Do we need to speed up our turns?

[asleepathewheel]

IMHO, we need to streamline our decision process. the turns are creaking along now, we have taken the full 24 hours and close to it now three consecutive turns. Not that its anyones fault of course, its difficult to reach an agreement quickly on anything. The purpose of this thread is to discuss change to our structure to perhaps alleviate the time problems as well as not requiring Nathan to leave his game running all day.

Let me first note that I think now that the war is underway, the turns will go faster, as we have geared towards war production and have fewer decisions to make.

First of all, do others feel this is a problem, or is it just me?

If its just me, then obviously we don't need to change anything.

If it isn't just me, then does anyone have any suggestions?

My first suggestion is that each topic for discussion gets its own thread immediately upon someone checking out the save. As issues crop up, new threads can be opened of course.

For example, for this latest turn, we would have had threads on: new wonder build, galley moves, front moves, scout moves, etc.

Benefits, we can concretely tell how each participant is feeling on an issue without having to wade through numerous messages. I think the last thread has 224 posts at this point. I don't want to wade through that mess to count votes. If we have issue specific threads, after a time, we can just count a person's last posted opinion (to allow for changes).

Of course the problem with that is, how long to wait? how many votes to count? I really don't know what's fair. I would like the saves to go out as soon as possible, but not at the expense of someone's ability to voice their opinion. Should we wait for certain people to weigh in on issues first before sending? I personally don't mind if my voice isn't heard on everyturn, but there are voices that should be heard before turns are sent.

Also to help this out, we can create threads for the next turns issues. Granted we are reactive right now, but that is going to change hopefully in 5 or so turns. Then we can have more preemptive threads like: do we raze the northern cities, or keep them? etc.

Drawbacks: would clutter our forum up. many items cross several topics.


Note: I'm not saying to be careless while speading up, I just think that we could smooth the process out a bit.

There are, no doubt, better suggestions than this one, but its all I could think of off the top of my head. Please give other suggestions if you have them or tell me to shut up if you are happy with everything now

[Aeson]

I think the turn time is a good thing to keep an eye on, but that the length the next few turns will drop drastically on it's own. We were hit by two real big blows in a row, the war and then the Pyramids, trying to fit a rather involved deal with GoW into the middle... all while getting ahold of the save each turn at a bad time of day given how our team operates on big decisions.

The poll should have our only real decision for next turn made before we get the save. Everything else is pretty straightforward. If we still need to speed things up, I'm fine with giving Nathan more leeway to make spur of the moment decisions (fine with it anyways actually). The basic direction we are heading has been defined (or will by the wonder poll).

[FrustratedPoet]

I've seen the other teams complain about us taking too long, but I say that as long as we are within the 24 hours we're allowed then we're doing nothing wrong.

That doesn't mean that we can't streamline the system a bit. Some more polls wouldn't hurt, although the amount of time available for voting would be short, it would be a good experiment I think.

However, in exceptional circumstances (ie. when an ally sneak attacks you) there is nothing wrong with taking a long time. Other teams have sat on the save for their full allocation before.

I think that turns will go a bit quicker for the moment, no our production is sorted out for the war. Although if some new shock comes along we might slow down again.

Turns are bound to take longer as the game progresses anyway. Managing a 15-20 city Civ simply has to take longer than managing a 1-10 city Civ. We should do all we can to make the process of playing a turn more efficient, but the other teams will have to accept that occasionally people will want to take the full 24 hours they're allowed.

It's a good idea to address this topic.

[DeepO]

You're definfately right in the need for more polls, or specific discussion threads. But it's not easy to separate your posts on one specific topic, and stay to the the thread. We get easily distracted in the turn threads, but that's normal, it's simply hectic because of the radical changed situation.

The wonder discussion should have been separated the moment somebody (nye?) posted first that we can change the wonder next turn. Further, last turn might have seen a separate thread on precise defense plans, which we can plan for. We know there are a couple of situtations we need to adress, maybe a separate thread fo r this makes it easier to track, and to comment on. E.g. what we do when Vox moves a small stack next to the mountain 9 of Arashi, when Vox moves a large stack there, what happens if Vox would try to approach throught the desert, what we need to do in case of invasions to either Hurricane, or closer to Olibanum Gale. These things are rather straightforward, and define what kind of troop strentghts we're going to need to keep those cities.

But please, try to keep the number of threads down, we shouldn't open over 5 new threads for each turn, that would be too much clutter in our forum, even more then the chaotic turn threads are now.

DeepO