Behavior in PBEM games

[TheBirdMan]

A question to all the "old" gamers:

Is it "ok" to play my turn over and over again (reload) to the point where I'm satisfied with my turn. I mean - in a turn, you realized, that you had moved too close to something/someone, that you wouldn't like. Then you reload and move you unit to another direction.

Or is that bad behavior?
[This message has been edited by TheBirdMan (edited July 25, 2000).]

[Lung]

A definite no-no, i'm afraid

If you're new to pbem games, it might be forgivable. I know the excitement can be overwhelming (so i'm told ), but ultimately you are cheating yourself. The biggest temptation comes from knowing that you might not get another turn for a few days, and you want to check all your options. Unfortunately, it's not kosher as it amounts to cheating. The game itself is based on a level of uncertainty, so it's cheating to deny that uncertainty, on a par with replaying a turn in Civ2 when you uncover a goody hut.

Do so at your own peril

[Sophanthro]

Yep, It's definitely not something your allowed to do.

You are allowed to open your turn after you played it to check things, but the turn you send to the next player must be the first turn you opened. Oh and if your opening it after the first time, you shouldn't move units to other locations as you might see something you shouldn't. At least thats the way I look at it.

[TheBirdMan]

Well - I thought so myself.

Just asking........... course I do want do join more games than the one I'm playing (my first on the first turn), and I'm not going to do something stupid - unless all others do the same.

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Woodstock was here!

[Stavros]

In theory, you can of course negotiate or dictate any rules for a game you start yourself, if you can find the players that agree to the rules.
It would be an interesting experiment. It would mean never loosing a battle you initiated, never finding a bad goody hut, faster mapping, and probably always catching special units which attack your city. On the downside, it would probably take 20 minutes to (re)play each turn Has anyone tried this?
But I agree in thinking that it would take a lot away from the game. Has anyone ever thought about writing up a PBEM etiquette guide?

[MOBIUS]

I get the feeling that PBEM was an after thought for Activision in CtP...

All of these potential cheating problems could be avoided in CtP II.

Perhaps we should petition activision before it's released (Not much time! Hopefully they've already thought of that/someone else has already suggested it...)

My thought is that anything that could conceivably give another person an unfair gaming advantage is either gamesmanship or at worst, cheating...

One has to trust the other players, as they have to trust you...

[Jon]

The simple solution is to follow the route adopted in SMAC which has password control on Turns and sends notification to all other Players if anyone has replayed their Turn. It also specifies if this was more than one replay, which is a certainty to occur innocently through crashes in the course of a long game, and counts it as cheating.

The downside is that it means that you must have a CMN in a SMAC PBEM or the game dies if one Player drops out. With an enthusiastic playing community that is generally not a problem as the ACOL Forum shows.