Would a real-time (with pause) XCOM style battlescape work?

[aceshigh]

I don´t even think there is a strategy game with individual soldiers field of view like XCOM. The closest I can think off is games like Baldurs Gate, which are however sword and sorcery fantasy games and the battles do not play like XCOM at all.

Let´s try to imagine a game using the same "stats" for individual soldiers as XCOM. So maybe it´s the reverse process, as the developers thought how make different stats for soldiers work in a turn base style.


Turn base is awesome, no wonder I (we all) have been playing XCOM in the past 20 years. But real time with pause could also be interesting for a strategic game... and it would be more "realistic", after all, real battles are not played in turns. (has anyone here played South Park The Stick of Truth rpg? Reminds me of Cartman telling one of them to wait his turn, because that's how real soldiers fought in the f*cking middle ages!)
@17:50
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCbF3PDXGEI


Now, let´s convert XCOM turns to "real time":

I suppose each square of the battlescape grid is supposed to be about 1x1 meters. Soldiers need 4 TUs to cover a square. Most of them start with about 60 TUs and therefore can "run" 15 meters.

This link ( https://www.ask.com/question/average-human-running-speed ) says an average human sprints at 24 km/h and runs at average 13 km/h. Usain Bolt can sprint at over 44 km/h.

Now, no matter how good our soldiers are, they can´t sprint as fast as Usain Bolt. We must consider battle condition sprinting, meaning they are carrying weapons, armor, other weight, must reserve energy for doing other things, etc.

If we consider a turn to be 1 second, it would mean a novice soldier (with about 60 TUs) can sprint 15 meters in one second. That converts to 54 km/h. Nah, just too fast.
If we consider a turn to be 2 seconds, it would mean a novice soldier can sprint about 7.5 meters per second (or 15 meters in two seconds). That´s 27 km/h.
If we consider a turn to be 3 seconds, it would mean a novice soldier can sprint about 5 meters per second (or 15 meters in three seconds). That´s 18 km/h.

Let´s consider 3 seconds. Therefore, an untrained soldier can sprint while carrying weapons, armor and other weight, 5 meters per second, or 18 km/h

 We have to assume everything is happening simultaneously, therefore, if you spend all your TUs for walking a big distance, it means you are actually running hard. You covered 15 meters in 3 seconds. If you use half your TUs to move, and the other half fireing, we have to assume that in those same 3 seconds of the turn, he run at about 10km/h for about 1.5 second and spent the next 1.5 second fireing at an alien.


Of course, XCOM uses the same TU system for everything in the game. Therefore a soldier increasing his TUs means his is doing EVERYTHING faster, not only running. If before he took 1 second for shoot three times (auto shot, 20 TUs out of 60 TUs), increasing the TUs as he levels up, and now having 80TUs (the turn still has 3 seconds), 20 TUs would therefore be 0.75 second. And his sprint (spending all TUs to move) would equal 21 km/h.


So far, does anyone agrees with me? Want to see your input on the considerations above.



Considering all the stuff above, we can start sketching how XCOM (or a similar game) would work in real time. Instead of TUs, each soldier would have (and level up) these different stats. That means we would order the soldier to walk, run or sprint, and his speed would be somewhat based on the calculations above.

We can pause and give orders to multiple soldiers... and when unpausing, they would start doing the orders.

Now... how fast you move has implications on what else you can do. Like... you are sprinting. You surely are not aiming and you are moving your arms around while carrying your weapon. Therefore, as soon as the sprinting soldier sees an alien he cannot shoot back (he is out of TUs). He would need like 20 TUs (1 second) to slow down and autofire at the alien. In real time, you can imagine that you give the command to shoot while the game is paused (auto-pause when a soldier sees an alien or performs his actions) and as you unpause, the soldier will take some time to slow down and one second to shoot the alien with auto-shot. Unfortunatelly for him, the alien was not running. But walking. Therefore he was already aiming and prepared to shoot any human soldier on sight with a snap shot immediately (because it was already prepared, by walking slowly, with the weapon pointed in the forward direction). Of course, an aimed shot would take longer, because more than prepared, the alien would have to aim. The time it takes to aim maybe the human would be able to shoot an auto-shot at you. Obviously, by auto-shooting, his chances to miss are great, while you have a good change to hit him by aiming. So it´s up to the alien to decide. He goes for the snap shot. And misses. Another snap shot. And misses again. While that played out, the running human is coming to a halt and auto-shot the alien. One of the shots hits the target, killing the alien.



