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Taking turns is giving me trouble...

So far two things have given me trouble:

Taking turns mechanics
The precision of units moving

Since the person who goes first has an advantage of moving first but the Person who goes second has the advantage of seeing what the enemy has done to counter it. Is there anyway to make the turns easy and less lop sided?

Also, since the unit size determines their mobility (how many spaces per move point the can move). But the area the units can attack from dont always match up, resulting in over lapping units... How do I avoid petty problems like these?

Comments

Well, you could always use

Well, you could always use unit initiative rather than player turns...so things end up a bit more balanced (or at least players get a choice). For realtime this could be in activation turnover...so some units might be able to move every 3 minutes, while others could only move every 5 (or whatever). I'm thinking army of hourglasses but there are many ways you could implement this.

I'm not 100% what you're saying your problem is with unit overlap, but it sounds fine as long as the overlap is somewhat reflecting the weapons or size advantage (essentially reach: I have a polearm or I'm super tall and can just reach over). You could also make it a feature with attack template overlap being required with certain parry actions or the like.

I would lik a little bit more

I would lik a little bit more detail about youra game.

Turn order in chess is a big deal, since the whiter player wins 55% of the time, i Risk going first paints a huge target on your head, in poker going first is a disadvantage, but the starting players shifts to the left after each round

It sounds like there is some asymetric combat involved in your game, in this case you can do a bunch of playtest and just figure out the starting player this way. Say the game is about germans v russians, the German player always goes first thats fine if you playtest it

But now you probably want to know, how can you figure out to determine this well lets dig into a game design. In general there are three major resources players try to gain control over during a game (and these are the same for most games out there).

~Quantity:the absolute number of resources/units/money/cards a player own or can get during his turn. This is probably the easiest to recognise

~Quality: how good/ valuable/ powerfull are the things you have on the board, e.g a rook is better then a knight, some space on the chessboard are better then others, and loosing control over them. Having acces to better actions (agricola) also counts towards this

~Tempo/ Time: how much time/turns/ action points/movement/speed do you need to get your task done, how many of the total units you have are actually on the board, you might be able to wreck themthat totally sweet destroyer in a couple of turn, but will that is not going to do you any good if your other units are dying right now.

Depending on the game you play some of these resources are used more or less. But less focus on the question at hand.
Usually players get resources at the beginning or end of their own turn, that means that the starting player will have an Quantitive advantage over the other player as well as a Time advantage. Since the second player has the opportunity to respond to whatever it is that the first player is doing, he can change his game play such that he gets an quality advantage right? Well, not always, in quite a few games the start player can play aggresive enou that the second player does not have the chance to counter as effective as he would like to (small quality gain) (or even worse be put ino such a rough spot such that he acutally loses quality over the first player. Thus quality gain (if any) is usually not enough to offset quantity and tempo by itself.

Now how is this usually solved in games? Often the players last in turn order are given some sort of initial bonus, usually extra resources to offset the initial tempo advantage of the first player. You can tweak the exact amounts of the rescource/ quality diffrence to balance things out (hint to a lot of playtesting).

Hope this helped

As for your second question can you reword it i'm afraid i dont really get it right now

The rest of my blog will give

The rest of my blog will give you a better idea of where I'm getting at!

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