I’m thinking that as we move into summer we should start another succession game -- something simple, something easy -- the lazy hazy days of summer. My current working thought is: each player gets to found one and only one city -- so seven players, seven cities; nine players, nine cities; (211 players, 32 cities because we’ll never get through the roster.) We are effectively a conclave of mayors, running our collective city-states. You run your city & any available units on the map during your set of turns -- at the end, place your city on either domestic or military advisor (Auto). Next player opens & plays his city, the available units, and then puts his city back onto automatic status. So we cycle through…

Conquered cities are placed on domestic or military advisor & left that way for the rest of the game. “Free” cities via huts are dealt with in the same way. During the player’s turn, he can micro manage his city anyway he wants to, but the remaining empire is run by the delegated domestic & military advisors. (If you want, you can help RB whatever is in the works in any city.)

I’m also thinking that we should use the “go-to” command and/or the long movement as much as possible. By setting up the automatic movement we’ll make the turns faster, have less flexibility and hamstring ourselves with fewer degrees of freedom. So the “available units” are those not on auto-pilot -- at least half of the settlers/engineers should also be on automatic (once the entire set of cities are founded.)

Fortified units can attack out of their cities when the attack is at the door. Units can also be called up to move up to three spaces from cities to chase down bandits, barbarians, invaders and other riff-raff. -- This is the only time when a player can disturb the otherwise preplanned city activity of a fellow mayor. Naturally, said units should be returned to the appropriate city as soon as possible after the emergency is over.

Players may choose the governments of Republic or Democracy, or if ALL agree, Communism. And just like these governments, we agree to work one or two months a year & delegate or go on vacation for the rest of the time.

Up for discussion -- do we want an “extra” city for all to play with -- perhaps the capital, or SSC? Do we want some “city rules” such as each city must provide a militia unit, a settler for the common good, (can opt for an addition settler for the city’s own development), and two other units for the national defense (one for the away team and one for domestic security)? Do we want to have a friendly competition for the grandest city among our fellow mayors (which of course will only add risk that the entire republic could go down in the soup…)

As pointed out to me before, we’re planning on MGE, Deity, Large Map & Raging Hordes, because the conclave of mayors want the room for hunting and have targets to shoot at.

Players will play the lesser of: 15 turns or two hours real time the first round, 10 turns or two hours real time each successive round -- short write up should take no more than fifteen minutes of that time. After all, this is a lazy effort, minimal thought, reasonable challenge. But since we don’t want to be too lazy about this, each player will play within 48 hours of the previous player’s post, otherwise it is an automatic skip. If we have at least five players by the end of this month, we’ll kick off June first; otherwise we’ll start with the summer solstice.