The Turn-Based Problem 1

Turn-based games all have at least this element in common: there is a player turn and an enemy turn. During the enemy turn, the player has nothing to do. At this moment, the player has nothing to do, which is boring.

Different games have engaged with this problem in different ways, for nearly as long as turn-based mechanics have existed. Some games ignore it, but more ambitious games have taken means to its effect.

Some games, like Xcom 2 or Disgaea, take the approach to make the enemy phase happen as fast as possible. To do this, they have all the enemy units move at the same time. With all the enemies moving simultaneously, that wait time is parallelized and takes up only the time of the longest movement.

Other games, like The Banenr Saga, change the system instead of trying to make it pass faster. In games like this, the player turn and enemy turn are broken up into many small fragments and then interlaced with each other. That is, the player moves one unit, then the enemy moves one unit, then its the player’s turn again, and then the enemy’s again, and so on. By keeping the enemy turn broken up and shorter, the player can stay more engaged. In addition, a broken-up turn system like this means that each action is more significant, and the game state changes every action rather than every turn. There’s more potential for complexity, and you can do things like moving units around a map to keep them out of range for the enemy units that are going to act next.

Turn-based games have to handle this mechanic-intrinsic problem in some kind of way, but I think these are the most common two approaches. For the record, I think the fragmentation approach is the more interesting of the two, though the Banner Saga doesn’t deliver it perfectly. The turn system used in TearRing Saga: Berwick Saga is the best implementation I’ve seen of it, though that was also because of various ways that the game systems took advantage of the turn-based backing of the game. Briefly, the main difference between the Banner Saga’s and Berwick Saga’s turn systems is that Berwick Saga doesn’t alternate turns on a one-to-one basis or have locked character activation times. Instead, Berwick Saga lets you order units in any order during your turn, and the number of turns is proportional to the number of units on each side. That is, if you’re outnumbered two to one, then every time you get one move the enemy will get two.

This broken-up but more controlled turn-based system that exists in Berwick Saga is really great. It’s just a great system that elevates the game beyond all the others of the same genre.