One thing I suppose is that playing in real time would allow the battlescape to play faster. Remember Terror from The Deep and how long it took to play a Cruiser ship level (8 decks total). I think in real time with pause you could play much faster.

Tell a group of soldiers to walk along the entire deck and they would go until spotting an alien and time pausing. Maybe we could create formations. Like selecting 3-4 soldiers, telling them to stay in formation, and they would walk in that formation, slower if for example the front one is crouched to allow the backone to fire over him, or flank soldiers walk while targeting the sides...

If it played faster, and we wanted the time of each Battlescape fight to be longer, we could have bigger maps, which would take the same time to play in real time as smaller maps in turns...

Ok, I haven´t thought out every situation or how it could work in every situation.

So, give your opinions, ideas, etc

[Muukalainen]

Yes it works. There was a game: X-com Apocalypse that had this real time feature

It is ofcourse different than turn based.

I think the Apoc engine was very good. Only things that did not make sense was that you could access your inventory instantly without having to spend any time grabbing those grenades from your backpack.

+ it makes more realistic simulation
+ it also allows bigger maps to be played without taking too much time

- it is harder to control and you miss some of the action if it all happens at the same time

[Sturm]

RTwP has certain downsides, namely:
1. Loss of intimacy of violence. TB allows centring screen around explosions , hits and deaths while playing animation which is pretty important for UFO's (and Laser Squad's) mood.
2. Absolute control of action for the player. Compared to TB where there are periods when it's impossible to give orders and the other side gives orders and pure RT where the player control is limited by time.

I think that if it has to be RT, pure RT with subordinate AIs would be much better than RTwP, SOPs and stuff like that. Additionally, even such pure RT would need some simulation of propagation of orders and information to be reasonably realistic.

[aceshigh]

Yes it works. There was a game: X-com Apocalypse that had this real time feature

I never played Apocalypse. I remember seeing it at a friend´s house, back in the day, and being turned down by the graphics, which I remember to be too colorful and bright, with lots of reds and yellows and blues. Don´t know if my memory serves me well there. Plus, I remember thinking this new geoscape (it was inside a single city, or something, wasn´t it?) to be quite weird.

Thus I may have missed out the RTwP features.

I think that if it has to be RT, pure RT with subordinate AIs would be much better than RTwP, SOPs and stuff like that. Additionally, even such pure RT would need some simulation of propagation of orders and information to be reasonably realistic.

yes, obviously for total realism, you actually shouldn´t even be playing with a mouse. You should be screaming orders and at maximum have a camera on each soldier's helmet. Wouldn´t be too much fun. And your companions AI would never be good enough.

A compromise must be reached. Turn base is cool for playing but there is absolutely no realism. I think RTwP is the best compromise.

[Sturm]

yes, obviously for total realism, you actually shouldn´t even be playing with a mouse. You should be screaming orders and at maximum have a camera on each soldier's helmet. Wouldn´t be too much fun. And your companions AI would never be good enough.

A compromise must be reached. Turn base is cool for playing but there is absolutely no realism. I think RTwP is the best compromise.

RTwP is even less realism.

[aceshigh]

RTwP is even less realism.

why dp you think so?

[Muukalainen]

I never played Apocalypse. I remember seeing it at a friend´s house, back in the day, and being turned down by the graphics, which I remember to be too colorful and bright, with lots of reds and yellows and blues. Don´t know if my memory serves me well there. Plus, I remember thinking this new geoscape (it was inside a single city, or something, wasn´t it?) to be quite weird.

