I am making a MMORPG which is something like “greed island” from the anime “hunter x hunter”. In case you don't know bout it, in greed island players need to complete quests do collect some cards. they win when they have collected all the cards. the cards also have many uses, like teleportation, attacking, stealing cards, etc. the players can also battle and all. I decided to use a discord bot to make the prototype, and in case you also don't know about that, just think of it as a text based version for the prototype. the actual game design states that players can refresh their event like every hour or so. they need to complete these events to earn cards, coins, equipment, etc. they can also buy cards and all. cards are also of 3 categories- collector's cards, spell cards, battle cards. collector's cards are the ones needed to complete the game. spell cards are general use cards like travel, steal, battle, etc. battle cards are the ones used in battles. this much is only like 20% of the whole game design, I don't think other things would be relevant for the question.

So, the actual problem is how do make the battles work. The battle between 2 players needs both to take actions one by one (I could also just take their actual stats and instantly give out who won but that wouldn't be interesting and battle cards would be useless). implementing this would be hard, as it would take hours for the battle to complete as both players wouldn't share the same time and it would take hours to complete one turn. I hope I am clear, as I am nut good at explaining.

The solution I came up with was that player would have set a sequence of battle cards to use before the battle. The player who either dies after the use execution of cards or has lower HP than the other player loses the battle (by the way I thought that the game would have permadeath, so this system would also support that mechanic).

Please give your opinions on this solution and suggest another solution if you have. Thanks for reading this far….

@undefined First, thanks for your opinions bro.

For proper “battles” I've implemented something like an arena (where both players need to be online to battle) which is for if either players want to earn some extra cash or they want to have official spectate-able battles. and guild wars would also take place in the arena. but i wanted what i call “unofficial” battles so that people can kill each other without anyone knowing and all.

I liked your first solution about using cards to build robots, summon and enhance magic creatures, etc. That would apply for a way of putting aesthetics also into the game. Players would feel of it as complex and all but yeah only stats would be compared.

But I still think that my approach was better as no strategy would be involved in creature/robots system. the players who have made more progress would win against people who made less progress…..

I tend to shy away from permadeath as a mechanic, it feels like invalidating hours of progress based on a mistake that may have only taken a few seconds. In your case you could have battles take on a sort of wager system, where players pit money or even certain cards against each other. That way losing doesn't have the sting of starting all over, but it definitely still hurts.