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[Sean Mirrsen]

MTS for Meta-Time Strategy.

http://www.achrongame.com/

Basically, it's an RTS with full time control. Meaning full control of time.

You attack the opponent, he jumps to the past and delays you, then jumps to the future, orders some bots, and they're ready by the time your main force strikes. Or just goes to the past and orders a row of defence guns in your path. Or takes some units from the present, shoves them a minute into the past, then another minute into the past with their originals from that time, then yet another minute, and then hits you in the present with a mass of units eight times the number he originally had. They'll last a grand total of under a minute, because if any of the copies don't return to the chronomachine that sent them in time, all sub-copies vanish in the next timewave.

Don't worry if you see steam seeping through your ears, that's normal.

[FoboslC]

OMGWANTNOW.
Oh wiat, its not released yet. Oh wait, its alpha. Oh wait, they dont evne provide etatest and their site is based on some sihtty blogsource

[Sean Mirrsen]

Well, they're still crashtesting the gameplay mechanics. I wouldn't expect a playable project until a few months from now at least.

[Asehujiko]

Predicting either a very shallow game beyond the time travel or exorbidant RAM usage.

[Nilocy]

Why so negative? I think its a great idea, time traveling... in an RTS? What couldn't be better. And yeah, its fairly early in development, but it stil looks pretty promising.

[Sowelu]

Predicting either a very shallow game beyond the time travel or exorbidant RAM usage.

So what if it's shallow?  Plenty of games are shallow beyond a set of core features.  Even Go is shallow outside of its core mechanics, there's only one type of piece, so what?  I'm excited.

[Mephisto]

At first, I thought this was a bad idea. It would never work. Now that I've watched the videos, it looks very interesting. I'm sure multiplayer could get very challenging.

[Servant Corps]

I think there was a game I heard off that took place in Mars. There are two time periods, the present and the future, in which you control what happens in both time periods.

For example, you may have your "future" empire build tanks and ship them off to your "present" empire to win. Your "present" empire will liberate some towns, which will produce income for your "future" empire and thereby allow you to win battles. Your enemy just have to attack the "future" empire, stopping the flow of reinforcements, then invade your "present" empire, thereby erasing both the "present" and the "future" empire from existance.

I think it was this game that got me interested in time travel to begin with.

Is that the same game?

EDIT:

We don't fake the time travel, it is not "we have three 'levels' you jump between and pretend they are different time periods".

Okay, so it is not the same game. I say "Boo!" to that, because, well...think of the possiblities. Your "past" enemy can nuke all your cities, leaving them unable to produce income for the "present" and "future" battlefield. And you need to manage all three battlefields, to ensure that your enemy doesn't let you win the "present" battlefield while he is rebuilding his forces in the "future" battlefield.

[Sean Mirrsen]

I can't say I remember a game like that. What Achron offers is much more realistic, except the changes aren't instantaneous and the future "is not set" - meaning that unit position is simply extrapolated from the current orders. Say, you tell your factory to build ten tanks. Fast-forward to ten minutes in the future, you have your tanks. Send them to the game's equivalent of the Chron-O-John, and you can have your tanks right now, despite them still being built. You lose the tanks if something destroys the factory, and you lose them if the original tanks you made do not carry out their orders and get yanked off to the past. This eliminates the paradox - if the originals' future is altered, copies cease to exist. So if you amass that eightfold army I mentioned, each original tank will count for eight. If something destroys the original tanks in the future before they can chronoport, all of your army will vanish. They won't go out immediately however, giving you time (heh) to alter the timeflow and prevent the factory's destruction.

[Servant Corps]

Well, realistically, time travel can't affect the future. It happened once, it will always happen.

But that would be boring.

[Sean Mirrsen]

That depends on POV. For the side observer, the future will happen as it is. For the time traveler, the future will change. The final outcome may be the same (if my view on the universe as one big machine is correct), but intermediately, the outcomes will change. For example, if someone goes back into the past and kills Hitler, the future will have changed. If someone from the future consecutively goes back in time and prevents that from happening, the future will change again. The fact that the two events occur simultaneously will not prevent the fact - for the traveler who travelled from the future where Hitler was killed, the future will change to its "Hitler not killed" state if he tries to travel forward. Now, what exactly will happen to the traveler is subject to debate. On one hand, the future he came from no longer exists - therefore, he will vanish as soon as he prevents the killing. On the other hand, he exists where and when he is regardless of where he came from, because he cannot simply vanish by the laws of physics - so he will remain in the time thread he restored. Time travel is a rather convoluted topic.

[Puck]

Heil Godwin's law. 

[Servant Corps]

Let take the example of the grandfather paradox.

You go back in time, and you kill your grandfather.
This means you can't be born. Meaning you can't kill your grandfather.

Paradoxes aren't logical, they cannot happen, that how the laws of physics work. The only way that could explain it if you can't go back in time and kill your grandfather. You would be unable to change history. Scientists did experiments with billiard balls to simulate time travelling, and they concluded that the only logically consistent way would be if the billard bills hit in such a fashion that a Billard Ball hit a Billard Ball which is at rest, causing that Billard Ball to travel back in time and hit the same Billard Ball at rest.

They did a documentary on Time Travel on the PBS Show NOVA. I'm going to trust them. Realistically, time travel can't change history.

[Sowelu]

Many, many, many time travel systems are based on branching a new timeline off from your universe and creating a new one that starts from the past.  If you want to go back in time, that's a new timeline; going into the future lets you stay on the same timeline.  In general, you can't change YOUR past, but you can tweak something at T minus 100 years in a new timeline, and then see the effects of that in the future of that timeline.

Fun corollary of that:  Under this system there would be one 'original' timeline.  Anyone who goes back into the past from this timeline simply vanishes, with no evidence that going backwards is possible at all.

I'm -pretty- sure this is the system that the Terminator series uses, but maybe not.  If the world is totally hosed in 2100 AD or whatever, you can't save it, it's gone.  But you CAN try your damnedest to create a new universe in which the world isn't hosed.  I'm not sure why the robots would be so insistent to kill John Connor if they already won the war in at least one universe, unless they want to spawn a universe in which they win it -harder-...

Although I guess when you jump to a new timeline spawned from the past, you probably can't go back to your old timeline, and there's no way to tell if it even still exists.  So meh, maybe there's only one active timeline at once and everything else gets pruned.

The main important points are that with this system, time travellers are not affected by changing their own past...because they're not.  They are inserting themselves into a new timeline at an arbitrary point, which happens to have 't' be earlier than the 't' in the timeline they left.

This has nothing to do with Achron   But it works fine in sci-fi in general.  Paradoxes are fine.  The only things that piss me off are time LOOPS, like where you turn out to be your own dad or something.  You can perpetuate a cycle through time travel, yes, but you can't have information be its own source...

...Right now I'm trying to figure out what's going to happen on a major TV show I like, which the creators previously claimed wouldn't have time travel, but now has some seriously blatant time travel with scary world-breaking things happening in it.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

LOST.  Someone who's alive in the present just died in the past.  Just how time travel WORKS hasn't been gone into in very much depth.  So for all we know, the next episode could start with the world exploding, or the present-day person dissolving into vapor, or with nothing happening at all and someone saying 'Yeah it doesn't work that way'.  Me I'm hoping for explosions...

[Servant Corps]

See, I wasn't ranting about sci-fi. I was ranting about the laws of physics. Realism. Sci-Fi and Reality are two different things. Sci-Fi just have to be plausible. Parallel universes may be real, but there is no proof, and in any event, Many-Worlds Intepretion claims that a new universe gets created every time there is a choice.