Some Team Organization/Efficiency Comments

[scooter]

Let's talk about where we are right now as a team. We're in a difficult position for a few reasons:

* In-game situation is tense, so everyone is on edge
* Turn player transition
* A widening gap between the "main group" that is logging in and/or paying very close attention and those who are following more loosely.

The reality is, as much as we try to emphasize the "democracy" portion of the gap whenever possible, we have so many cities and units that it is just not possible to discuss every city and/or tactical move as a team, other than via livestream. I think we need to chat for a few to 1) nail down roles and 2) guide discussion to be more productive than it has been lately.


Leading Roles

Primary Turn-player/Pilot: NobleHelium
Primary Tactician/Co-Pilot: sunrise089
C&D: kjn
Diplo: scooter
PR @ CFC: Ceiliazul
Turn Tracking Thread updater: ??

The last one we probably need to fill. IMO, the pictures and words posted in the turn discussion thread are sufficient, but turn reports are disjointed into sections now more than ever. This is fine given the state of the game, but it would be nice if at the end of each turn, someone could go through the discussion thread, pick out the highlights, add some minor commentary if necessary, and post it into the tracking thread. You don't need to be able to login to do this, it should be mainly copy/pasting and organizing things that are already posted. Do we have any volunteers for something like this? This would be perfect for someone trying to find a way to contribute further.


Turn-by-turn Discussion

Primarily, I think we need a "Tactical Discussion" thread. I'd like one separate thread where we can discuss purely tactical things without it getting mixed in with "which city do we draft" and "when do we whip X" and metagaming theorizing. So if there's support for this idea, let's create a thread like that, fill it with screenshots of our border, and start plotting the ideal place to put our units and/or discuss places for pre-emptive strikes.


Diplo Discussion

I've complained about this with an unfortunate lack of tact, but the quality of this thread really degrades when we get to discussing CFC. Anytime a topic relating to them comes up, we get a "Crazy CFC Post" thing going on where people suggest conspiracy theories, NAP-stabbing, and get irrationally angry and degrade the thread. Then we get a wave of people complaining about the first group (I'm including myself in this group), which is also not very productive. We need both of these waves to stop so that we can calmly discuss our options. Generally speaking, if you can't discuss the diplo situation without getting angry or promoting conspiracy theories constantly, you probably should just steer clear of that thread and focus your energy on the tactical stuff. I'd like that thread to be focused on one thing: Getting the dogpile to crack. We've seen a bunch of games here where dogpiles failed, and it's usually because the dogpilers cracked in one way or another. Solving that problem is a lot more productive than


General Etiquette

This is mainly aimed at people in defined roles - stop being jerks to people who are not in defined roles, even if you think their ideas are lousy. That freezes them out. I aim this at myself too of course, but we've been slowly squelching discussion. I think we have a lot of discussion over bad ideas, but I think the solution to this is guiding the discussion more carefully rather than killing it.

For those not involved in defined roles - please do pay attention and keep updated on what's going on, and if some things are not being covered adequately, feel free to speak up and say so. It can be a little discouraging to people in defined roles when they do something, and then someone who clearly isn't paying close enough attention criticizes them ignorantly.


I would love to get more input on what you all think would make things run more smoothly. I know of several people who have quit following the game due to frustration with how things are run, and I really don't want that "brain drain" to continue. I've really enjoyed this game and us all working together, and it would be sad to see things crash and burn, especially now that we're facing a bit of adversity.

[Sullla]

The reality is, as much as we try to emphasize the "democracy" portion of the gap whenever possible, we have so many cities and units that it is just not possible to discuss every city and/or tactical move as a team, other than via livestream.

When I made this same suggestion, repeatedly, I was pilloried by the rest of the team. But it's the reality of how a game like this has to be run. It is not possible to micromanage every detail when we have 35 cities, dozens of units, and hundreds of population points.

The best solution is to pick capable people and put them in charge of their respective fields (e.g. scooter for diplomacy and so on), letting them make the minor day to day decisions on things, and get a group consensus for anything important. This team's biggest ongoing issue has been a refusal to let those people do their jobs, and constant micromanaging / backseat driving / Monday Morning Quarterbacking of every last decision from the peanut gallery... especially the small and trivial things that don't really matter. I had to step away from this game because the incessant nitpicking of every single action was driving me insane. The team has to delegate some of the responsibility and trust those in charge to do their own thing. For those who can't handle that, this may not be the right environment.

As scooter says, there's also a gaping hole in report coverage of the turns right now. I know this is shocking, but the stuff that I wrote every turn represented a vast amount of time and effort. No one stepped up to fill that void, and someone needs to do so. What a team needs above all else is information to make intelligent decisions.

[antisocialmunky]

I think instead of having a tactical thread or a thread for all of X need to have...

Some War Threads, 1 for each front each with up to date C&D in the OP and our unit status on each front (all data is in the C&D and report threads):
1) Poly
2) CivPlayers
3) CFC, if it comes to that.

