Lumberjack Tycoon, Brian?

[Jamski]

What's the point of running realtime on a wargame?

Because real wars run real-time?

-Jam

[Urban Ranger]

Smart alec

You aren't commanding a real war, just a simulation.

[DrSpike]

And we don't want simulations to be like what they are simulating, heaven forbid!

Hehe, TB probably is better for wargames, but some elements are handled nicely in a TW style game. Plus they appeal more widely I'd say.

[Skanky Burns]

People with short attention spans want their actions to have an effect now, not after they press the "end turn" button.

OTOH, the people who can hold a though for more than a few seconds (such as fans of turn-based) are also able to play rts generally. There is a bigger market for rts than tb.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by DrSpike
And we don't want simulations to be like what they are simulating, heaven forbid!

Hehe, TB probably is better for wargames, but some elements are handled nicely in a TW style game. Plus they appeal more widely I'd say.

Basically there are two issues - scale and turn order effects.

Real time makes more sense for tactical games, where there really isnt much time to make decisions. A company commander,say, has to make decisions on the fly, not spend 20 minutes consulting weapons effects charts or whatever. Too much pausing of course defeats the point. and in longer framed time compressed games it makes no sense. I mean if im playing a campaign that took two months, i dont want to play the game for two months - and playing real time doesnt give the time to think that the Real general had.

The other issue is simultaneity - going first can be quite an advantage, and lead to unrealistic results. To avoid that in TB you either need a complex phasing system (which was common with board war games) or you need Simultaneous TB. (We go, instead of I go - you go)

For historical empire builders, RT helps with the time scale issues - - if youre covering 500 years, and you have turns of say one month, the number of turns is too long, and you spend too much time just clicking "next turn" (or worse being forced to micromanage each turn) If the turn is one year, you cant have interesting combat. With pausable or slowable RT, you can let things fly during peacetime, and slow down for wars and other dramatic happenings. IIUC thats basically the function of RT in the Paradox games. To see what a problem this is in TB, you need only look at Civ.