Game style switching...

[sorberec]

A friend and I have just started a PBEM game and experience so far makes us wonder if there should not perhaps be an option to start PBEM games as networked games. The reason for this is that even with accelerated production, for a good portion of the early game, you're waiting for units to finish building and workers to construct improvements. Which means that the only thing you have to do is load the game, press SPACE, save, exit & e-mail to next player in the line. Hardly exciting is it?

Surely it would be better if you could play the game as an on-line turn based affair for an agreed number of turns or amount of time, and then resort to PBEM when you're at the stage when you're going to have something to do most turns?

[Zero]

If you play with a friend, then you can usually agreee to edit the game, say everyone starts out with 3 settler or everyone gets an extra scout... whatever.

or no timelimit simul is your best answer if u guys can all play at the same time.

[sorberec]

Well the other people I'm probably going to be playing with have only just started playing Civ3 (with the PTW expansion) so I don't want to go confusing everyone by editing the game rules at the moment. (I know one of them has played Civ2, but the other I've no idea of his Civ experience).

Obviously the whole point of PBEM is that it's there for people who can't definitely be on-line at the same time as the other players quite often. BUt if you can guarantee that everyone taking part will be on-line at the same time for say 1 hour at the start of the game, playing the vanilla PTW PBEM should be speeded up a bit.