Yes, the graphics ruined the game. But the engine behind graphics was good. Realtime support. Buildings would collapse if you destroyed the bottom levels.

About the realism aspect and compromises, one solution would be to adjust it with difficulty:

with HARD no pause or bullettime
MEDIUM 15 second pause possible at every 30 seconds of game time, bullettime possible
EASY pause possible at all times
EXTREME voice control only "SQUAD ONE SHOOT THAT ALIEN!" "NO THAT OTHER ALIEN YOU DUMBAS**S!11!"

and yes, Apoc made it possible to make squads and give orders for squads without controlling them one by one.

and with bullettime I mean the slow mode of Apoc. It was not actual bullettime but I think it was half-speed or something like that.

[aceshigh]

the way I see it, the PAUSE is a compromise needed to simulate the intelligence of the soldiers. In other words, without a flawless AI that would pass a turing test and much more, the only way to properly simulate the actions and strategy of each soldier + squad commander (small 3-4 men tactical units) + unit commander (the whole deployed squadron) is to let player take control of them. That can´t be done at the same time for all units, therefore you need the pause.

Total real time works for larger battles in normal RTS games as well as games like Rome Total War... where the individual intelligence of units is not that important, nor the individual units (you lose many in a battle and don´t care)

at XCOM there are too many happening at once and fast, therefore a pause, for the player to control the units and thus simulate at the same time the units intelligence as well as the squad commander orders, is necessary.

[Solarius Scorch]

Why don't you just play UFO: Aftershock or X-Com: Apocalypse, despite its so-so graphics? They are superb games, especially the former.

I have nothing against loose discussions like this, but it's essentially like saying "I would like to see a modification of Starcraft where the game takes thousands of years and you build cities and wonders". There are several games like that, there's no need to tailor a completely different title to do new things it was not meant for.

RTwP is even less realism.

Riiiiiiight. 

[Gifty]

You don't need to shoot down every mod idea; the only way to have a successful and long-lasting community is to let it go where it wants and trust that good things will follow. Do you think Quake would have gotten anywhere if every little fan-made doohickey had to be lore-approved?

[Solarius Scorch]

I'm not "shooting down every mod idea", this is absurd and untrue. An a community member as any other, I don't even have the power to do so if I wanted, though obviously I'm not. However, if I think an idea is IN MY OPINION not worth pursuing, then I, as well as every other member, have the goddamn right to say so. And everyone else has a goddamn right of not giving a damn about it, if they disagree.

Sorry about being so blunt, but I think certain rules must apply, otherwise you'll have a forum of yes-men which will fill have no purpose other than inflating each others' ego. Especially seeing as most suggestions are IN MY OPINION rather silly (which isn't bad, this is how brainstorming works... as long as silly ideas can be identified as such.) I'm not talking about this particular idea, it's not silly at all, actually it's quite cool, but I think also infeasible at this point.

[Muukalainen]

This keeps on popping up. The more I think about it the more I want to code a real time version of the original XCOM. As crazy idea as it is.

It would be a different game, yet almost the same. You would need new tactics to beat the classic Xcom.

[Hobbes]

This keeps on popping up. The more I think about it the more I want to code a real time version of the original XCOM. As crazy idea as it is.

It would be a different game, yet almost the same. You would need new tactics to beat the classic Xcom.

IMO, what really helped to cut time the most on Apocalypse was the ability to create squads and give them orders.

[Solarius Scorch]

IMO, what really helped to cut time the most on Apocalypse was the ability to create squads and give them orders.

Oh, yes. Well, it's similar in other such games, like the UFO franchise.

[Gifty]

@Solarius

You know what, my post came out a lot harsher than I had meant, I'm sorry for that. It just seems that the community can get extremely defensive about the purity of the game, and it was riding my nerves a little, since mods by definition have to mess with that purity a little.