PBW basics

[Emperor's Child]

For all you PBW players: I’ve never dabbled in this style of game play and am curious about how you guys get a game going.

Race Selection: And I’ve always been curious, how does the game start up where you create your race? Who does that part, how is it all pulled together?

In the beginning: Most games at the start are so small that you can knock out like 20 turns in an hour… How do the PBW games get past this…just play through, start with high tech and several worlds…what?

Turn processing: How does the Host combined the separate turns and process them? Can the host punish / change the turns for players that have cheated or broken agreed to rules?

[Xrati]

Great question. I was thinking about posting about this myself as I'd like to get involved in PBW. Maybe some of the more experienced players could explain some of the basics of how the system works and what new player need to know to get involved.

[tesco samoa]

PBW is set up so the game turn can run after last player upload or at a set time.

What will happen is that either everyone will upload their turn or the turn will time out and it will kick off another turn.

Most games set this to 24 to 72 hours.... So it can take a while to get a game complete. Usually your looking at 4 months to a year for a game. Some games run for 2 years or more

[tesco samoa]

Also there is a faq for players to read at the pbw site that you can check out... then post some additional quesiton.

[douglas]

Race Selection/Creation:
Look up the settings for the game you're going to join, particularly the mod and racial points allowed. Enter the new game setup screen for the appropriate mod, set the racial points maximum correctly, and create your empire. When you're done tweaking everything, save your new empire to a file and quit SEIV. The file will have a .emp extension and will most likely be in the empires subdirectory of either your main SEIV folder or the mod's main folder. Find the new .emp file and upload it to PBW. The game host is responsible for setting up the game and adding all the empires to it once everyone has uploaded.

In the beginning:
The best pace you can realistically hope for in most PBW games is one, maybe two turns per day. Taking the early game at this pace is just accepted as part of the cost of using a play by email system. In one-on-one games, if you're lucky enough to be playing at the same time as your opponent, turn rates have been known to get up around 50 in a single day, but that's only for early or very small games, and it's the exception rather than the rule.

Turn Processing:
When playing a simultaneous movement, different machines game, which is how all PBW games should be set up, hitting end turn saves your orders to a .plr file. This file is in the same location as the savegame, and SEIV will tell you the full filename before quitting. Once you have generated the .plr file containing your orders for the turn, you need to upload it to PBW. Once all players have uploaded, or the deadline for the turn comes around, PBW will automatically run SEIV using a command line that will load the correct mod, load the game, and process the turn with all the .plr files. Once that's done, PBW emails the new .gam file out to all players. When necessary to punish rulebreakers or roll a turn back because someone missed an important turn with a good excuse, the game host can upload an earlier turn's .gam file to replace the file on PBW.

Nag emails:
The game host can set PBW to automatically nag players who are late uploading their turns. It can be set both to nag some number of the last players to upload and to nag at a certain time before the deadline. These emails will have the game host's from address, but they are actually sent by PBW. If PBW is set to nag the last 3 players, for example, the very last player to upload will get 3 nag emails - one when the number of players remaining drops to 3, one when the 3rd-to-last player uploads, and another when the next-to-last player uploads. If he also waits until just before the turn deadline, he will get a fourth email when the near-deadline nag is triggered. Please do not get mad at the game host for sending these - all of them are sent automatically by PBW, with the game host's email address entered in the from field.

Missing Turns:
If you do not upload your .plr file by the deadline and the game is not set to only run after all players have uploaded, the AI will play your turn for you. This can be very very bad in some cases, as the AI is known to quite frequently declare war on long-time partners in such situations, may make really stupid attacks, probably won't leave fleets guarding chokepoints alone, and in general does lots of really stupid things. To prevent all these mistakes from happenning, there is an option in the Empire Status (F11)->Ministers screen at the very bottom labelled something like "AI does not make changes to empire during a simultaneous game". Turning this option on will result in missed turns acting as if you had simply opened the turn, immediately hit end turn, and uploaded the result. While doing this too often will severely handicap your empire, it is usually much better than letting the AI screw things up for you.

[Emperor's Child]

Thanks Tesco!
Douglas hits a Home run! Very helpful!

Another PBW newbie question: Where do new games get started or announced? Is there a place where all PBW games are announced other than on this board?

[RCCCL]

PBW has its own website at this address http://seiv.pbw.cc/

You will have to register. After you do so, you navigate via buttons at the top of the window, most of which are self explanatory.

[Suicide Junkie]

The shiny fleet icon just below the repair wrench icon is for listing only the games which currently need players.

That will probably be your first stop on PBW.

[douglas]

There is a button on PBW for listing all currently open games, but don't expect many players to join just through browsing that. All the games I'm in were announced on this forum, which is the best way I know of to get people to join. There's also a forum on PBW where new games can be announced, but very few people check it. There's another forum over on spaceempires.net that gets a bit more traffic, but it's still a poor second to the Shrapnel forum.

If you're looking for a game to join yourself, the easiest way to get in a one-on-one is to notify Alneyan that you'd like to join the King of the Hill League. This thread would be a good place to do so. For larger games, you'll either have to be very patient - they don't start up very frequently and generally take a while to gather players - or find one in need of a replacement player and take over for the person that quit. If you don't mind playing with a major mod, The Galactic Invasion 2 game (alphabetized by "the") needs one replacement at the moment. I believe that particular empire is set up as a nomad race, which is a very different play style from stock, but it's a cooperative game against two space monster races so you shouldn't need to worry about someone trouncing you while you're still learning how things work and making up for all the missed turns.

[Kana]

Well from my point of view this is the only way to play SE4...I don't think I've ever played more than 100 turns of a SP game...but I've played well over many many times that of PBW games, and I'm in two right now...at one point I was in up to 5 at a time...Oh, and it is 10x more challenging than the hardest AI...

Kana