Hello everyone!

My name is Eric. This is the first article I have ever written on the internet. To start, I am going to give a little background information about myself. I am a freshman at The Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) studying electrical engineering technology. I always have a lot of work but I can usually make time for games, so if you are interested send me a friend request and we can play something sometime. On Impulse, I play Sins and GalCiv II. I also have a 360, my GT is majchrzak8, I play quite a few games on that. I also play Magic cards, so if you are willing to talk about that world I'm always interested.

Okay, for my first article I have decided to write about my favorite type of game, turn based strategies. Ever since I was introduced to Advanced Wars on the Game Boy Advanced I have loved this genre of games. I see it as a more advanced version of chess that can be played between more than two people. The game generally starts fairly even, depending on how much of a challenge you want, and is played out more or less like a battle simulator. Turn Based Strategies are the closest thing you can get to being a general in a real war. In war, you do not see real time events as a general; you see the outcome of each battle and plan from there. In an RTS you are only commanding the units in one of those battles and often times in order to make the game move faster things are made less realistic. For example in a RTS often times you can train soldiers in seconds, in a TBS it usually takes one turn, this turn can often times be simulated as a whole day, week, year, etc. This gives a more realistic edge to the battle because it takes much longer in concept to build an army. You cannot do that in an RTS otherwise; the game will go on forever. Because of this, I view TBS games as a more realistic simulator, but that does not mean I will not play RTSs. Just thoughts I was thinking, feel free to comment.