[llamabeast]

There have always been people on the forum who would only play network games, and others who would only play PBEM, and most people don't mind too much. There are advantages to both setups.

Here are some advantages to PBEM:
- It's easier to see the game status from the website than by logging into the game, particularly if (a) you're at work, or (b) you've already half-completed your turn, so you can't connect to the server without your turn being uploaded and there being some danger of hosting occurring using your incomplete turn.
- It's easier to play multiple games at once; you don't have to either keep on retyping the host address/port number, or setting up a load of different shortcuts to dominions each one specifying a different host and port number
- It's easier to keep backups of past turns, since they're kept in your e-mail by default. This can be pretty handy to look at old messages/events, or even just for fun to watch the history of your game
- It is possible for someone other than the owner of the computer to easily admin a game; Dominions itself is rather hard to control smoothly from elsewhere while it's running, while the LlamaServer has the Admin Options interface. I think this is actually fairly key.
- In case of a glitch, e.g. temporary loss of internet access, a PBEM server is much less badly affected than a network server and doesn't need human attention to resuscitate

These are all reasonably minor issues of course, but then again so is the time taken to use PBEM. If you are using a decent mail program (e.g. Thunderbird, or presumably Outlook Express though i haven't used that for some years) it's a matter of moments. I would say when I get a turn e-mail, I will have the game open in literally 5 seconds (since Thunderbird remembers which folder you save your attachments to, and I don't save that many apart from dom3 files).

If you use webmail on the other hand, I can imagine it would be a bit more annoying.