Question about playing in sessions

[Franses]

I noticed that as a host I am able to study a game after the other players leave. It just continues with the other players defeted.

If it is only the host that can do this it does not seem fair to the other players? Is there a way they can study their game too?

Sending them the saved game will not help since they then get to play my civ. Are they able to start the game from a save of their own or what? Does anybody know the answer to this question?

[Acemo]

their civs should be destroyed upon leaving, but yes you can study the terrain and even use the replay feature. if the host quits first the other players have the same thing happen. I am pretty sure that they have autosaves to study if they wish. In other words, cheating is possible, AFAIK the honor system is the only thing that prevents this, so it is good to know who you are playing against. It might be possbile to password protect one's civ, but I don't have the game infront of me to check.

[Franses]

Thanks for your reply. Good to know.

I was not thinking about cheating though. I trust the players I play with but I can imagine that all players decide to take a break to just study their current situation. Especially in the later parts of the game I think it is worthwhile to do that between sessions. It might speed up things in the next one. Or do you regard that cheating in itself?

[Acemo]

Originally posted by Franses
...
I can imagine that all players decide to take a break to just study their current situation. Especially in the later parts of the game I think it is worthwhile to do that between sessions. It might speed up things in the next one. Or do you regard that cheating in itself?

I'm not sure exactly what you mean. If you mean studying the game as in your empire only, I can't see how that would be cheating, but I would consider playing any additional turns to be cheating though.
Of course that is just me personally.

[Franses]

Yes, I do mean studying your own empire. What is build, how your units should be stacked. That kind of stuff. Sometimes in SP games it takes me 10 minutes or more to do a turn. You cann't do that in MP unless all players need that amount of time.

I fully agree with you. Playing extra turns is clearly cheating. No doubt about that. I trust no one here on Apolyton will ever do that.

[Acemo]

I don't see any problem with studying your civ, but it does bring up an interesting point.
Most of the games i play are si-move no turn limit games. I almost always have time to study my troop placement adjust city production queues before the other people I am playing with are done with their moves. Why is this? I don't automate settlers right off (I do use "build road to"), but I do, once I start to get too many, say 20 or more. I do allow my governor to control what tiles are worked and to control happiness, but I don't think i use any more automation than that.
So I am playing fast or is everyone playing slow or micromanaging everything?

[notyoueither]

I think you play fast Acemo. I use govenors too, but you are almost always done before me.

[Franses]

In the continuation of my first game I tried the save possibities. If you are not the host you can not save but......

if autosave is on there is an autosave of the game. If you start it, it will load the game completely intact.

Fortunately this is the case because I had a strange experience this evening. We started this game a few days ago. Me being the host. When we wanted to continue it this evening I opened the game but the other player was unable to connect to it. We wanted to try again but from that time onwards I had a hard time starting it at all. As soon as I pressed host I generally was kicked back to the main menu or the game stalled completely (directIP as well as gamespy). After a couple of tries I succeeded again but the other player was again not able to connect. Finally we decided he would try to host the game (possible thanks to the autosave feature mentioned above) using directIP. This worked as expected.

Any ideas on how we can solve this next time?.

[Acemo]

Originally posted by notyoueither
I think you play fast Acemo. I use govenors too, but you are almost always done before me.

Thanks, that is good to know, maybe I should slow down.