Problems with PBEM

[wilfal]

i took my first turn and this is my take.

1. The game will move slow. That is without a doubt. The upside is that we, the players in a group control this...so keep up

2. No props to Activision...their heads were up their asses in almost all aspects of the game including PBEM. What am I talking about:
A. In pbem, a player can play out numerous scenerios before sending the game to the next player. EX: 1st turn i could move my settler, close out, open back up, move the settler somewhere else, repeat process until you have a settler that can explore much much more. And when the military gets involved bad scene...what if Monkey drops his whole fleet on one of my cities and gets toasted....do you really think anyone is not going to close out and reconsider their move. I dont think so....
B. The game took 1 minute to download and one minute to upload and that is after turn one...how about turn 230. I expect download/upload to slow down and be a pain in the ass.

I really dont want to gripe b/c i love the game Civilization. But man, If any other company would of made this game I dont think the flaws would be so bad....Activision should of gone out of business about 1 month after the release of Stampeed on the Atari 2600.

The upside...i think the flaws i see can be nulified with a code of ethics...but is that realistic?

[wilfal]

the first message was posted by me WIL

but i also go by wilfal

[Monkey]

Yes WIL, unfortunately that problem of players cheating by loading the save game multiple times cant be solved easily. For now we will just have to accept that players have the morals not to do that.

Besides what fun is that if you are playing to win? Like I said we are playing a diplomatic game so think carefully before you go rushing your entire fleet to destroy someone. Having said that I would be still be pretty cheesed if my entire fleet got destroyed by one of WIL's cities and I might consider reloading....hmmmm(hehehehe *evil chuckle*)

No, **raises right hand** I Monkey solemnly swear that I will not reload a save game not matter how tempting the situation might be.

I'd encourage all players to take that oath with me

I will update the rules page to take into account this reloading of save games by players. I think someone else informed me already about this in the other rules thread in CTP general but thanks for informing me WIL. However, I very much doubt the rule can be enforced....

[Frazer]

I solemnly swear never to cheat in any way and to keep the game moving as fast as I possibly can.

[Monkey]

Ok i'm worried that the people are not getting their turns on time now and I just remembered that I forgot to inform people of the order in which the turns will take...

The order is:

1)Monkey
2)Robm
3)WIL
4)Ed
5)Becky
6)Luk
7)butchM
8)Frazer

if you think your turn has been massively delayed contact me at my e-mail or post here in this thread....I still havent heard anything from Ed yet....
[This message has been edited by Monkey (edited September 02, 1999).]

[Big Dave]

Hey Monkey, just another thought I wanted to share before it died of lonliness

You might consider starting a separate thread for each PBEM game you run. Everyone would publicly post when they send the file. If someone does not receive the file they can post and email the last player to have it so it can be resent. This way everyone is kept informed of the whereabouts of the current turn. When the thread gets too long you start a new one and ask Markos or DanQ to lock or delete the original thread with a final message containing a link to the new thread.

In addition to keeping the players all up-to-date on the status of the game this also lets snoopy folks like me see how the game is going. I don't have time to get involved in a game right now, but after January I'll be looking and would like to know generally how the PBEM games are "flowing".

Thanks for considering my ramblings,

Big Dave

[Big Dave]

Well, now that I've read the rest of this forum I feel stupid. You already did it.

[Robm]

I solemnly swear to never cheat and reload a game. You raised a very valid point WIL, I hadn't even thought of it myself, yet, but I probably would have after completely losing a 9 man stack to 1 phalanx.

Seriously, we do have to agree not to cheat, and I shall up hold that on my part.

[Luk]

I wait, wait and wait, where is my turn?

[Paul]

Regarding Wilfal's complaint about the time it takes to upload/download the saved games: You could zip the files and then mail the zips unless there are players who don't know how to handle zip files. I have not yet played CTP by e-mail or tried to zip a CTP saved game, but that would probably help.

[Paul]

For testing purposes I started a PBEM game. I noticed that PBEM saved games (96 kB) are smaller than regular saved games (312 kB). Zipping the PBEM game compressed it to 90 kB so that's probably not worth the effort.

One other and more annoying thing I noticed was that I would get to see the next player's message icon for the empty build queue after ending the turn.

[Robm]

I wonder if Ed has taken his turn, I don't see any action from him. Maybe we should start a new game without him.

[wilfal]

To Paul,

It takes 1 minute at 56k to upload/download the file, i think my aol account auto zips any attachments, but i dont think zipping a file will save that much time. If anyone has a probelm with the file i send let me know. I have 4 e-mail services and could send through another.

WIL