Finding the time to NOT have fun

Zapmeister · #1 July 19th, 2004, 07:26 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Cainehill:
Had you considered asking if the other players would agree to a slower pace?

Yes, but then I realized it wouldn't make any difference, even if they agreed. I'd still want to quit regardless of whether turns ran twice a day, once every two days or once a week because 90 minutes is too much to take out of any day, however infrequent, if that ninety minutes is a chore as opposed to gaming fun.

Sheap · #2 July 19th, 2004, 08:41 AM

Color me obvious, but the problem of turns taking too long can be avoided by not playing on Faerun, or any map bigger than about 200 provinces, even with 17 players in the game. When the game gets down to 4 or 5 people (or as often as not - STARTS with that few), and you're playing on Faerun, and you've got 100 provinces to deal with, that's just not going to be fun. Less fun if you aren't winning.

It's easy to pick a number of provinces per empire that you happen to like, and then assume that it scales linearly with the number of players in the game, but it doesn't. More players does mean a bigger map is required, but it's logarithmic, not linear.

Blitz · #3 July 19th, 2004, 09:05 AM

There's the basic reason why I don't play Online. The maps are too fuggin huge and take way too long to finish. If that's your bag, fine. I can't possibly dedicate an hour a day to update a game, let alone 2 hours on one game in a 12-hour cycle. There are plenty of really nice smaller maps. My friends and I play on Ormus quite a bit. Fits 4 nations pretty well, ends up in a 2-2 situation most times... and we finish the games in about 40-50 turns usually. Even played Online, that's a month and a half, and even in the end my turns rarely took longer than 10 minutes to finish.

Frosted Flake · #4 July 20th, 2004, 01:15 AM

Have you considered not micromanaging everything. 3 hour turns boggle my mind!

frosted flake

Zapmeister · #5 July 20th, 2004, 01:23 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Frosted Flake:
Have you considered not micromanaging everything. 3 hour turns boggle my mind!

frosted flake

Actually, it was 90 minute turns, twice a day.
If I didn't play as well as I can, I wouldn't enjoy the game at all.

Tuna-Fish · #6 July 20th, 2004, 01:38 AM

IMHO, Sheap is right. For some strange reason people think that bigger map = more fun. In my experience, the best part of a dom game is the early and middle game, and the game just goes worse as it drags on, because in the endgame everyone has access to all tech and items, and esp. after some decisive castling you cannot really hurt the opponents all that much. I'd say that either figure out winning rules with what you will not have to occupy huge tracts of land to win, or play in such small maps that the map is not bigger than (preferred amount of provinces)x 4.

Pirateiam · #7 July 19th, 2004, 03:51 PM

Quote:

I've recently gone AI in a game that was taking me almost 3 hours a day to play. It was a 12-hour game and, until recently, I was having a great time.

Recently, though, things have been going less well and I was having less fun. However, I was still a major nation - some may even have said I was winning. With a sudden increase in my work/study commitments, I had little choice but to abandon the game.

Well being Zapmeister's main antagonist in the game he left, I was sad he left since it has been a very interesting game. In fact I commend you on your strategic thinking. A couple times I had written you off and turned to other nations only to see you rise to one of the top nations. we proabably should have changed to a slower pace but we sure did get alot of turns in quickly. With you leaving it is basically now between me and Arco (Mark the Merciful) since you hurt C'tis pretty bad before you left.