playing out in game battles.

Off the top of my head, I'm not sure what public games do that. But I've had a bit of experience on a couple projects I've been making.

In addition to Corsaires mention that it ruins the experience for player's 3 and 4... the battles tend to greatly increase the length of the game even with 2 player. Maintaining a full blown tactical combat system and full non-combat aspect tends to extend the game length past any manageable level.

On two projects I'm working on, both dropped half of the equation in order to become playable.

One of them abstracted the combat so that you could focus on developing your organization. You take alot of turns and have plenty of time to develop your technology. Battle's just happen to occur in between these stages and take very little time.

The other ended up cutting most of the "Economy" stage of the game. In a two hour period, I tended to complete about 6 battles. Having 6 "Economy" turns in between systems was worthless because you didn't have enough time to do anything major.
In the end, I abstracted the Economy to take less than a minute. I focused on making the combat tactical and engaging.

Both were better games after focusing.
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The only other way I see to allow the tactical combat merged with "The big picture" is to make combat is very rare.

But is it really wise to make players learn an entirely new set of rules for something that they'll only do once or twice a game?

Hey Guys

The game I'm working on is similar to what you are discussing. There is a world map in which players' characters travel around to castles, towns, forests, etc. The game is very combat heavy. Once combat starts, the players utilize a separate board, the Combat Environment (there are multiple Combat Environments for various locations, forest, arena, castle, etc).

My game can be played cooperatively and/or competitively, which is determined in how players decides to form parties. If everyone wants to play together, the game is cooperative, they form a single party, and during combat, the entire party is involved; this keeps everyone active.

In the case the game is competitive and there are two parties, the party not involved in combat gets to play the monsters, as opposed to AI mechanics to operate enemy monsters for cooperative-only games. This way the opposing players are engaged in combat. (Additionally, it's kind of fun for the opposing players to make all the decisions for the monsters.)

I agree that you don't want to have players in your game inactive for combat, which can easily last 10 or 20+ minutes (depending on the depth of combat). To work around it, give those players not directly involved in combat an interaction with the game. In my case, they substitute for the game's monster AI auto-combat rules.

I hope this helps. If you have any questions about how I operate my game in this function, let me know.

Cheers,
Twenty Percent

Ha, I appreciate the compliments; thanks.

My game is a turn-based RPG (think Final Fantasy). The monster fights are random encounters (determined by dice, but you could substitute cards for dice). After combat, the same monsters don't appear again. In other words, they don't move around the map. Think about many RPG's (again, FF is a good example), where you move around the world map and randomly enter combat.

So in my game, monsters do not progress outside of battle. There are three tiers of monster difficulties, however, to provide a variety of challenges for characters and parties of different "levels" (although my game doesn't have levels).

You could progress or control AI (monsters) in your outside-combat game in a similar fashion to how I control AI in my in-combat game, which is via dice. Each monster's card has tactics listed. A 6-sided die is rolled to determine which tactic they will follow. Here is an example monster:

Lich:
Tactic #1-3: Life Drain: The Lich uses Life Drain (an attack listed on the monster card) against the furthest enemy within range.
Tactic #4-5: Paralyzing Gaze: The Lich uses Paralyzing Gaze against the closest enemy within range.
Tactic #6: Undead Minions: The Lich summons 3 Skeletons.

You could do something similar for your monsters (or other NPC's) in your game around the World Map.

Let me know what you think. Good luck,
Cheers,
Twenty Percent