Practical Game Design

Types of combat system

A comprehensive list of all the combat systems that have been used in video games would be quite long. Surprisingly though, there are basically only two main categories:

• Turn-based
• Real-time

Turn-based games divide in-game actions into a series of distinct parts known as turns (a discrete time-space). Turn-based gaming is often associated with the combat systems in strategy, cards, and RPG games and is at the core of board games (both physical and digital). Typical examples are games such as Hearthstone, XCOM, or Civilization.

In a real-time combat system, all the actions take place in a continuous time-space and therefore characters act as quickly as it takes for an action to be ready. The most prominent examples ...