I really hope there will be simultaneous turns. Otherwise the multiplayer games will take a loooooong time to finish, and not in a good way...

If you want a quick game, play on a small map - don't ask them to penalize those of us who want to bunker down for an 18 hour marathon game.....

My point really being, please include both options if simultaneous is offered. Otherwise (if its a choice between the two) I vote for turn-by-turn. Games take longer, but it's more fair, and more fun.

Here is the dev journal thread on this topic:

https://forums.elementalgame.com/377297

Non-real-time simultaneous turns is not something I'd be a fan of. It's simply too difficult to execute your turns because you have to plan all of your moves for the turn in advance (you aren't able to react to anything until the next turn).

Could someone explain to me the difference between sim and non-sim turns pref. with examples? I dinnae ken.

Hehe ... well, as long as there are few "overland" spells (meaning all damaging spells, even volcano, need to take place within a tactical battle) then it will mean little whether turns are simul or non (however I of course prefer simul).

Well, tac battles alleviate ALOT of the stress of simul turns in any case. With FFH2, someone could destroy your army even before you had a chance to move! In this situation, a double-moving fiend might still invariably "catch up" to your army, however you at least have a fighting chance. In a tactical battle, you generally have the time to place your buffs, and to summon the required summons ... at least a respectable timeframe to cast a few select supportive spells ... if not enough time to cast all available supporting/buff spells.

In this, combat (especially in simul turn) would be vastly different than in FFH2. In FFH2 multiplayer, mobility was a winning factor. Cavalry with raiders could "essentially" defeat an empire of longbowmen (even though in practice it would be very hard).

What I am essentially saying, is that there were many spells that only lasted one turn (or several turns) and immediately attacking with unexpected ferocity is the kind of thing that catches people with their pants down ... and no magic. This isn't the result of a strategic failure of not having enough mana to deal with your problems, its a more human logistical restriction of not having the luxury to use spells before the attack. And then it has already started, and you are losing units before even one spell can be cast. Its why a giant stack of infantry can crush a smaller stack supported by archmages the turn AFTER they cast the fire elementals ... because it is much quicker to move the infantry atop them than it is to select the archmage to cast the elementals.

Certainly all spells should be castable from within battle (since the mana reserve is the same, yes?) ... and hopefully a select few spells, and only those without military application, can be cast out-side of battle. This is merely an argument to make simul-turns as fair as possible, not an argument against the game-play component of the "Stack of Doom destruction spell".

As the original topic has been answered, I don't see why we shouldn't talk about simultaneous turns versus nonsimultaneous turns in general, and not necessarily in relation to Elemental. I guess I should say that I don't really care that much about the issue, especially since we've got the choice between them, so please read this just as a comparison between the systems and not as an attack.

Losing an action due to the unit moving first is a valid complaint about simultaneous turns.

I don't see how you can argue that the first person can easily have the rug pulled out from under him. Assuming equal distances to a resource, the first player will always beat the other to a goodie hut. They will spend most of the game being a turn ahead of everyone else, so they will already know whether there is a goodie hut there or not, since they have the vision of turn #86 while everyone else is at turn #85. Eventually these advantages may diminish over time but they never go away, and the fact that they had them at the start of the game is never changed.

It's like this in board games as well. The first player has the advantage of the most choices, and most boardgames put in something to balance it for the other players that play after. In fact in really tiny computer game maps, you can see the first player dominating in the game because he's had the chance to build an attacker before anyone has had a chance to build a defender. He will be twice as far ahead in production as the next player on his second turn, 33% ahead on the third, 25% on the fourth, and so on. In a completely balanced map, he will always complete the wonder first, be the first to get the bonus from a tech. This is mitigated by having a ton of equally good choices so players do not regularly overlap in their decisions, and by inequal starting locations.

If we really want to get into it, there's different kinds of simultaneous turns. There's ones where the orders are accepted simultaneously and then processed  after everyone has hit the end turn button. There's also one where orders received in the same timeframe are then handled randomly, independant of who hit the button first. Civilization currently does this, eliminating the "he's the host so his computer beat me there!!" complaint and leaving the "this unit lost an action because we moved at the same time" one, albeit with the caveat that he didn't lose an action due to a bug, he lost an action because the player took the 50% chance he might get the goodie hut.

I don't really care for the first because I like to see things happening as soon as I give the order. The second one works wonderful actually, but every time this debate comes up and I bring it up, it gets ignored in the hustle.