Binge and Purge PBEM

[self biased]

we'll try this again...

pbem, meeting one particular night out of the week to bang out a few dozen turns.

any takers?

[Beta]

What night? And when you say night - what times are you referring to?

[self biased]

evenings eastern time. i've monday nights off after nine. jon miller's up for some action, too.

[snoopy369]

I suppose I could be convinced to play a game on monday nights. I couldn't guarantee EVERY monday night, but some at least... after 8pm central time (even earlier would be fine if there's another day in the week you can make it earlier)

[Beta]

Monday sounds good to me. As does having Jon involved.

[self biased]

four hours trying to get an MP game off the other night sold him on PBEM.

[snoopy369]

How about starting with us 4, this monday? Four is a good number for this sort of game - more and you'll have decreasing likelihood of actually getting off fast turn sessions.

Another question - what method of connection will we use? I suggest either MSN messenger (or similar), or IRC... I have accounts on all of the major IM programs, but MSN seems to be the program of choice among 'Poly folks ...

[snoopy369]

And - what sort of game are you looking at, in terms of world details?

Pangea?

Small?

60% water?

Middle-of-road, or random, age/climate/temp?

[Beta]

Snoop - so many questions - so little time.

I would suggest small, pangaea. Monarch.

And do we want 4 Ai's in with us. I think not. But how about random civs. That would be interesting.

As to chat places - why don't we just use poly. I think I have msn messenger. To be honest - I hardly use it.

And I am OK for Monday evening.

Mmmmm .... just finishing my eggnog and whiskey - Canadian whiskey I may add.

[snoopy369]

From my experience, you can't do (well) a fast-turn game through Email. Yahoo! and other free email servers often delay emails for five minutes or more; not a big deal for a one-a-day, but when you're trying to do a lot of turns in a short time period you need direct sends.

I've had games where I got 15-20 turns (in a 2 player game) per hour done (early game turns) through direct sends; I don't think a 2 player game could get more than 5 turns done in an hour with email sends. A four player game would be even worse.

You can use IRC, or any of the IM programs to do direct sends - as well as FTP either through a common FTP server or direct FTP connections to each other if we set them up properly...

I'd rather not have AI civs. Random is fine.

Edit: I suppose we could post the turns via attaching them to posts - but that does not have the advantage of notifying you when the person before you in the turn cycle sends them to you. That would slow it down a bit, especially if (as I presume) we do not spend 100% of our monday nights waiting for turns (Although I lead a pretty boring life, and usually spend monday evenings watching football or, now that football is over, playing civ )

[self biased]

i've got msn and AIM. i'll PM jon miller, and let him know what is up. about the setup, though... i like the direct send idea, but what about four of us with two civs each?

[snoopy369]

I'd rather not, but i will if the consensus is for 2 civs.

2 civs can be fun, but it would slow the game down a lot, and it doesn't really make it that much more interesting in the long run. Just means that someone who gets lucky and has both start next to each other either is a target (like me in my 2x4 game) or has a huge advantage, if he doesn't advertise it (*dumb dumb dumb me*) ...

Also, you have the problem that you have to pick a bigger map, and that makes the game progress slower than it would on an equivalent ratio of size to civs with 4 players ...

[snoopy369]

I was thinking this over again, and I may be wrong. 2 civs each will in some senses speed things up - faster tech progress, and we'll each have 2x as many military types so we'll have roughly the same progress. Of course, the 2x as large map will have a slower tech rate, but not 2x slower i don't think.

What do the rest of you think??

[snoopy369]

Oh - and my msn nick is (surprise) snoopy369@yahoo.com

[snoopy369]

You almost home sb?