Hi! In this thread I want to discuss some balancing issued of Hedgewars with regards to turn-based strategy.
There are a few elements in the game which break turn-based strategy a bit and, in my opionon, reduce quality of the gameplay.

First issue: Fire.
I am talking about the long-burning fire, that is, fire that burns for several turns. Caused by molotov cocktails, hellish handgranade, etc.

It turns out that this fire actually just burns a fixed time. This is not good for a turn-based game, for several reasons:

• If the fire already burned long enough, one could simply wait until the fire “burns out”. This destorys a lot of strategic aspects of long-burning fire
• If the team you want to “block” with the fire is several turns away then it is very possible that the team you are trying to block will never have to face the fire bacause it went off several turns ago. Extreme case: you are team 1 and the enemy is team 8, at 45s turn time per team then there are 270s between, much longer than the “long-burning” fire burns!
• Because fire can also dig down into ground, it is possible that fire drops in the middle of your turn! A very annoying side-effect which messed up so many turns.

I propose to make the long-burning fire entirely turn-based and remove every time-based aspect to it. The fire should be reduced by 1 level per round (round = each team had a turn). This also includes digging. Fire must not drop in the middle of a turn unless it was caused by the player. This would fix all 4 problems above.
This way, fire will be much more strategic and it also won’t drop in the middle of a turn.

The second issue I want to talk about is the TimeBox.
I find using it a bit frustrating. Again it breaks turn-based strategy a lot because it can re-appear at any time, even in the middle of a turn. I find that part especially irritating, because it can mess up a turn significantly.

An obvious fix for that would be that a TimeBox may only appear between two turns but never in the middle of a turn.

The third issue is weirdness by the “wind moves everything” game flag. It often causes mines to be blown away at the beginning of the game. That alone is bad enough (let’s ignore this for now). But this can even happen when a turn has already started, which again messes up a lot of turn-based strategy.
The fix for this would be: First check wheather the wind would blow anything away, if it would, let it blow until all moving objects have either been destroyed or come to a rest. Only then the turn may start.

In general, my rule of thumb is: The state of the world must not change in the middle of a turn, unless it is caused by the player. So a mine triggered by the player is allowed to blow up, for example. But a mine which suddenly falls out of nowhere or fire which suddenly drops because it “burned down a level” are clear violations of this rule of thumb.