spirit of tactical SE4 combat lies in that what you call "stupid quirk". What you dont like -the "disjointed movement and firing phases" are very important and nice to play (at least for turnbased fans) This kind of sequence is not a quirk, it a achievement of long standing gaming traditions. (computer and board)

No, it is not an achievement, it is an old limitation. I am a turn based fan; I do not like how se4 handles movement and firing phases.

Then I dont understand why you are for a real time engine in SEV ship combat. If I hate something I am not for it.
BTW - RT games could be both strategic and tactical in scope. As TB games could be. The mode of play has nothing to do with the scale of game.

As I have said repeatedly, real time combat for se5 has no correlation with RTS games. There are no similarities at all.

Maybe you have a different approach what "balanced" and " realistic" mean than I. Maybe you an explain when a game is for you realistic and balanced.

The "quirks" of turn-based combat are what makes it unbalanced and unrealistic.

Secondly there are no problems at all with "all turn based combat systems". They are fine as they are. (at least if they are good designed)

No, they are not fine. The disjointedness of them causes absurd possibilities like a ship being able to move within range (and range of the enemy too), fire its weapons, then run away, with absolutely no possibility for the defender to do anything (assuming the attacker is faster, same range of weapons). Please tell me how situations like this are balanced or realistic. Real-time processing of orders eliminates these sorts of "quirks" of turn-based combat.

P-D:

What Fyron's refering to as a "stupid quirk" is the way an -entire side- moves and fires at once. All your ships can be destroyed before they even do anything. Even turn-based systems can get rid of this, through initiative and not letting one side move all its units at once, and/or having phases of "Player 1 moves, Player 2 moves, both fire".

Even phased systems are imperfect. They can often create needlessly-complex rules systems, and still have many of the "quirks" of "normal" turn-based combat. What real-time combat is is a phased movement/firing system, but with continuous phases instead of segmented phases.

I'd prefer a system like Combat Mission's myself; give orders, click go, watch them play out.

That is exactly what pausable real time combat is.

QuarianRex:

This problem isn't really present in SEIV. You tend to start far enough away that niether player can get the "jump" on the other.

It has happened in every se4 combat I have ever seen.

Dogscoff:

For combat, a real-time system might be made to work, but I'd prefer to see this done entirely by the AI with indirect human guidance, ie like strategic combat from se4 (although the strategic combat Ai=I would have to be improved considerably). Even with a "pause" mode in realtime tactical combat, you'd still miss opportunities if you weren't quick enough on the pause button, and the whole thing would be a horrifically slow mess with multiple humans anyway.

Most MP games of SE4 are done with strategic combat. Only hot-seat games can use tactical anyways. Real-time execution of strategic combat would not pose any problems. Hot-seat games already take a long time as it is. Real-time tactical combat would not be much slower, as long as you limit the number of pauses each player can make (so you don't get the combat paused every 2 seconds- which defeats the purpose of real-time anyways).