Hourglass

[Illuminated One]

Ok, a hopefully very different game with only a slight modification.

You may only spend a fixed amount of 10 minutes for each of the first 20 turns and 20 minutes for each turn the rest of the game. This includes all time spend on diplomacy, testing, deciding, playing and whatever you do during the turn. If you do not use up the time of your turn it is lost you don't have extra time for the next. If you are a noob (have played less then 3 games) you get additional 5 minutes.
You have 2 hours to design your god.
You may also not play a nation you have already played and you are not allowed to play this nation in another game of any sort as long as you play here.
You may not conduct diplomacy with a nation you have not seen in game.

Get yourself a stopwatch, set it and when the timer rings send in the turn and stop sending any messages. Right, little break, to make sure you have read the rules and agree to follow them, you have to say Scythe somewhere in your sign up post.
There's no excuse like I just needed 30 secs to finish thats, or I was just talking about the game with my fellow player without doing actual diplomacy or I just accidentaly set up a SP which is very similar. Try to not make strategies for this game while driving to work or whatever, too. And you shall not use any means you have (like macros) to ease the micro for you.

Hosting interval: 52h flat (delays liberal).
Mods: CBM 1.6
Era: LA (R'lyeh and Ermor banned, for obvious reasons)
Settings: Standard
Players: 5 - 9
Map: Decided by majority vote

Anyone interested?

[Squirrelloid]

Does reading your turn reports / watching battle replays / finding the provinces in which you found sites via remote spells count against your time for the turn? Because 10 minutes sounds absolutely stupid if it does.

How do you expect anyone to play endgame in 20 minutes? How do you expect anyone to actually use mages? Better hope you get a nation with thugs/SCs!

[Illuminated One]

Well, I played games with about that timeframe for individual turns. And the thing is of course to prevent a ridiculous late game. Of course this doesn't produce the best turns but if everyone sticks to the rules it's completely fair.
Yeah, thugable nations are quite good here, I might as well ban Niefel/Gath if the players want it. Other than that take it or leave it.

[Gregstrom]

Actually I'm sort of interested. I don't often have the time to put in a decent turn after turn 40 or so, and the idea of a game where everyone's under a tight time pressure sounds like a laugh.

[Belac]

How would it be enforceable? You could require everyone to make a forum post when beginning to work on their turn, then another when about to submit it, but would there be any way of checking against the llamaserver logs to make sure people were honest?

[rdonj]

The problem is, even if you could tell when the file was received (you can't on the llamaserver, you'd have to use gandalf's), people could still just lie about when they started doing the turn and you'd have no way of knowing. The only way I can think of that you could actually enforce this (and this would be completely stupid and not worth doing) would be to have the turn files going to one or more third party players, who the players have to ask to give them their turns. Then, the player has to do their turn within a certain amount of time after receiving the turn file from the administrator folks they have to send the turn back to the third party player, who then uploads the turn.

Doing so would be completely insane, so I don't recommend it. I highly doubt there is any valid means of enforcing this rule... so it's best not to try to. If this game is going to happen it's going to rely on the honor system.

[Gregstrom]

Wot no more interest in this game?

[Squirrelloid]

At 10m/turn? It takes longer than that to go through my messages by year 2 if I'm in a war!

[Gregstrom]

...and? This game requires a different playstyle from the one you're used to. I was looking forward to the challenge, and there was even the possibility I'd learn something from it.

[Squirrelloid]

...and? This game requires a different playstyle from the one you're used to. I was looking forward to the challenge, and there was even the possibility I'd learn something from it.

Having to make decisions without knowing the state of the game is stupid. Speed chess works because you can process the board state instantly. The point of timing is to reduce the available time to plan moves, not make it impossible to know what's going on.

[Illuminated One]

Squirrelloid, you have now stated 3 times that you will not play.
The rules of a game you do not play in are not your concern. Spamming the thread with telling everyone how stupid you think this game looks in my eyes like you try to convince people to not join for some fun or agenda of yours. Of course it is funny to manipulate people in games, but most people draw a line in real life and do not try to impress their opinion upon everyone (*). People who don't draw this line are, when people realize it, generally not respected and left with the free time to spam every game thread.
Take a lesson from rdonj or the x other players, who, while not showing interest have no need to tell everyone what they think about it.

(*) this is of course perfectly ok when you have to protected someone or it is a designated discussion area


So, back to the game:

It is completely possible to get an overwatch over the map in 1 minute, overlooking a battle setup takes another (if anyone doesn't know the f and n keys can be used to speed things up). Of course you cannot watch everything in detail and consult debug logs. You also cannot spend 5h on diplomacy or micromanage your rp to the last experience star.
This game is not for people who like that.
This game is for people who like to play an intuitive game, try do their best to cope with the big challenge, can live with the many mistakes they make, and can find only 20 minutes every two day to commit.

[Digress]

I like the idea.

I play that way already ... and it shows.

Unfortunately I can't pencil my failings all down to time pressure ... "strategic" failings brought on by banging out turns whilst drinking cause more problems.

Maybe I need to start a "Too drunk to drive?" game - now how do I organize to breathalyse players before they do their turns.

[Illuminated One]

Haha, I like that idea even more.
I'd certainly play in it, and it's a question of honor to drink in a drinking game.

[rdonj]

Actually I would be completely happy to play in a game like this. I am one of the fastest dominions players in blitzes anyway, so it would hurt me less than many other people :). The only problem is (as I am saying rather a lot these days...) I'm trying to get out of games, not into new ones. So unfortunately I can't join :(. Of course, the games I'm still in right now could go on for ages....


Also: There is a better (still unfeasible) way of enforcing a timer than I originally stated. You could leave quickhost off, and arrange specific times to get everyone together to do their turns. When such a time comes around and everyone is available to play, you force host the turn and then everyone has to get their turn in within the time limit. You could play multiple turns in one go, or not. If you went with such a system it would probably be best to have everyone on IRC or something so you could tell when everyone was there and ready. Alternately, skip that and pre-arrange times. If someone isn't available during the play window, they stale (this would suck, badly). It would still be a lot of pain and effort to organize playing a game in this fashion, so again, I would just stick with the honor system.

[militarist]

I like blitzes. I play chess well as well, and like long parties when you think a lot, and blitzes also.
But the question is the reason -why do you want such a game? I would understand it if you want to do like 5-6 moves per day. I would be interested in this case. It would be funny. But hard to find people.
But if it's the same 24 hours hosting, I don't see any real difference. It will shorten moves, but I don't know how much.

[Illuminated One]

There are two main reasons:

Firstly I'm anoyed with using "out of game" things to have an advantage. Things like reading debug logs to figure out the enemy script or writing lengthy diplomatic texts. Not only does this represent an advantage over people who lack the required skills, it means also that I need to commit extra time (not spent making meaningful decisions/actions) if I want to play competitively. I don't want that, I guess I could farm on an mmorpg instead. So everyone gets a limited time frame, how he uses it is his decision.
Since I was already there I thought we can also make this a very tight schedule and also put a prime focus on the metagame decision of time management. I just hope that wildly sending unscripted armies around doesn't prove a winning strategy.

I don't want to play 6 turns a day because I don't have the time at the moment. I know many people here like fast host times, I couldn't understand slow pace game when I started, too.
Well, if you consider it otoh you have the same amount of ingame time, it's just spread over a longer timespan. Requires more patience and is less demanding.