.com.unity Forums - Hourglass

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- - Hourglass (http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=44798)

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?

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!

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.

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.

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?

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.

Wot no more interest in this game?

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

...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.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gregstrom (Post 729440)

...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.