[WendellM]

Hiya Socialist and Jubala,

Once again, a semi-parallel between strategic SE4 and "that other company's" tactical Combat Mission.

Until a couple of days ago, CM was email-only. They've just added a patch to allow for TCP/IP play in "real time" (each player plots his turn at the same time as the other player, and when they're done, they automatically exchange turns, watch the outcome from different angles for as long as they wish, then start simultaneously plotting the next turn).

This allows for both players to be busy all the time, either plotting turns or looking at the result of the plottings... at least in theory. In reality, one will be finished sooner than other in each step.

This factor prompts me to ask how a many-player "real-time" strategy game would go. If one player were doing well, with the other players each commanding many fewer units, would the game be bogged down as the other players quickly concluded their turns and had to wait as the single player took much longer? Or would the weaker players need much more time to confer on strategy, so that the powerful single player had to wait on them?

I don't know (I'm not too much into multiplayer scene, though I've played a few MP games from time to time). Maybe TCP/IP would help multiplayer SE4, but it might mean that some players would be left waiting with nothing to do for long periods of time. Perhaps e-mail, with its built-in slow nature would be better in these cases, since all players would expect to have the same amount of time for planning (like, a day). This would presumably be better for players who live in different time zones (As an American player, I recently enjoyed several CM games with a player in Germany, where arranging for true real-time play would have been difficult, if not impossible).

However, I don't have enough experience to really answer this question of real-time compared to email for a deep strategy game. What do more-experienced players say?