Real-Time Longturn. Just a thought.

[Corbeau]

I had an idea. It's a long shot and it's probably never going to be implemented, but I like writing down ideas so why not.

To avoid the problems with turn-based discrete-moving mechanics, I had an idea about Real-Time Longturn. This covers city production and movement.

First, city production is done continually. "Turns" are 24-hour periods so, if a city is producing 6 shields per turn, it actually happens that one shield is produced every 4 hours. An improvement is built once all shields are in, of course. Same goes for food and trade.

Movement is done using Movement Points, as in the turn-based game. The different part, though, is accumulation of MPs. Presently, a worker has 2 MP so in real-time LT, he gets his 2 MPs stretched over a period of 24 hours in increments of 1/9 (or whatever is defined), up to the double its regular value value. However, at one instance, he may only expend only his regular amount of HP. Once he has done that, he has to wait for 10 hours (or whatever the Unit Wait Time is set to) to move further.

If a unit has used its MPs through a longer period, not all at once, then the game has to record the times and set it so that a unit can not expend more than its regular MP within a period of 10 hours. So there would be two current MP counters:
1. total MPs (everything that has been accumulated, maximum of 2 full MP complements, meaning 4 MPs for a green Worker)
and
2. "possible to use at this moment" whish would be one full complement minus whatever was used in the last 10 hours.

In this version, a unit with 1/3 MP wouldn't be able to make a move that would ask for more, as is now the case due to turn restrictions and all excess MPs being erased at TC. Also, the exception to "only one full MP complemet at a time" would be moving into terrain that asks more MPs than this. Naturally, only if there are enough MPs accumulated.

Consequentially, a unit could not enter terrain at all, ever, if it would require more than double the amount of its regular contingent of MPs. This is not the case for any terrain in the current rulesets, but it's a nice rule so I'm putting it here

Workers with experience would be working faster so that, when working, a worker would spend its full 24-hour set of MPs within 24 hours. Meaning, if a worker has gained experience and, as a result, now has 3 MPs (instead of the default 2), and he is performing an action that requires 2 MPs, he would be finished in 16 hours and have 1 MP left when it's done.

[Hans_Lemurson]

I like this idea! The discrete "End of Turn" still causes major issues in terms of exploiting it to make sure moves can happen before or after it has completed. Even the 10 hour time limit is not enough, since it just means there are 3 critical times each turn(TC-10h, TC, and TC+10h) which can allow you to get two moves in before your opponent can react.

But if this is broken up and spread across the whole day, then no single time becomes as intensely special.

I can only think of two problems off the top of my head:

• Rounding. Sub-dividing the turns will result in a LOT of rounding issues with partial income and partial yields. Maybe this could be avoided by multiplying all costs by ~24 or something, but then things could end up looking really messy (and unit rush-buy costs would have to be re-scaled...)
• Hourly TCs. What happens if suddenly every hour there's the potential for unexpected moves and you could never fully trust whether a player's action has "completed" or not.

But both of these seem fairly minor, and could be fixed without too much trouble. I think the move timer could probably even be increased, since there's no hard TC boundary any more that would squeeze your move times. A "Delayed Goto" command would be essential, though.

[Corbeau]

Actually, I never mentioned "hourly TCs" Things would be distributed by the minute or even second, if the server could handle it. What do you mean by "partial income"? If a city is producing 18 gold, this means 1 gold every 80 minutes. Etc.

Maybe it would be questionable how to divide, say, 19 Trade into 10 Bulbs, 7 Gold and 2 Luxuries, but even I could make a simple algorithm how to do it so that they are more or less evenly distributed through the day, one by one. (Actually, Luxuries would be "permanent/constant", so only Gold and Bulbs need temporal distribution.)