Turns.

[DaloLorn]

See #2 for an explanation of AP.

SERS will use a system vaguely resembling that of Battle Isle: The Andosia War, separating the tactical level (ship movement, combat) from the strategic level (empire management).

Tactical Turns

Basics

Players will exchange Tactical Turns in a fashion resembling the hotseat mode in the Space Empires games. This may cause some oddities like earlier players always being able to catch later ones, but the alternative of simultaneous turns - either Civilization-style "everyone's taking their turn in real time" or Space Empires-style "everyone's taking their turn, but nothing happens until everyone's finished" - would open its own can of worms, and I'd rather pick the lesser of two evils.

What can the player do?

During a Tactical Turn, the player can move his ships and spend AP to perform various actions. Ending a Tactical Turn will immediately drain all AP throughout the empire, as if they'd used 'Wait' enough to run out of AP. (Before this 'AP dump', however, the game will try to spend it to execute any queued orders, like moving around.)

Attempting to end a Tactical Turn while units still have queued orders will attempt to execute those orders. If any units still have AP left, the player will be warned so that he may take appropriate action if necessary. Similarly, the beginning of a Tactical Turn will also see units execute queued orders if such orders exist.

Turn cycle

The order in which Tactical Turns are exchanged is constant and depends on the player's slot in the lobby. Not sure if there should be a (flexible, like in Civilization if I remember correctly) turn timer, or if that timer should be optional. Also not sure if I should let the lobby host force an end-of-turn event (or start a turn change vote?) to prevent trolls from deliberately sitting on their asses waiting for everyone to give up - the power itself is equally abusable, but at least people will know immediately that they're dealing with an abusive host and leave instead of waiting hours or days before they determine that the game's not going anywhere.

The nice thing about having no timer coupled with a host-enforceable "we are sick of this, end the turn already!" option is that one could hypothetically do something like the PBW (Play-By-Web) games hosted by spaceempires.net, where the players don't have to be present simultaneously. (On the flip side, you'd still need all participants in tactical combat to be at their computers, but that can be verified separately, and you could hypothetically make the inadvisable act of telling the game "I don't need to participate in tactical combat with these or those units at this time, replace me with the AI".)

People should probably have the option of setting an empire password so other players can't screw them over. (They should also have the option of changing that password - for example, if one player decides to give his empire to another player. It should perhaps be possible for the host to override the password on an AI-managed empire, so people don't lock an 'open' empire and just leave it unattended.)

Strategic Turns

Basics

A Strategic Turn consists of one round (from player 1 to player 1) of Tactical Turns.

What can the player do?

All actions that don't require AP (queuing orders, changing construction queues, changing research allocation, etc.) can be performed at any time during a Strategic Turn. Income is processed at the beginning of each Strategic Turn.

Basically, the Strategic Turn is a SERS analogue of the 3-minute budget cycle. The difference is that it might not really represent 3 minutes, and its length can be adjusted a lot more easily than speeding up/slowing down all of SR2. (Speed setting notwithstanding. :P)

Turn cycle

After the end of the last player's Tactical Turn, there will be a finalization 'turn' where no player is playing a Tactical Turn. This is to ensure that people have the chance to adapt to the actions of the other players, as well as to ensure that they have no sane reason to prolong their own Tactical Turn beyond the time required to spend their AP and fight their battles.

Before player 1's next Tactical Turn (and, consequently, the game's next Strategic Turn), there will be a pause while the actions of the past Strategic Turn are processed. During this period, nobody can do anything. (Most likely, the AI's strategic actions will also be performed during this period or the beginning of their Tactical Turn, because it would be both pointless and unfeasible to make them run throughout the duration of the entire Strategic Turn.)

As with Tactical Turns, there is the possibility of adding a turn timer or a host override to end the turn without player consent. (Perhaps people whose turns are overridden should be AI-controlled if they don't take any preventive measures. Maybe people should even be able to tell the game "I'm not going to make this turn in the foreseeable future, just let the AI do it".)