It works fine. The turn based parts don’t run concurrently with the real time stuff.
The Total War games resolve combat in real time but the strategic stuff is turn based.
Constrained by Batchall? I don’t think the average online gamer is as focused on honour as the Clans. 
Have you heard of Discworld Noir? It’s a pretty good RPG with some really interesting twists. I would recommend it. I don’t know if it was written by Pratchett, but it’s got original characters and is set in Ankh Morpork.
I’m a fan of Total War – in fact, I wouldn’t mind a multiplayer online version of Total War – it’s just that it wouldn’t have enough of that “total immersion” feel, ironically enough, that an game that simulated an entire nonstop war campaign would.
That said, I’d also play a Total War-like online game where you had a turn-based component, then played a massive online game with every soldier represented by a player. Just make it modern or fantasy, because I’m not a big fan of P2P HTH combat.
In case it wasn’t clear, my original game idea was for an offline single player game. You’re right, mixing turn based with real time would pose problems in an online setting.
Lovely game, but it does not simulate my car accurately. The specific model I own is in there, but the odd acceleration characteristics it has (sluggish from 0-6500 RPM, brutal from 65-8500) do not show up. Also, it is much harder to make the tail slide out.
Some hand-drawn games from that era were beautiful, and they all were more personal and designed than the more algorithmic graphics of modern games. Plus, graphic designers could fit more information on the screen because every pixel was theirs.
I have two ideas:
[ul]
[li]A Maxis-style game where you are in control of a person’s body from birth to death. It would be interesting to have control down to the level of hormones in the blood, but a lot would have to be elided.[/li][li]A game where you run a political party from creation to (hopefully) putting a candidate in the Oval Office or instigating a successful violent revolution. You have to manage your platform in response to the current public mood, set the tone of your campaign, choose the public faces of your movement, and deal with the scandals and dirty tricks and creeps and plumbers that make politics so depressingly interesting.[/li][/ul]
I still love No Greater Glory; my only annoyance with it is the PC-speaker music (playing either the opening bars to Dixie or Battle Hymn of the Republic over and over in response to battel reports) and the fact that the AI knew your moves before it planned its own. Meaning that naval invasions like the capture of New Orleans in '62 could never be repeated because the computer knew automatically where and when you were invading and moved troops to meet it. Also, check out his precursor game, “Revolution '76”, which took the same concept and applied it to the Revolutionary War.
But I was looking for something more theater-based, where NGG is the entire war. A game where you’re the commander of the army, but that doesn’t give you direct micro-managing control of your troops (like most war games); rather, you set flags and instructions and hope your subordinate generals are smart and active enough to actually do it. (Obviously, giving the right general the right objectives becomes an important part of setting strategy. Tell James Longstreet to do it and he’ll have a perfect defense; tell John Hood to defend an area and he might launch a pre-emptive attack on possible attackers first; tell Stonewall Jackson to defend an area and he’ll do the same thing as Hood, but somehow manage to make it work; tell R.S. Ewell to set up a defense and find him only half set-up when the Union attacks.) Add in a War Department and Congress that occasionally decides “important objectives” for you and trying to juggle achieving those along with, y’know, winning the war…
I’d like it. I have no idea if anyone else would.
I’ve mentioned my idea for a pike and shot online FPS. Instead of German troopers hopping around like bunnies, you have to concentrate your forces. The winning team would have to march shoulder to shoulder, pikes protecting musketeers, concentration of firepower would blow away any stragglers, plus a few cavalry that can easily kill an individual infantryman but can’t hope to face a unit of pikemen.
At no time would players be FORCED to march shoulder to shoulder and hold their formation, it’s just the game mechanics would work such that any team that did so would easily defeat a team of hopping jackrabbits.
It would be pretty cool I think. Of course, most people would hate it.
I’d like to see the uber-leet FPS kiddies try to be pikemen 
It’s hard enough to control them in the first place, I’d love to see them bitch about their mates not staying in line when they barely can themselves.
That said, staying in line would be hard enough as it is for even well-disciplined people with today’s interfaces (lack of 360 view and lack of online audio for 80+ people in the formation [whereas there are systems now that can link up 10+ people.])