People use the turn discussion thread for general micro.

I feel like somehow this forum has turned into a sim of how people decided that republics are better than pure democracies.

[pindicator]

I think your idea of having someone in charge of going through the thread and pulling out the relevant / decided information is important not just for getting turns written up, but for every thread as well. Noble asked a question about Open Borders yesterday and I realized there wasn't a place to quickly reference the current deals we have. (Or is there and I'm dumb?)  But having some kind of sticky for every thread that gets updated with current plans.  We can add one post for every turn with what we decide, or we can just edit a top post with the current plans, but the important part would be only one person posts in there to make the information easy to find.  I would
> recommend stickies like this for:

Current Diplo Deals
Micro Plans for current and upcoming turns
Tactical Plans for current and upcoming turns

This way the turnplayer will have a quick and easy reference for what to do to prevent things from being missed or plans being forgotten. It would also help confusion in the discussion as people could quickly look back on what the established plan is.

I would also suggest that the people in charge of the larger sections (domestic micro, and possibly tactical) try to delegate tasks as much as possible.  Find people who want more involved roles and assign them tasks like:

• Figure out how best to build military over the next X turns.  We want to produce X, Y, Z units for the war and yet keep growing
  
• What's the best way to fastest way to get the bank finished at MM without sacrificing gold generation or delaying our GP?  (Solved, I know, but it's an example)
  
• How would you defend an attack from CFC with X cannons and knights?

They then give their recommendations to the primary person in charge of each section, which would help take the burden off the primary person, and also help get more people feel involved with the game. Maybe give the same assignment to multiple people, along with a deadline.  But the final say would be the primary person's.

And on top of all that we still need to be welcoming of casual participants and their ideas.  I think my idea of having Sticky posts with the current agreed plans would help Casual participants be able to participate better, by showing them where we are so they aren't repeating ideas or bringing up things that were finalized turns ago.

And yes, I'll take on that responsibility if you think it's a good idea and nobody else feels energetic about signing up for it. But i may not be the best person for it because i could only devote time to it in the evenings.

[Ruff_Hi]

Leading Roles

Primary Turn-player/Pilot: NobleHelium
Primary Tactician/Co-Pilot: sunrise089
C&D: kjn
Diplo: scooter
PR @ CFC: Ceiliazul
Turn Tracking Thread updater: ??

I can pull things together but a summary of some items that change during the latest turn (ie developing diplo) would be good.

The current posts in the discussion thread are fine for reports. They might not be up to Sullla standard, nor present the various options being considered ... but they certainly capture the flavour of what is gong on.

The other option is that someone I write a super high level turn report and then references individual posts from our discussion thread. Looks like we need something for T166 and T167 - is that right?

Candidate posts are:
http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthrea...#pid401392
http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthrea...#pid401433
http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthrea...#pid401434
http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthrea...#pid401569
http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthrea...#pid402623
http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthrea...#pid402636
http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthrea...#pid402702

Those will do for general game discussion. What about our diplo position - do we have suitable summary posts that I can reference for that?

[scooter]

Current Diplo Deals

You know, we actually do have this. It's in the second post of the Diplo Tracker. However, it is out of date. If someone would like to update it and keep it up-to-date, that would be wonderful too. It slips through the cracks for me - I don't really have the time to do that.



Good comments so far. ASM has a point about splitting up tactical threads, although I would at least consider combining Apolyton/CivPlayers into one thread ("The Western Theater") since they are more likely to be essentially functioning as one civ. I'm not totally convinced we want multiple tactical threads, but I don't feel so strongly that I would object to it.

[mostly_harmless]

I think the Tactical Thread is a good idea, to get more people involved. I would not split the Western Front into two separate threads, though, as ASM suggested. East and West should do.

We are in a bit of a weird situation. With Sullla's excellent regular turn reports there was plenty of well documented information for lurkers and "casual" members to come up with ideas and suggestions, which then very often got shot down because of Sullla's way to run this game.
Now the "core" team wants more participation but the regular detailed info is missing.
I think, having someone (Ruff volunteered, right?) to compile a turn summary is a very good idea.

mh

[antisocialmunky]

I think we need to have 3 critical pieces of information per report post right now which we could have their own little sections:

Our Unit Micro
Our Builds
Enemy Movements

And we'd want some highlights for everything else. As long as the information is not so jumbled together, it would be good.

Also can Sunrise or someone else who is good at tactical stuff curate our defense plans? I'm not quite sure what's going on in that area.

It seems like we have a stack trying to cover both BbB and DD and we are going to give up Gauntlet. But I couldn't say what the plans are beyond that.

[pindicator]

Could we ask for a pause while we set all this up?
I think losing our turnplayer and setting up a working system for going forward is a pretty good reason for a 24hr pause

[antisocialmunky]

Lets, though we'll be on the 1 week timer soon.