Pitboss 6 Planning Thread

[oledavy]

We're still waiting to hear from our last team member, but Team We Don't Have A Name Yet votes 5-0 for QUICK speed and NOBLE difficulty.

[spacemanmf]

Good to see the planning thread set up as Always War, although I think someone set the speed to Marathon.

[antisocialmunky]

Can someone tally the votes?

[plako]

Is plako now GM?

Not me and not very intrested. I'm just working here .

You asked for tally concerning speed. It seems that teams 1 and 3 are firmly on Quick/Noble. I haven't seen "official" statement from your team 2, but you seem indifferent whereas Luddite is advocating higher difficulty up to Immortal and it seems Kuro and TT from Team 4 are thinking Monarch or if not feasible Prince.

If you really ask from me, choose Quick/Prince as a compromise. It isn't game breaking to any direction and doesn't affect much to the relative value of traits as Sullla presented.

[luddite]

I'm sorry if this has turned into a drama bomb. But let's not be hasty, OK? These games take so long to play, it shouldn't make a difference if we take an extra week to set it up carefully and make sure that all the settings are good. I'd had to spend months playing a game that's no fun.

A 24 hour timer is never going to work. 6 hours for three people to play their turns? Come on. It's ridiculous. Similarly, PBEM is not practical. Emailing the save to 12 different players? We'd be lucky to get in one turn per week. Let's focus on solutions that are realistic.

What I said originally was that a 24 hour timer would work as long as we can all play at the same time window every day. If your time window is 6PM-midnight, there's no reason you can't do one turn in that time every day, just like a pbem. We could also make it work as a pbem if each player just controlled 3 civs by themself.

48 hours feels like the absolute minimum amount of time for a turn. That's still only 12 hours for a 3-person team to play their turn, which isn't much. I think we'll have to increase the timer as the game goes on and more units appear on the board. Because the game is a Medieval start, it will likely last about 100 turns. If we played a turn every two days, the game would take roughly 200 turns = 6-7 months.... which is almost exactly how long the other Pitboss games have taken. And if it takes longer, do we even care? The Apolyton Demogame took 11 months, and no one seemed to object. If you want things to move faster, well, that's why we suggested Quick speed and Noble difficulty. Which a couple of you have objected to pretty vehemently, while also insisting that the game will take too long to play.

It won't be a turn every 2 days. Remember that the pitboss timer gets delayed every time someone logs in or out, and with 12 players that's going to happen a lot. Also, with everyone having an assigned time frame to play, there's no way for any turn to end early. Plus the inevitable delays for tech issues, real life emergencies, and rules disputes. We're looking at more like one turn every 3 days with these settings.

And seriously, stop with the strawman insults about Quick game speed and real life speed. Those are two separate issues.

About difficulty... the objections to Noble are pretty silly. You guys are stuck thinking in terms of the AI, where "Noble" means a very easy game. When there are no [COLOR=white]AIs and no barbarians, it affects very little indeed. Here's the relevant stuff from the XML code:

Yeah, I know what game difficulty does. I proposed a higher difficulty for one very specific reason- tech costs- which I explained twice. I would have thought you guys would be more open to this, since a slower game speed might have made it possible for you to invade LP with macemen in PB4, instead of him being able to tech a full era ahead before they got there.

well anyway if everyone else is content to play noble/quick then I'll just leave and do something else. No reason to waste months playing a game that isn't fun.

[plako]

I made a test using pitboss server and there has been false information around. Sequential turns work so that all team members can log in on their turn whenever they like and not in particular order.

I seriously think this is clearly best way to arrange the game i.e. no simultaneous but sequential turns. Assuming e.g. 10h timer that would be ~12h real time per team that would mean 48h in worst case scenario and probably much less especially in the beginning.

Would this be good enough pace?

[Kuro]

I will have to discuss it over with my team what we vote, but I am about 80% sure we vote Quick and Monarch.

[plako]

I will have to discuss it over with my team what we vote, but I am about 80% sure we vote Quick and Monarch.

Since Sullla seems pretty indifferent concerning the difficulty level would Monarch and Quick+sequential turns pitboss work for you Luddite? What about team 3?

[luddite]

Sequential turns would definitely help a lot. Monarch/quick works for me.

[antisocialmunky]

That is originally what I thought it was.