Concepts of BACD wargame

Basics
Turn based games (TBS) often have difficulties implementing rate of fire (ROF). In the most common case units can fire twice per turn, or once per turn, or once per N turns. It real time strategies (RTS) units can fire each N microsecond, this system is much more flexible. This also allows wide use of ROF boosting units, spells, upgrades in RTS games. Here you can find a proposal of TBS that uses a tic-based rate of fire system to provide improved tactical depth in PC wargames. Please note that this version is draft document.


Base design
The number of turns in typical strategy is tens or hundreds, here we do not have turns in their classical representation, we have "tics" instead. A battle can last as long as million tics. The game starts at tic number zero with initial deployment of units and, possibly, structures. Each unit has his HO (hit points) and hitpoint number is also large, maybe 1000 for small units. Each unit's movement is specified by number of tics required to get one movement point (MP). Also if you ordered your unit to move through rough terrain it'll wait several more tics to actually move. In fact time when you get MP is time when you need to chose the direction of next move. This would work better on hexagonal map. Possible implementation includes storing tic of the last movement for all units on the battlefield. The game checks whether or not the difference between curent tic and movement tic is higher than the number that defines speed. If enough tics passed controlling player is promted to move the unit. Boosts decrease the number of tics required to move units.
Also rate of fire is defined by tics between two shots. For example unit that has per tic MP value of 1500 and ticvalue of 700 it would do in average slightly more than two shots per move. If it faces another unit with 400 pershot ticavlue than second unit will fire almost twice more frequently. If unit is blessed to add +25% rate of fire his ticvalue is multiplied by 0.8, ticvalue of 700 would be 560. When this unit has high experience the ROF rises even more, perhaps 0.85 factor for promoted units. So we get delay between shots equal to 476.
Each unit has his own armor. Units with high rate of fire are low damage are good against thin armor, units with low rate of fire and high damage would be good against heavily armored units.

Example:
Magician has 3000 hitpoints, shot delay of 1000 tics with 300 damage per attack and no armor.
Elite archer has 3000 hitpoints, shot delay of 100 and inflicts 75 damage per round. The armor is zero.
Swordsman has 3000 hitpoints 400 damage per attack each 2000 tics. His armor is 65. As you can see swordsman kills archer, archer kills magician and magician is stronger than swordsman in duel.
Also ammo clips can be introduced. Unit with ammo clips can fire several shots with high rate of fire, but than needs a lot of time to reload.

Deployment, reenforcements and development

As wargame the emphasis of this game is battle and not development and resource management. On the other side infrastructure protection provides motivation to maintain a straight frontline. Sides start with considerable amount of resources (money) and can spend them on buildings that can produce units, on buildings that develop new models of equipment (like scientific buildings in conventianal strategies). Other building would have their own firepowers thus being just like immobile defensive units. Finally buildings of another type just provide their owners with resources.
To limit growth the number of research and supply buildind must have very low upper limit, players would be forced to buy more units and fight from the beginning.
Alternate resource system features prebuilt factories that are unbuiltable and undestructable, but can be captured. This really makes player interested in protecting his land. Factories simply produce units to their owners, tic cost (build time) is defined for each unit. Factories can have different specializations and different efficiencies.
Also bonus buildings that provide boosts to combat parameters would be good, if each player starts with several +5% bonus buildings (to damage, rate of fire, armor, speed) he would be interested in protecting them.
To prevent battles from being the same from game to game minor randomization of starting conditions.

Basic design of movement

The battlefield will be cell-based, cells can be either hexagonal or square. Each cell will have it's own terrain type that affects unit movement. The number of tics needed to enter the cell does not depend on destination cell type, source cell defines number of tics needed to quit the cell. Once the unit gained his movement point he can either move or wait several tics and than move. See more in GUI and turn sequence integration.
In 2 player game (main mode) one player has initiative advantage, it works like he has half a tic more. Taking into account that bonused tic delays are rounded to integer we never get conflicts like whose unit moves first. If the same tic several units can fire and move controlling player can chose what to do first.

GUI and turn sequence

As the game can last thousands of tics we do not want the game to stop each tic. The game interupts when one of the player's unit have just gained movement point or firing point and promts for orders. Possible orders are:

The game engine stores list of interrupts in array (also link-list is possible, some disadvantages and adavntages of both versions will be discussed in final version of this design document) in the place of each tic we store unit that may cause interrupt, custom message if delayed and, indeed, side to handle half-turn advantage
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Contact me if you have any suggestions or related ideas.