Intersite Game - Turn Discussion Thread

[NobleHelium]

No, the 48-hour timer and the race condition are orthogonal problems. Even with no race conditions coming up, there will be people taking forever to play - it's only that the race conditions forces some players to sometime game the clock, even for only defensive purposes.

And if we had race conditions, the fundamental problem is still just as bad with a 12-hour or a 24-hour or a 48-hour clock.

(How to solve it? No idea. Going for a plan-and-execution model would make the game very much different, and arguably very dissimilar from how Civ "should be".)

Civ is supposed to be played with sequential turns, you know. I don't see why you are so perplexed by this.

[kjn]

Civ is supposed to be played with sequential turns, you know. I don't see why you are so perplexed by this.

Not perplexed. Pitboss games are in many ways superior to PBEM. But forcing a simultaneous play onto a game designed for sequential play leads to bad things - like double moves, the sabotage troubles, et c, that need external rules to handle.

That's also why I mentioned that any real solution to the double-move (which is a race condition) problem would likely remove one key aspect of all Civ games, its consolidated movement-and-action phase.

[Tyrmith]

I'd love it if these other teams would spend more time playing civ and less time word-smithing in that stupid roleplay thread..

Not that I don't agree with you, but my (totally unsubstantiated) guess is that the roleplayers arn't the ones responsible for actually playing the turn. It'd be like blaming kjn or LP for not playing the turn when it's sullla's responsibility. It may actually be worse, as many of those teams opt for more of a poll based style where every turn they need to post what happened, talk about it for awhile, make sure everyone's had their input on what to do, and then someone needs to get around to actually playing. We plan things out far more then I think some of the other teams do.

[Sullla]

We plan things out far more then I think some of the other teams do.

Corrected: we plan things out far more than I think any of the other teams do.

I genuinely wish that we could avoid all this and play normally. But when the consequence for one piece of bad luck is death, we have to hedge our bets. I do think we could petition for a reduction of the turn timer to something like 36 hours over at CivFanatics. It's clear that the current 48 hours are not even remotely necessary. The ironclad rule of any Pitboss game is that the turns will take exactly as long as the timer is set. Allow 24 hours and everyone will play in 24 hours; allow a week, and everyone will take a week.

[antisocialmunky]

I would petition for shorter (24hr) clocks with a provision to lengthen the clock to 48 in case of massive war later on. The only reason why people probably chose a 48 hour clock is in the case of war. I wasn't part of the rules discussion so forgive me if this already came up, but why didn't we set this on a variable clock like I'm proposing?

[Tyrmith]

Didn't we already shorten the clock, or was that just from some longer number to what it is now?

[antisocialmunky]

I think that was ~48 timer hours to ~48 real hours right?

[mostly_harmless]

No, that discussion died, since only 3 teams voiced their opinion on it (incl. us), and the game admin never picked up the issue. I therefore think the turn timer is unchanged since game start.

mh

[kjn]

I checked down the rules for the game about war declarations, and I think we can play this move safely.

a. Civilizations that are at war must observe turn order. Turn order is automatically fixed by the APT Mod on the first turn of war.

b. Teams must also observe turn order on the turn immediately prior to the first turn of War.

b1. Declarer Desires First Half Example: If the declarer desires to move first during the war phase turns, they must move before their 'target' in the turn preceding their war declaration.

b2. Declarer Desires Second Half Example: If the declarer desires to move second during the war phase turns, they must move after their 'target' in the war declaration turn.

Setting out the various scenarios with the prior scouting map:



If we play now on T19, and move to magenta, and the DO (Dastardly Opponent) is 3NE of our capital, and then moves SW to 1N of deer and sees our capital.

Then case b2 applies, ie they moved after us on T19, and must declare war after we have moved. We have time to move our worker out of the way and get our warrior back in our borders.

So the movement this turn carries no risk.

However, our movement on T20 (to dark blue) carries a real risk.

On T20, our warrior moves to dark blue before the DO moves 1N of the deer.

On T21, if the DO wants to declare war, they have to follow the turn order of the previous turn. We move our warrior first to magenta on T21, then 1SE of AO on T22, and is back on the city on T23. The DO declares on T21, and can hit our capital on T22. So turn order doesn't matter here.

What we should do on T20 is however to play as late as possible, preferably as the turn rolls, over, then immediately do our moves and finish turn. That locks us to the first half of the turn timer.

[Sullla]

Turn 19 - 3240BC

Another 24 hours later, and We Play Civ still has not ended their turn. (Every other team has done so.) At this point, I was fed up with waiting and played our turn. We should be fine, and if for some reason we aren't, chalk it up to terrible cosmic karma.



Warrior move reveals nothing too interesting. Could be hidden strategic resources there, of course. When we move next turn (playing last no matter what for safety, which means we will surely have to use the full 48 hours ) we'll see a lot more tiles.

There's yet another hill tile SE-SE of our current position, so if we really wanted to be ballsy, we could go another tile even further out. Probably a bad idea though. Really a shame we lost that initial warrior, who would have had all this mapped out already.



Late turn Demos. I don't think there's anything here we haven't already noticed and processed.