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Just looking for some brainstorming here, which I'll get started. I have a little turn-based tactics game I'm making, and while I polish what is essentially the early engine and API before moving on to more of a beta phase, I'm putting thought to the specifics of the gameplay, and how some things might work.

As an example, while I'm cribbing from the Final Fantasy Tactics manual heavily, I've decided to do without the option to determine the direction your character faces after their turn. In practice, I find this led to a lot of dancing as you waste your movement turn just going around to the back of an enemy you were directly adjacent to to begin with before attacking. In my current engine, A faces B to attack, and B automatically faces back, as hits, misses, criticals, etc. ignore facing directions when calculated. This may end up a good idea, it may not, easy enough to fix later. If nothing else, the gameplay is more fast-paced without that little detail. I also feel like this game is going to focus a lot on terrain control as units block and zone other units, and the dancing doesn't fit in that well.

Basic things I have already:

• Movement within a range that differs from class to class.

• Melee attacks; the only combat currently implemented.

• Speed modifiers; some classes get their turns more often, and this is impacted by how much you do your turn (skip movement and attacking, and your turn comes again quicker).

• Terrain cost in movement; you can go further on grass than mud and water.

• Simple menu system that allows one attack and one move (in any order) per turn.

• Tooltips and context-sensitive onscreen hints (you can see the health/energy of one unit there as I hover over him, and the text at the bottom of the screen changes depending on the current action).

• In-game map editing, saving, and loading

• Screen pans when you hold Space, and screen snaps to player when their turn comes up (plus the spinning yellow cursor)

Things I'm adding shortly:

• Ranged effects, like healing and projectile attacks

• AOE effects, like black magic (three hexagons, and maybe seven)

• Character death and resurrection.

• Implement more specific classes with innovative abilities, detailed below.

• "Monsterous" creatures that take up three tiles. Movement is going to be a pain to calculate.

Things I'll add later, in a perfect world:

• A shop component where players can deck out their team in better gear and consumables. This will operate like Warhammer ie: you get a gold budget, and spend on what you want while your opponent spends an equal amount on what they want. Better weapons? Better armor? Boots that increase movement rate? Health and energy potions? All classes can use items btw (unlike FFT, where only chemists could).

• A final, polished game would have to be in 3D, and the map would be stored as a tree structure to allow height, plus multiple levels (allowing you to walk over and under bridges, for example). My luck with 3D has been poor, so not sure how I'll start on that. Probably either XNA or Unity3D.

• A version made in Unity, Flash, or Java, to be playable in Facebook so you can fight your friends online. Either realtime, or (more likely) turn-based, like chess by mail. :p

• AI that isn't dumber than a bag of hammers, though the focus will be on multiplayer.

• Graphics that aren't trash. Yes, I stole FFT sprites and made everything else in like 10 minutes of Photoshop.

Classes I intend to implement:

• Warrior: Strongest melee, big movement rate, lots of health. The single target damage dealer. Can also cleave multiple adjacent hexagons, and throw players.

• Ninja: can hide, and ambush enemies that come by. Fast turn speed. Has some utility abilities, and decent melee.

• Archer: Carbon copy of FFT class; ranged single target fire with both a minimum and maximum range. Can also do line-of-sight shots along a row of hexagon tiles with no range limitation.

• Paladin: Can defend a position by not allowing enemy movement past him within a one-tile radius, and come to an ally's defense by taking their hits. Tough class with crowd control and support abilities.

• Priest: healer, resser, buff bot. Squishy, usually cowering behind a paladin.

• Mage: AOE attacks, teleports, can conjure (attackable) walls to blocks players.

• Summoner: This is a little different from the FFT class, which I always just thought of as a mage ripoff. Summoners in my game will be able to summon two types of entities; either a static creature that buffs or damages all players in a given vicinity over several turns before leaving, or an actual extra creature that you get to use for X number of turns before it despawns. A possible third type might be a weaker, uncontrollable NPC with some automated attacks that (usually) target the enemy.

Any other ideas? I honestly don't play many of these types of games, I just really liked FFT and FFTA, so experience is not on my side here. Throw out some ideas, tell me what might not work, give me some other games in the genre I could play for "inspiration".

Yes, high ground will boost damage for melee and archery at the very least.

What effect should flanking have on gameplay, and how would mounted units play differently from non-mounted ones?

That seems like what I'm trying to get away from though. Maybe you could get a bonus to hit if more than one of your units is adjacent to the unit you're attacking since you're ganging up or swarming him, but a bonus to flanking like that just seem to encourage the same wasted movement as you run laps around each other. I know flanking on paper sounds logical, but I can't think of a way to implement it in-game that doesn't seem silly (and slow combat).

It makes sense, the player is unable to move as much, so its harder to dodge.

Since you're not really using square positions, its almost the same. And I can see changing it to a "gang" bonus instead as you describe, It doesn't really need to be full flanking.

But then you don't really need to provide a bonus at all. Its up to you

Just put nukes in the game. That will reduce everything down to one turn and no one will have to work hard to build up shit.

