Monthly Archives: November 2007

Supernova 2: battle turns

I finally started today to program the core of the game: the wargame part! I still have to define many ships and devices but in the meanwhile I thought to start programming this part, so I can get new ideas on what equipment would be more fun to implement.

So I started to implement the fog of war, ship placement at beginning of battle, planets, and so on. Now I have another question in my mind… how to design the gameplay in the wargame, expecially the turns system.

There are mainly two kind of system (with a third one not really common):

1) each faction moves all his units until ends his turn. This system is popular in many wargames, like Advance Wars or the famous SSI Panzer General series. You first move all your units and do the attack, then watch the computer doing all his moves.

2) each single unit (independently from which faction it belongs to) moves based on their “initiative” or speed. I used this method in Magic Stones, this way the unit attack order plays an important role (since they’re able to strike first). In some games, like Heroes of Might and Magic, they even allow particularly fast units to move twice vs another unit, in the same timeframe.

3) this method, not very common, is “simultaneous turn” – the units move at same time, but is particularly good only in multiplayer matches, and since my game won’t have multiplayer, I don’t even take this one into consideration 😀

For now I’m more inclined to use the method 2, even if method 1 could be used too. But I think method 2 adds more strategy because of the “initiative”. I still need to finish implementing the ship deployment on map though, so there’s time to think what to do…!