Classic turn-based ?

[Ironhawk]

Secours said:
I'm not programmer, but to me, to have both option available (simultaneous / not simultaneous) would not be a big deal technically.
In fact, it would be very interesting if someone could develop a mod like this. Il could be done "easily" by playing a "fake" neutral phase between every player phase.

Actually it would be a ton of work to go back into a game and redesign it like this. It is possible to design a game from the ground up to play both serial and parallel turns. But thats not how Dom3 was written.

And personally, I didnt like the simultaneous turns when I started playing either. But over time I've actually come to really enjoy them. As others have posted many interesting tactics availabe in dom3 would disappear. But moreso, I find that simultaneous turns force you to outwit your opponent, rather than just out-click them. Once I came to that realization, dominions went to a whole new level of strategic complexity for me.

[Edi]

To echo Ironhawk, it would be a massive workload and then some to rewrite everything from scratch to support classic turns as well as simultaneous turns.

I love the simultaneous turns aspect of Dom3. For a game that uses both simultaneous and turn-based systems, take a look at the Age of Wonders series. In that game, the simultaneous turn structure is far more like RTS, where the quickest click gets the prize more often than not. I hated that, always played it in classic turn-based mode. With Dominions, even if the option were there, I would not, because Dom3 has true simultaneity.

[Gandalf Parker]

Im a champion at fudging "something like" for features that people want, and I enjoyed considering this one. But Im afraid that I didnt come up with much.

The closest I could get would be
A) start game with 3 players
B) host game with player 1's turn file
C) host game with player 2's turn file
D) host game with player 3's turn file

The problem is that during (B) the game will still process files for 2 and 3 but declare them to be stale. So instead of turn-based you just get each player taking a turn every third hosting. It might be interesting, but not quite what the requestor wants.

I do like both simultaneous and turn based. But I wouldnt want Dominions to try too hard to be turn based. There are advantages to the pbem style and its a type of gaming which is far more in need of decent games than other styles. I wouldnt want to lose that for any kindof features.

[MaxWilson]

Yeah, the main problems with doing the off-hosting thing are that

1.) Disease, events, income, etc., happens too frequently.
2.) You don't get turn reports for anybody except the guy who went right before you.
3.) The AI moves every turn.

It's hard to work classic turns into Dom3's architecture.

-Max

[Ygorl]

You could partially take care of income, gems, etc. by lowering site frequency and world richness. Disease and age would become more important (unless you modded the game to raise lifespans, e.g.), scaling with the number of players. I think it wouldn't be too hard to tweak the game engine itself (speaking for Illwinter here) to make this kind of hack a little smoother... I like simultaneous turns so much better than sequential, though, that I don't know why they would. That was one of my favorite aspects of Diplomacy, but it's always so hard to get a group together to play...

[Foodstamp]

Ygorl said:
You could partially take care of income, gems, etc. by lowering site frequency and world richness. Disease and age would become more important (unless you modded the game to raise lifespans, e.g.), scaling with the number of players. I think it wouldn't be too hard to tweak the game engine itself (speaking for Illwinter here) to make this kind of hack a little smoother... I like simultaneous turns so much better than sequential, though, that I don't know why they would. That was one of my favorite aspects of Diplomacy, but it's always so hard to get a group together to play...

I loved the board game Diplomacy. I think the reason I loved it so much is because the turns were decided simultaneously. The only thing I didn't like about the game was how poor Austria-Hungary was doomed from the start.