quote:
Originally posted by WendellM:
This factor prompts me to ask how a many-player "real-time" strategy game would go. If one player were doing well, with the other players each commanding many fewer units, would the game be bogged down as the other players quickly concluded their turns and had to wait as the single player took much longer? Or would the weaker players need much more time to confer on strategy, so that the powerful single player had to wait on them?
I'd say it depends alot on who you are playing. In my experience it usually equals out unless there's a very big difference in size of players empires. Sometimes player A waits for player B, sometimes the other way around. I used to play Age of Wonders alot and that is a turnbased fantasy strategy game with options for both turnbased (classic as they call it) and simultaneous play over the Internet (TCP/IP) or LAN and email as well as hotseat. In simultaneous move all players moves at the same time but orders are executed directly. So it was quite possible to get away from a larger enemy force simply by moving first. Or the other way around. In AoW you can at the setup of a game decide on time limits for the turns. Many players on the leauge tables wanted to play with 3 minute time limits which I thought was too short, usually wanting 5-8 minute time limits. Which meant the faster paced "twitch" crowd played with others of their kind while us more sedate players played with others of our kind. I think it works quite well. Tactical battles could take forever if they where big with 16 or more units per side and several sides. Usually most smaller battles (few units or massive overkill battles) where played on autocombat but many players didn't like autocombat (me included) as it did some really stupid things.
Anyway, you just have to find the right people to play with that take about the same amount of time you do. There's nothing more irritating than someone yelling at you in the ingame chat to hurry up.