souran wrote:However, becasue shit moves around, because there are actually conditions that change the order of use of abilities, and the utility abilties in general defy the supposed "scripting" of 4E characters just has the flexibile nature of 3E spells makes them difficult.
False. 4e is, at its heart, a simple probabilistic adversarial game. The game's branching factor is big, but still comparable to that of Chess, even when you include things like sliding. Remember, "slide 1" is just a king move. Even better, the game provides some very effective heuristics for action selection (for example, use high-level powers first). Turn reordering doesn't cost anything, because it's just a different branch in the game tree.
In other words, once you have a basic 4e game engine, tacking on an effective AI is straightforward. Getting a working system would take about as many programmer-hours as implementing a really big 3.5e prestige class.
I'm not going to dispute padded sumo vs. rocket launcher tag. All I'm going to say is that 4e is much,
much more uniform than 3.5 and that its game tree is orders of magnitude smaller. On top of the entire engine being easier to implement.
souran wrote:Could you script shinning force? Yes you could, heck thats how the bad guys fight. But that doesn't mean that its not challenging or interesting.
That's true. However, games like FE and FFTA have an inherent advantage in being computerized: the ratio of interesting stuff to bookkeeping is much,
much higher. If you ran them by hand, they'd be unplayable. 4e was designed for the tabletop, so it's still playable, but it's not great. 3.5e wins by having huge interestingness with only a moderate amount of bookkeeping.
Of course, this ties back into one of the original complaints about 4e: it plays like a video game because it
is a video game. If they'd made a solid 4e engine with a good UI and hooked it up to something like Google Hangouts, they'd have made a killing. But they didn't, and without that it sucks, as would any video game run by hand.