The original description was "continuous turn based". Despite a few attempts to explain it, I've never been really clear on just what that is.

A great example of continuous turn based combat done right is Laser Squad Nemesis. It offers the advantages of turn-based (lag not a disadvantage, time to carefully consider options, etc.) without many of the disadvantages (long wait times while the opponent carries out their turn). I would be ecstatic if the team could achieve this level of depth in just a sub-component of an already great game.

Either way, combat orders should be simultaneous. There should be some element of suprise when facing the enemy.

In this way, you can't always bank on a battle going perfectly according to plan ... there will always be contingencies to prepare against, and potential penalties for not preparing against them. I think this also makes cavalry more flexible in general ... in North North African Campaign of WWII showed that a tank commander could be quite successful by doing little more than thinking on his feet. I feel cavalry should be the same way ... you get more movement so you have more time/flexibility to adapt your battle-plan to unforseen circumstances.

That's not continuous turns... That's turn-based. It's just each unit's turns are tracked separately. When it's one of your units' turns to move, you know precisely what will happen when you click on where to move or what to attack or activate an ability, up to some randomness. In continuous turns, you and your opponents are both acting simultaneously - you basically share turns, so you don't quite know what's going to happen because things might move/the 'board' might change and your actions might not necessarily have the intended effects. At least that's my understanding of it... I have only ever played RPGs with continuous turns, though, and I'm not entirely sure how that would translate into a game like Elemental's combat.

Astrath, well said.  I am abandoning this thread to start a new one.   

Mostly a guess. I think some other forummer told me it worked like that, but didn't explain it as clearly.

I think RTS games get a bad rap from TBS players who discount the mental acuity it takes to make decisions at the rate that progamers do. That said, Elemental's battles should be TBS. 

If you mean the mental acuity it takes to memorize and repeat a sequence of tasks and to train yourself to do them very quickly, yes. I agree..

After watching a few professional matches of Starcraft for example, everything is decided at the start based on what the players had decided to do.

sorry, but that´s completely "bullshit" ! Turn based games have one great advantage: the AI is much much better than in any RTs games, because it has more time to "think" of theri moves and take everything into consideration.

If you know "Fantasy General" or the newer "Fantasy Wars" or "Elven Legacy", you will know, what a good TB Game looks like. These games are always superior to any RTS game considering the demand of a challenging AI. Total War series fails here with every part of the series although the game and its engine is great.

I thought the AI in Elven Legacy was pretty poor... It wasn't easy, but the difficulty didn't seem to stem from the AI as much as simply being greatly outmatched in a number of the scenarios. Sure it was a fun game, and they did some things very well, but I played it through once and had no desire to return to it.

Honestly, I'm not sure I agree with you that turn-based combat has better AI in general over real-time combat. Sure, Total War's AI had tons of problem (path-finding being especially bad), and after a while you can destroy superior armies with few/no losses. But I could do the same thing in HoMM, AoW, etc... In those games I could predict exactly what the AI could do, just like I could in TW, and I could manipulate it to provide me with an easy win. Long story short: I didn't feel any more challenged by the AI in games with turn-based combat than I ever did in Total War.

Now I will say that I had to think a little more in fantasy games with tactical combat, but not because of the AI; because of the magic. Magic adds an entirely extra dimension to combat, and when you have lots of nifty spells it is not always obvious which to use when. But Elemental will have combat magic, whether it's RT or TB combat. It also adds an unknown in the form of not really knowing what the enemy is going to do magic-wise (and/or not being able to prevent it), which helps throw off your ability to manipulate combat a little.

Training is certainly a large part of winning a Starcraft match. However, even executing a routinized strategy still requires being able to keep track of a large number of variables under enormous time pressure.

'Clicking fast' is just one part of winning an RTS match -- it might be a necessary condition, but it certainly isn't sufficient. Claiming that all RTS games are mindless click fests is the TBS'ers equivalent to the RTS'ers claim that TBS'ers are dumb because they can't think in real time.

yea, It would be nice for simultaneous movement ... although If they start automated, and its a good automation, it should be hard to tell when its "just the computer" and when it is the human player making a move. Of course if you CAN wait n see, meanwhile your people are on their automatic route, and the human player can give feints ... since its simultaneous even if you do wait for him to move before you move, thats just playing defensively, you lose the advantage of initiative but gain the responding/reaction advantage. Although there is no reason that they won't counter-move after your re-adjustment. Its the cool thing about relatively real time "battle simulators" as opposed to the RTS (click to build more troops Naowwgh) and even turn based battles (although simultaneous turn based "orders" with fighting happening in real time would not be so bad).