If there wasn’t a way to control that (maybe controls that help you stay in formation assuming everyone else does?) we’d have the cavalry kiddies ripping the formations open.
I want more games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - free roaming, non-linear, open-ended FPS-based games with RPG elements, set in MODERN TIMES and not in a fantasy setting like Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. Gritty, realistic environments, day/night cycles, large outdoor areas with forests and rivers, and moving clouds. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is a good start, and I’m hoping that it will inspire more of those type of games, but I doubt it will happen. We’ll probably be stuck with FPSs featuring alien spaceships, drab corridors, and clone supersoldiers for a long time.
Crysis looked interesting and then I found out that that the jungle was going to be frozen in ice for part of the game (yay, we get to look at a blue-gray color palette for 1/3 of the game!) and that it was going to feature an alien spaceship and very generic-looking aliens. I hate it when they do stuff like this. I’m much more impressed with realistic environments, done well and made to look gritty and lived-in, than alien ships with made-up tubes and “control panels” everywhere.
I would also definitely like to see the kind of spy game that Derleth mentioned. I think a lot of people probably don’t have patience for that kind of game, unfortunately.
It would be great if there were some shooters where the bad guys actually ran out of ammo.
There’d have to be some mechanism to make keeping formation semi-automatic, otherwise it wouldn’t work even for people who tried really hard to make it work. Plus you’d absolutely have to have officers to issue orders, otherwise nothing could be done. You’ve got to keep formation otherwise you’re screwed, yet the formation has to move over THERE right now, but no one can take the first step.
Add in the whole problem that an individual infantryman in one of these battles doesn’t have many interesting choices of what to do. Volley fire, individual fire, but basically he’s got to march with his unit and shoot at whatever everyone else is shooting at. And there’s no way you can duplicate real-world morale. Units broke formation because the individual soldiers were afraid of getting killed and tried to run away, an entirely natural response to danger with the unfortunate consequence of making getting killed more likely rather than less. Online soldiers will sacrifice their lives bravely.
So on one level I recognize that this game wouldn’t be a very interesting one, it’s just that I’d like to see a game that rewarded an attempt to use real-life tactics, and so many online FPS games reward charging around the map hopping like a maniac and spraying bullets everywhere.
Actually, Microsoft’s Close Combat did individual morale pretty well. (Was it Close Combat?)
Yeah, but in a FPS game do you really want to give each player a morale meter, and if their in-game morale falls below a certain level they’re not allowed to march forward, or fire? In an FPS you’ve got to allow players to control “themselves”. It’s fine in wargame to factor in morale, in fact the big problem with most computer wargames is that units will blithely march into certain death just because the player ordered them to. But that won’t work for an FPS. You’d have to have some sort of in-game reason for players to be reluctant to withstand withering fire, some reason they should break ranks when charged, some reason to run for the rear when they think the battle is lost. But you don’t want to punish the characters with boredom, like locking them out of the game if they die, you want players to play the game. Accumulation of skills over multiple maps that reset to zero when you die might be one way.
I liked Revolution '76, but I was terrible at it. Every turn, I’d manage to raise something like 2000 regulars and 2000 militia in a region and then get the message “The British are moving 20,000 troops to from Britain to New England”, and of course, my poor 4000 troops would be slaughtered. I’d usually manage to hold onto one region and win by default when the Whigs managed to take control of the government.
But, yeah, I’d play the game you suggested.
Which is why in real life Washington technically lost most of his battles; he was usually forced to retreat in the face of superior forces. His genius was in fighting a proto-guerilla war in which simply keeping your rebel troops alive and able to fight another day was paramount. Britain could always achieve a temporary local superiortiy of forces almost anywhere in the Colonies; the problem was the the Colonies were so vast that occupying ALL of it all at the same time was impossible. The Americans would attack where it was convenient and then simply move to wherever the British weren’t. This went on for years until the French sided with the rebels and attacked the ships and ports that Britain needed to supply and reenforce it’s troops. After that, Britain got sick of the futility and recognized American independence.