Can actions happen in less than 6 seconds?

[Hirmuolio]

The game has 6 second long turns. If you have a watch in game you will see that if your action progresses time then the time progresses in 6 second chunks.

But I also noticed that when you run you can sometimes move by one tile without any visible time passing. Does the watch just show less accurate time that what is used inder the hood or is the time rounded to zero sometimes?

Also I heard somewhere about plans to change turn lengths. Driving is pretty hard when you effectively have reaction time of 6 seconds.

[TheMurderUnicorn]

I don’t know about any changes to turn time. I hadn’t even really thought that turns had a ‘time’ associated with them, per se, I tend to think in ‘moves’.

Like most rogue-esque games, moving while you have a ‘fast’ speed will occasionally grant a ‘free’ move. If I remember right, it’s based on 100. Your ‘speed’ represents the number of units required to make a move, and the number next to it is the number of units used by your last move as it will vary slightly. So, for instance, if your moves ‘cost’ 51, you can move twice before breaching the 100 threshold. When your movement or action or whatever passes 100, a turn passes, which is apparently 6 seconds.

At least, that’s how it was explained to me when I began playing, though I’m sure they were more articulate. I’m sure there’s a better way to say all that, and as I typed it I found my words vaguely confusing.

[Hirmuolio]

I guess it is a roguelike turn system but with very poor precision of 6 seconds. (the other roguelike I have played had 0.1 second precision).

So if your explanation is right (and I am reading the UI right):

At the start of the turn you get X “moves”. (100 by default, modified by various things).

During your turn you can do actions until the sum of “moves” used by the actions is 100 (or whatever ammount of moves you got). Then your turn ends. If the ammount of “moves” you performed was greater than the ammount of “moves” you had then the remaining is carried to the next turn.

The imprecision from such long turn duration allows exploiting fast actions pretty badly.

If you can do two actions in less than 100 moves then you are quaranteed to be able to perform them before any NPC can even move.So you can attack and step out of attack range.

And it is even worse. If the zombie takes lets say 120 moves to walk+attack then you have full 12 seconds time to dance around the zombie. (with more precise timing you would have only 7.2 seconds window to attack and retreat)

I guess shortening the turn duration would help with fixing the OP spears and the general “dance” around zombies to avod being hit.

[TheMurderUnicorn]

Okay, so I tried really hard to explain this, but I realized I don’t know enough about the turn system to properly put it into words, so I’m going to pass that off to someone smarter than me.

I CAN say that the actual time attached to a turn is irrelevant. We can call it six seconds or 1 second or 2, it doesn’t matter. What matters is how many turns pass. Your enemies are bound to the same sort of rules that you are, so all that matters it how many turns go by.

[Hirmuolio]

Yeah but when the time taken by actions is noticeably shorter than the duration of turns it causes problems.

It is better to take many turns to do one action than to do many actions in one turn.

[Litppunk]

Its balanced by various things like damage vs speed, that zombies are rarely alone, unless your being clever to keep them strung out/funneled to keep them from surrounding you, and that if your not careful those ~50ish cost moves/ 2 “moves” per turn can quickly becomes something much closer to 200 or more from pain, sickness, injuries, cold/hot, encumbrance, compounding status effects dragging not only your speed down, but also dragging base stats down which can leave you without any strength, and leave you overburdened and under equipped to far from safety to see anything but the end of your characters life.

It goes both ways, and learning how/when to abuse the speed is an important part of the strategy and play.

btw, you went from how exactly does this work? to Wow, thats so unbalanced really fast.

[Hirmuolio]

Well maybe I had a bit of negative view in my head even before this thread.

And I’m not saying it is unbalanced. Just that the long turn duration has some inconvenient consequences.

[kevin.granade]

It does, I want to bring it down to 1s as a coarse adjustment, and then bringing it down even further in the future would be possible.