So I finally realized why Codex doesn’t really match real-time-strategy to card-game form.
The turns are sequential, not simultaneous.
Has anyone come up with rules that would let each player get the same income levels, and play (hidden) at the same time, and then reveal what they are doing?
blasphemy.
how would you even patrol and attack with simultaneous turns, how would anything work at all. my brain just exploded lol
I’m interested
Patrollers can’t attack, only defend. They are set for the next turn
I don’t know what else though. I’d be interested in theory crafting it with other people
The question to ask is, if I put a unit in patrol on turn 1, can it block an attacker on turn 1?
If my opponent is red, and we are both taking our turn 1, can I put a unit down, and put it in the patrol zone, in case red brings in Zane on turn 1?
To me, the answer is yes.
If you say the answer is no, well, that means we are going to design different games.
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As I see it:
During your hidden part of your turn, you decide who will patrol, who will sit back, and who will attack, and which player they go to attack.
How to handle units that meet in the middle? Open question.
When your attacking units arrive at the enemy, and see who is patrolling where? Each person selects one of their units to attack, and decides which of the patrollers it will attack.
Now, if you have a lot of cheap tokens, you can send them in first, and “delay” – see what your opponents are doing to your base before you commit your real forces. But that has it’s own costs (lot of cheap tokens are not cheap to get in this game).
Completely unexamined: How do you send patrol zone aid to other players in multiplayer? (I have yet to play a multiplayer game.)
So, after some thinking …
Why do we have “haste” as an ability in these card games?
How long does it take to cross a map? Trick question, maps come in many sizes.
There are maps where you can pump out 4 zerglings, send them to the enemy, and they are just getting the bunker started when you arrive. Others where the bunker is finished, and the marines are already inside.
In “Impossible Creatures”, which actually had numbered tech buildings, you could send your starting tech 1 creatures at the enemy, but in most maps they would have the tech 2 building made by the time you arrived.
So a one-turn delay before attacking units arrive? Fits the “this is what we’re modeling” for ground troops.
Which brings up the idea of “creature speed”. What if your game was based around “most ground creatures have speed +1 turn, most air units have speed +0 turn, most ground units can return fire against fliers, and anti-air is relatively easy to get”?
Add to that an ability “extremely long range”, maybe had by very few units, intended more as the “break” move against someone who walls up – Starcraft has that in the siege mode (range 12, I think) and the guardian (range was something like 18?).
Now, add in your “map cards” – tiny map, normal map, giant map – as effecting the time for units to reach enemy territory.
You could use the “dune” model for attacking units. They aren’t expected to return home. If you kill your target, instead of returning home, you move on to another target with no time delay.
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New idea:
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At the high level of play in games like StarCraft, or Warcraft 3, how do the players deal with “both of us sent units to the other side, and they met in the middle”? Are you micro-managing your combat, or are you busy with your base? How does it work when you’re not at my level?
My expreience watching videos of high level play is theey have hotkeys memorized to manage both the base and any battles happening across the map as needed.
This is a super intriguing idea, but I feel like it also more or less requires making a brand new game built around the idea of simultaneous turns
Which is by no means meant to discourage this conversation
Truth to that.
I think that the units/cards/spells are mostly usable as-is. But as soon as you ask “simultaneous turns”, and “time to cross the battlefield”, and “what do they do after the first round if they are still alive”, you realize that some things don’t map well.
“haste” as an ability – it’s great for a turn-based card game, but what does it mean on an RTS map? High-speed flight? Making it “can attack this turn instead of with a one-turn delay” is more “map the cards to the concept” than “design around the concept”.
And then there’s things like slow speed fliers that need extra time to arrive. You know, things like that T3 battleship, or Overlords :-).
Yeah, I could see the hypothetical simultaneous turns version using a lot more of the forecast mechanic
I suggested a thing “early” on in developement that might be useful here.
Your player area is covered by a screen that doesn’t let your opponent know what is up. Like fog of war, the space between your screen and your opponents screen can be “across the battlefield” area. Whenever you want to attack with your unit, it has to go across the battlefield, and if it meets oposition there, they have to fight - unless fliers and anti-air and all of that.
A unit in an opponents base, grants that player vision (remove the screen) to that base.
For simultaniousness, units would have to be set to auto attack in some order, or there would have to be some kind of double blind way of choosing what to attack.
Potentially using a “build order” track to place down cards face down, that has to be locked in 2-5 cards in advance, so that whenever cards get flipped simultaniously, that action happens simultaniously.
How would you scale that to multi-player? Player 1 can see player 2, but player 3 cannot – how do you implement that?
I don’t have an answer 
An even more important question, how do you check to see if people have payed the right costs? In an RTS the game it self can do this, but RL is not as fortunate.
I haven’t thought about it more than what I wrote, so I ain’t got no answers. So that would have to be expanded upon if the rest of that premise sounds interesting ^^
Yea. Simultaneous hidden turns seems better suited to either forums, or GM-monitored games, or even a computer-moderated thing.
First idea: Since you can’t have a true “hidden playzone” without a moderator, without a risk of cheating, you’d need to have your zone played open. (Side question: How do we have hands played hidden then? What it is about a hand of cards that is “cheat proof” – but then there are plenty of card mechanics that can cheat there.)
Your current turn’s play can be in a hidden area; both/all players reveal this at the same time, everyone can check everyone else’s gold spending / validity. Then, all of these plays are put into action at the same time.
Note that to do this, you have to have a way to say “This card that you can see is going to be sent to attack so-and-so” without having that attack order visible.
This will quickly “scale” (or not) into trouble for an in-person, physical card game. And I can see why Sirlin did not follow this path.
Even assuming that in an RTS game, you can effectively scout the enemy in real time, you’d be looking at “We see X is coming in to attack, so lets produce Y”. This is the best case in an RTS computer game. That would be modeled by “Players declare attackers one by one, until everyone has sent all their attackers (public phase); then, players play the cards that they are going to produce (private phase). Attackers will not arrive until after these units have been produced”.
That currently seems to be the best way to handle this. And it gives a potential new meaning to “haste” units – units whose production is fast enough that they can be quickly churned out to join the outgoing attack party.
It’s not longer “This unit is haste because it can cross the battle field super fast”.
It’s now “This unit is haste because it can be produced so fast that it comes out before you can produce troops in reaction to it joining the already declared attack”.
This at least has the benefit of scaling to handle more units/players without problems. But getting that level of scouting? I was never able to, but I was never more than a “this is enjoyment” player.
Areas of Play can have certain levels of information know about them. The problem is when there is a cost to pay to change a hidden area (add a card, move it around etc) and the cost is variable (e.g the gold cost of a card, this is why all morphs cost 3 in mtg). Cards in hand is hidden in that the other play does not know what cards are in the hand. But they know the number, and all effects in the game therefore only affect this, none change the actual cards in hand, because this can’t be tracked by an opponent.
Any hidden information about a play area has to not matter if it is changed, otherwise you have problems.
why do you describe a hand of cards as cheat proof? Nothing is actually cheat proof, its just a question of how easy is it to tell if someone cheated.