Not really that I can think of. It just always kind of makes sense for mounted units to be fast. And I guess the association has started going both ways for me, I've started thinking that fast units should be mounted. But really, when I look at it, there's no need for them to be mounted.

Neither of my suggestion have helped you at all.

EDIT:

I like what spellcaster said.

It's looking nice. (Especially the ripped sprites )
The speed modifier sounds nice. Does that mean each unit gets a turn separately ?(i.e. not your team as a whole). Do units 'enter combat' (attack and receive a counter attack) or do they just 'deal damage'? Do units have to choose between defend and attack? (I.e. lose an attack turn when defending.) Do units get an extra disadvantage for attacking? Does skipping a turn also give you perks (when you are attacked)?
If the direction doesn't matter I would make it obvious in presentation: either they return to avatar like position or they move about randomly when standing still.
In Fire Emblem you have (pretty) big armies with big walking range; meaning if you place a unit wrong, it might be attacked by an force majeur of enemies. I'm saying this because if you have a small number of units with a small walking range (like the screenshot could suggest), it might take away a lot of the movement tactics (if you also don't have directions).
On the other hand the throwing warriors, blocking paladins and wall building mages seem to add some tactics. Do the mages get infinite attacks? Could you build a whole fortress of walls before the enemy reaches you?
How are items handled? Can you trade items on the battlefield? Or do you use items from one big pool?
BTW what does a 'screen pan' do?

In a real-world situation, flanking means to engage the enemy from the side, where they're more vulnerable (a line of archers can't safely fire sideways, except for the first few men), with a part of your army (typically the cavalry). The enemy cannot defend themselves well against such an attack, and has to rearrange their formation; depending on the terrain, there is also an element of surprise to the whole thing.
In terms of turn-based tactics, I'd translate this into both an advantage in hit chance and a penalty to the enemy's shields / armor (to simulate the surprise aspect), as well as a penalty to the enemy's ranged weapons (to account for the limited usefulness of a group of archers when firing sideways).

"Lance carrier"? /goes off to Google ...

Interesting idea. The warrior already has a push-back planned; the monstrous creatures could auto-attack units in range even when moving. Interesting ideas.

If it's not obvious, I'm more about the functionality and making classes to fill roles than making classes and then deciding what they can do.

Right, looks like we're on the same page on that now. Easy enough to implement.

This is my new secret for great graphics. PS: don't tell Square-Enix. >_>

Correct. If you could move all 5 at once you could swarm and kill an enemy character before they could defend themselves, retreat, or heal. Turns are based entirely on how fast the individual unit's initiative is independent of team, which means you could sometimes get a few units in a row from one team taking their turn. I may add checks so you can't have more than three units in a row from the same team act, just for balance.

Counter-attacks are definitely possible, but there's no combat "state".

They can take one action in addition to moving. All units can attack, some units (like the paladin) have the option to set themselves defensively instead of attacking.

They wait (slightly) longer for their next turn. That would be the only general disadvantage.

No combat perks. Skipping turns simply means you wait less time for the next turn.

That might be interesting for aesthetics. I don't think it would constantly need to be pointed out that facing direction doesn't matter, but if they could intelligently face the direction of the most or closest threat that might help immersion.

No, I don't want crowd control to be a massive factor because no one likes being kited, stun locked, etc. Ice walls are good for blocking choke points, and don't last many turns. They'll last even less if the opponent wants to spend turns attacking it.

Mage attacks are not infinite; all special attacks take energy, which refills over time. If the mage spams big nukes he'll blow mana faster than he can regenerate it, but if he uses more standard attacks primarily (like fireballs) and uses the expensive stuff situationally, he'll be fine.

Current plan is "big pool".

Pan the screen. Let's you drag the mouse to scroll.

The paladin has this ability exclusively; if he's defending, you shall not pass. I'm not sure I want to make it universal; it would just make the dancing larger.

Keep the thoughts coming; good ideas, and I'm open to changing my mind on a lot of current plans too. I think we can stop talking about flanking; that one will be in I think.

23 you might want to take a look at Battle for Wesnoth. It's a turn based strategy with fantasy setting. It's quite fast paced thanks to the mechanics and combat. It uses the principle you've described above - units are autofacing each attacker that engages them, so basically there's no flanking. However there are units with ability to "backstab" that when there's friendly unit right behind your enemy (like in the example TF posted).

Regarding the combat, I think you need to decide whether you want more tactical combat or fast paced. The tactical approach would be having the units some facing direction which would allow flanking i.e. attacks to the weak sides.

It has been used before.

Here's another D&D idea, Attacks of Opportunity. When an attacker comes in range, your player gets a chance at an attack before the attacker does (even if its still the attacker's turn). Like anything else in D&D though, its just a chance at possibly attacking, not a guarantee you'll get to attack, or for how much.

It even works if an attacker is rushing by one of your characters, as long as they are "within range" (in D&D, thats most often 5 feet, but can be larger for LARGE characters), you can get a chance to swipe at them as they run by, even if they aren't going to attack that specific character.

Sure, my bad, I've forgot to put "more tactical" above. I meant if you want more elaborate tactics such as those I've seen on a con where some guys played Warhammer 40k - the board game with miniatures.