4 dimensional Strategy or "Star Trek 3D chess is a thing of the past"

[Christopher]

Recently I stumbeled across an interesting game and I thought I share it. It can be used as a Setting, a set of pointers for timetravel rules and as idea for making games for a Star Hero Settings. Becauase if we can do it now, it should still be possible in the Future.

 

The game is called Achron. And it is 3D Realmtime Startegy game. With time Travel as a major game mechanic. In Multiplayer no less. All thanks to the "Resequence" Engine.

 

Instead of just playing in the "now", you have a timeframe of 7 minutes to play in: 1 minute into the future, 6 minutes into the past.

Events that go beyond the 6 minute line becomes "inmutable past".

Causality is not instant, instead if moves in waves (called timewaves). They come from beyond the inmutable past rushing with about 3.1 second per second of real time towards the present.

 

It's one of the few games where you could play out the grandfather paradox. Actually they did just that (using a mech and a factory):

http://www.achrongame.com/site/achron-and-the-grandfather-paradox.php

But generally creating paradoxes will not work out in your favor. In this case you either end up with a Mech that comes from nowhere and kills your Factory (the Mech has less worth) but is there to stay or you end up with the Factory creating a mech, the chronoporter sending it and nothign happens (resources and production time for a mech wasted).

[Tom Carman]

In one of Diane Duane's Star Trek novels, the Enterprise's morale officer came up with a chess variant that he called 4D Chess. (Spock mildly objected to the name on the grounds that the fourth dimension was hyperspatial not temporal, but he was too interested in the strategic possibilities to complain much.) Pieces could not go backward in time, but you could "time out" pieces to reappear at a future moment of your choosing. The game became about very accurately forecasting your opponent's movements and getting pieces into place to ambush them, while fooling the other side into not doing the same to you. The scheduled return of timed-out pieces could only be altered by a one-for-one sacrifice of moves in the present