Classic turn-based ?

[Ygorl]

You could partially take care of income, gems, etc. by lowering site frequency and world richness. Disease and age would become more important (unless you modded the game to raise lifespans, e.g.), scaling with the number of players. I think it wouldn't be too hard to tweak the game engine itself (speaking for Illwinter here) to make this kind of hack a little smoother... I like simultaneous turns so much better than sequential, though, that I don't know why they would. That was one of my favorite aspects of Diplomacy, but it's always so hard to get a group together to play...

[Foodstamp]

Ygorl said:
You could partially take care of income, gems, etc. by lowering site frequency and world richness. Disease and age would become more important (unless you modded the game to raise lifespans, e.g.), scaling with the number of players. I think it wouldn't be too hard to tweak the game engine itself (speaking for Illwinter here) to make this kind of hack a little smoother... I like simultaneous turns so much better than sequential, though, that I don't know why they would. That was one of my favorite aspects of Diplomacy, but it's always so hard to get a group together to play...

I loved the board game Diplomacy. I think the reason I loved it so much is because the turns were decided simultaneously. The only thing I didn't like about the game was how poor Austria-Hungary was doomed from the start.

[PvK]

Thinking about the wicked tactics possible in a classic turn-based version of Dominions, it sounds like it would be a nightmare of gamey exploitations. By "classic" I don't mean a click-fest, but where everyone does all their moves one at a time and views the results of each before deciding what to do next, with everyone paralysed until he is done.

"First, I send a scout with retreat orders into all provinces I might want to attack.
Then, I re-do all my scripts and send in tailored attack forces against the enemies I know are there.
If any important enemies survived those attacks, I start casting assassination spells one at a time until I get them."

etc... sounds dreadful to me, and is why I tend not to like such games.

[MaxWilson]

Well let's be fair--you'd probably have a "declare" phase where you declare all combat-related movement, a "resolve" phase where battles actually get run, and a non-combat-related movement phase. So you'd probably not get exploits at quite that level of granularity.

I agree that simultaneous turns have better versimilitude.

-Max