Why do western turn based strategy games lack hotseat?

[Don]

I just noticed an interesting curiousity. Most turn-based strategy game of western origin allows you to play as only one guy, and I'm not talking about like campaign mode where it'd not make sense to let you play as the computer. I'm talking about say a generic quasi-balanced map, it's just assumed that nobody would ever play more than one side. In fact to do that you'd need some kind of patch or expansion to support what's commonly referred to as 'hotseat' even though you'd think if you can control one player (which you obviously must) how can it possibly be different to control more than one player? I guess you could have some issues with diplomacy, but it's really not that complicated, not to mention a lot of game don't have meaningful diplomacy (if at all).

Yet most turn-based strategy games of Japanese origin allows you the ability to play as multiple players. I wonder if there's some kind of cultural thing here. It's like it's never occurred to Sid Meier that if you got 8 civilizations in a game of Civ you might want to control 2 or 8 of them even if you're by yourself. And then you have Starcraft for N64, which features split screen mode on the same TV!

[SineSwiper]

Why? I don't understand.

[bovine]

Hotseat means you can see what the other players are doing. Hotseat kills strategy.

[Don]

Lack of knowledge is not strategy. I guess it's RTS and particular Starcraft makes it feel like scouting/fog of war is supposed to be strat, but it's wrong. Historically nobody ever fought a war going 'gee I have no idea where their entire army might be at this time!' No you don't necessarily know where every one of their unit is at but you got to be asleep if you somehow didn't realize a million man is marching to your major supply centers. Yes there's some validity like say in Super Daisenryaku or ROTK 11 it is completely pointless to try to attack via a backdoor route since there is no fog of war in the game period, but even there if you say take the backdoor route from X to Y it might force the other guy to respond in a way that's disadvantageous. You guys are acting like Chess will be more strategic if sometimes you can't tell what pieces are behind a 4 square distance, so you don't know if there's a Queen or a Knight behind that Pawn. Well it doesn't work like that. Chess is infinitely more complicated than virtually any strategy game in existence. That is, a computer still has a hard time to solve Chess, but it'd be almost trivial for a computer to solve any strategy game that exists if the same amount of effort was devoted to solving that game compared to Chess.

[Julius Seeker]

Hotseat means you can see what the other players are doing. Hotseat kills strategy.

Tell that to a chess player =P

[Don]

Actually I just realized that let's say chess has a fog of war (say your units can only see up to 3 square in each direction), it'd be way easier to solve, because since you can't see the other guy's units you've to assume a Queen has to be at where you can't see (and likewise the opponent has to assume the same thing). So that means you'll just slowly march all your pieces to the center of the board while keeping all of them mutually protected until you can actually see the opponent while the other guy is doing the same thing. However by the time both of you marched your pieces to the center this already greatly reduced the number of state the battlefield can be in, so it'd actually be easier to solve. It's because you can see the Queen is at a certain spot so you can say well if I do this and that and that I can get an opening. If you can't see that you'll just have to assume there is a valid positioning (that you cannot observe) that'd render your plan useless.

[SineSwiper]

Lack of knowledge is not strategy. I guess it's RTS and particular Starcraft makes it feel like scouting/fog of war is supposed to be strat, but it's wrong. Historically nobody ever fought a war going 'gee I have no idea where their entire army might be at this time!' No you don't necessarily know where every one of their unit is at but you got to be asleep if you somehow didn't realize a million man is marching to your major supply centers.

You would be a bad player if you didn't know a massive army was coming. Scouts are critical.

[Don]

Sun Tzu wasn't the one scouting the enemy when he was plotting his strategy. Scouting might be important on a strategic level as in 'where to scout' but once you figure it out the actual implementation is very trivial especially in a game environment. At least in real life you don't always have instantaneous communication so maybe it's possible your scouts get killed before they can relay the info back. In a gaming environment clearly the moment your scout sees anything you, the player, already knows everything they've seen even if they're immediately killed, so therefore the typical anti-scouting strategy of real life won't work (killing the scout).

It's actually pretty trivial to set up say a 2 unit patrol team that will get you at least a 1 turn lead time even if you knew the exact path they're patrolling (and you won't anyway) and that is enough time to mount an effective defense in most turn-based games. Now it's true when you play other people they won't usually bother set up elaborate patrol systems so you can actually sneak up on them, because when you're playing a game like Civ that may take tens or even hundreds of hours people just don't have the stamina to prolong it even more by patrolling in the exact same way for 500 turns. In the interest of time it's far better if everyone announces an attack ahead of time, rather than have everyone increase their turn by a minute or more each to play in a way that'd render surprise attacks ineffective.

[SineSwiper]

Well, there's also satellite pings to get a quick view of cover, and hidden observers. The game is what the game is. Trying to make it more realistic will result in a maddening problem of balance. After all, real war isn't about two balanced sides.

[Don]

Well if you look at a real time strategy, scouting becomes a skill actually due to the game's limitation. If you really are Jim Raynor and someone just said: "OMG I SAW TEN ULTRALISKS ARRRGH!" you'd probably stop everything you're doing to figure out how to stop them. But of course when you play a game of Starcraft you're not really the commander. You're the guy who is giving ghosts tips on how to use their sniper rifle, talking to scientists about what to research next, and telling your siege tanks how to use the siege mode, so while doing all that you may have missed the fact that ten Ultralisks just trampled your scout, and being able to notice the last part is the difference between someone is good or not. But I don't think it's a strategy element.

In turn based game, scouting is really like a prisonner's dilemma. If you and your opponent both scouted then you ended up having no advantage compared to if nobody scouted, and since strategy games are GAMES after all you're probably most interested in finish them in a reasonable time as opposed to doing everything absolutely right, so you may get lazy and people can sneak up on you, but that's only because it is a game. If you're playing someone a turn based game for a million dollars, you'd obviously do any tedious work every turn needed to ensure victory. It's almost a degenerative element of competitve turn-based games, that is it's something if you and I both do it completely cancels each other out so it's just a waste of both of our time, but you got to do it if you're seriously about winning just because the other guy might do it too.

[SineSwiper]

Micromanagement is what makes the first two letters in RTS, even if it isn't realistic. There has to be some level of "frenzy" to keep it interesting.

[Julius Seeker]

Anyway, bottom line why strategy games lack hotseat now, and why they seem to be losing lan features as well; is because they want every individual who plays to buy their own copy of the game.

[SineSwiper]

Huh? You need a copy of the game for each LAN player, anyway.