Scope RPG

CTB Turn System ​

Scope's soldier phase runs on a Conditional Turn-Based tick system. There are no rounds, and no guarantee that every unit acts the same number of times. Speed decides how often each unit takes a turn, so speed-heavy parties genuinely act more often than slow ones.

Turn-based enemy

The Core Idea ​

Every unit carries a turn countdown - an internal timer that ticks down continuously. Three rules drive everything:

  1. The unit with the lowest countdown acts next. Lowest countdown = closest to zero = next turn.
  2. After acting, a unit's countdown resets based on their Speed. Fast units reset to small numbers and come back quickly. Slow units reset to larger numbers and wait longer.
  3. No rounds, no fairness guarantee. A unit with twice the Speed of another acts roughly twice as often over a long fight.

Fights unfold as a continuous stream of individual turns in whatever order Speed dictates, with nothing enforcing rotation between sides.

Why Speed Is King ​

The CTB system is the reason Speed is probably the most strategically important stat in the game. In a round-based system, Speed might decide who goes first - but everyone still gets one turn per round. In CTB, Speed decides total turn count. Every extra turn is extra damage, extra healing, extra buff uptime.

This is also why the Bard is such a strong class. A Bard who never deals a point of damage can still swing a fight by handing extra turns to allies with Rallying Anthem and slowing enemies with debuffs.

How a Turn Unfolds ​

Each turn follows the same shape:

  1. The unit with the lowest countdown is found.
  2. The clock advances - every alive unit's countdown drops by the amount of time that passed. The acting unit reaches zero.
  3. The start-of-turn tick: the unit's active buffs and debuffs count down, cooldowns tick, and a crowd-control check runs.
  4. The unit acts - you pick for your units, the AI picks for enemies.
  5. The unit's countdown resets based on their current effective Speed.
  6. The engine checks for deaths and battle end.
  7. Repeat.

Everything is resolved on the fly - the engine doesn't pre-compute a fixed schedule. That means any mid-fight change to Speed (a buff, a debuff, a death) affects the next resolution immediately.

Tiebreaking ​

When two units' countdowns land on the same value, the system resolves the tie deterministically:

  1. Player units act before enemy units.
  2. Among same-side tied units, the one with higher base Speed acts first.
  3. If still tied, a stable ordering breaks it - the same scenario always resolves the same way.

Battle Start ​

At the start of every fight, each unit's countdown is seeded with the exact value their Speed produces. The fastest unit on the field acts first simply because their countdown started lowest. No separate initiative roll, no ambush mechanic.

One Rule For All Actions ​

A quiet but important design choice: every action has the same recovery. A basic attack, a powerful spell, a healing cast, a swap, a skip, and even a crowd-controlled skip all reset the unit's countdown exactly the same way.

This is a deliberate simplification. Other CTB games use variable action weights - "this skill is powerful so you wait longer." Scope skips that on purpose. Tactical depth comes from positioning, targeting, and Speed manipulation, not from deciding whether a skill is worth its wait time.

Why the CTB model

A round-based system would make Speed a minor tiebreaker. CTB makes Speed a primary axis. It also means Bard-type support classes can genuinely feel different from damage dealers - their value is tempo, and tempo is real. Without CTB, buff classes tend to collapse into pale copies of damage classes.

Battle End ​

A battle ends the moment one side has no alive units. Victory or defeat.

There's no turn cap, no time limit, no draw state, and no "flee" action in the soldier phase. Either you wipe the enemy or they wipe you. The explicit exit is forfeiting, which resolves as a defeat.

Auto-Resolved Phases Are Different ​

The CTB system only runs in the soldier phase. The boss phase and the arena use a simpler auto-battle model - strict alternation, basic attacks only, Speed decides who goes first but doesn't grant extra turns. See those pages for the other turn model.