Real Time with Pause: Difference between revisions

 

Contrast [[Real Time Weapon Change]].

* Several Realtime Strategy games developed in the 00's, including:

** The ''[[Age of Empires]]'' series

* The "Pause" button on [[Captain N: The Game Master|Captain N's Controller]] is like this... for his allies. Kevin is fully mobile during the pause effect and can relocate objects... but can't give his friends new orders.

 

* [[Vandal Hearts]] 2 uses the Dual-Turn Battles, which is this to a tee. Not only you need to move your characters, you need to anticipate which enemy character will move, to where, and what action will they do. This requires a lot of advanced thinking and good guess, even if the AI can be abused to allow unlimited turn treasure hunting.

** In the game, there even exists a spell called "Premonition" which tells you which enemy character will move. However, it will not tell you where it will move and what it will do. An experienced enough player can still make educated guesses based on the enemy's movement range, weapon range, skill and equipment list, etc.

* ''VGA Planet'' and its [[Spiritual Successor]] ''Stars!'', being designed for [[Category:Play-By-Post Games|play-by-email]].

 

* ''The Dark Eye: Drakensang''

* ''[[Summoner]]''

 

* ''[[Star Wars]]: Empire At War'' has a tiny, hard-to-reach pause button with no hot-key associated with it. It clearly was not intended (or at least badly designed) to pause the game often enough in mid-combat for it to be useful. There are third-party mods that add a hotkey, making it a viable feature. Considering the quick pace of battles in this game, it is not surprising that such mods were developed. Some players consider this cheating, however.

* The first ''[[Homeworld]]'' game has a pause feature which actually makes the game more difficult to play because its behavior is very unpredictable. It may have been designed to allow examining the battlefield, but not to issue commands. Still, some players do manage to use it that way, making the zero-g RTS significantly easier.

** But it does persist in other casual games like the "connect 3" variety, especially since there are so many of them being made.

 

* ''[[Fallout]] 3'' has V.A.T.S mode, where the game is paused mid-battle, and the player can target an enemy's bodyparts. This is unique in that once unpaused, the game goes into a slow-motion replay of the shooting sequence that was queued in V.A.T.S, temporarily taking away the player's control of his character. The game then proceeds right back into full realtime mode.

* ''The Clue'' and ''The Sting''. These games use a Simultaneous Turn Resolution design, except there's only one "turn" in each mission. You can spend up to an hour giving a long sequence of commands to your team members, and then watch the heist being performed in real time with no opportunity to intervene until it's done.