Pitboss etiquette

[2metraninja]

Advantages of going second:

1. Krill edit: Going second allows you to move twice before an opponents builds complete ie you can move HA/knights 4 tiles through culture before you have to dela with reactions

Generally going second gives you one turn advantage - you make the first move in the war, then the first turn of the war ends, your opponent can react on the next turn.

[Old Harry]

Thanks novice, Krill, retep, Donovan. I've used all your suggestions and updated the first post.

Anyone think this would be useful to be stickied?

[Mardoc]

Possibly - if you add a disclaimer. "This is not an exhaustive list. There are things that we didn't think to mention that are still rude."

[Old Harry]

Added.

[BRickAstley]

Stuck.

[OT4E]

Is autopromote allowed?

[spacetyrantxenu]

Yes. Though it comes with the risk of the AI doing really dumb things with your xp.

[Old Harry]

1. Play your turn as soon as you can. A fast turn pace is a happy turn pace.
   
2. If you can't play your turn(s) find a sub. Otherwise you might find it hard to get into future games. (Thanks retep)
   
3. The person declaring war can choose which half of the turn timer they get, so long as they didn't move after the victim on the previous turn.
   
4. Don't try to play after another player on a regular basis. If you are trying to prevent them getting the second half when they attack you then you're playing clock games and Krill will find your pathetic civ and crush it. If you are planning to attack them then just drop behind them one or two turns in advance (it's actually less likely to telegraph your intentions). In fact you can play before them the turn before you attack - there is no problem with letting your victim double move you.
   

It seems like the wording of 1, 3 and 4 isn't clear. Should 3 say something like:

The person declaring war can choose which half of the turn timer they get on the turn where they declare war, so long as they didn't move after the victim on the previous turn.

?

[Charriu]

I think we should also add that you cannot assume that the other patry knows about a peace-time turnsplit. The other involving party should be informed via short PM or something.

I think this could have prevented the end of PB53.

Also I could look into adding a new trade item to communicate this turnsplit in-game.

[Gaspar]

The inherent problem with these rules, and why there is a conflict over the rules in most games, is that the following statements are all true:

Pitboss games take many months to resolve, and so players are heavily invested in playing optimally.

The second half of the turn is objectively better than the first half of the turn.

The outcome of those two statements, is that basically in every instance a player is either playing suboptimally or is going to want the second half of the turn.

You can make every other rule, but as long as a player has agency in choosing which half of the turn timer they want you are going to have conflict. Just because nobody has elevated the nonsense to Lord Parkin levels in years doesn't mean there isn't constant conflict over turn splits. This is because there is no soft rule anyone is going to come up with that is going to fix this. The only way this can be actually fixed is either by going to sequential all the time OR coming up with a rule that applies uniformly in all situations AND the players have no agency in once the game has started.

The current rule - attacker chooses sounds great. But if I recognize my opponent is preparing for war, all I have to do is attack him and I can get the turnsplit I want. The attacker is a meaningless distinction. All it means is he who declares war. Peacetime turn splits happen all the time, a la PB53, but they can't be enforced and then we end up in the tech thread with people quitting and so on and so forth.

What we need to do with a rule is take the agency away from the players in the moment. One easy rule is to say, once two players have been at war, any future war state will have the same turn split. That alleviates some of the issues that have both occurred in PB55 and PB53. But that just kicks the can up the road, and incentivizes early game wardecs to secure superior turn splits. Its still better than games blowing up as they are now, but its not ideal. A second easy rule is to have every game convert to sequential once war has been declared, as has been proposed in some recent games. I think this is a better solution, because Civ4 was designed to be played with sequential turns.

A third potential rule, would be to assign every player a turn order when the game begins, based on their play windows, as in sequential. The mapmaker assigns each player a slot in the order based on this and therefore, in any war between player 3 and player 4, player 3 would go first and player 4 would go second.

I'm not sure any of these are perfect answers, but they're all better answers than taking subjective rules and treating them like they are objective.