FreshMeat - EA Newbie - (RUNNING)

[Ballbarian]

Yes. You do have to use attachments in email to send and receive your turns. (It's really not that much trouble.)
LlamaServer FAQ

[anticipatient]

I was surprised to find that pbem is actually really enjoyable!! This will be my second one.

[Executor]

PBEM is much better, and safer, the server crashed in a game I was playing,
( I actually had a shot of winning ), they say that happens rarely, but I'm not very optimistic now.

[meister_miagi]

I actually prefer the llamaserver to network hosted games.

[Renojustin]

Safer, only if the host does not keep a backup of the game. Better? Not by a long shot. Explain how you can possibly justify that when in a network game, you are always a click away from downloading or uploading your turn.

[Darkstone]

Everything on the llamaserver is saved (backed up).

Renojustin, if you're really unhappy with PBEM, I don't think anyone will hold you to staying in this game, but I think it being PBEM was pretty clear from the first post?

(I hope that didn't come off as sounding mean or whatnot, that's not how I meant it).

[Renojustin]

When did I say anything about the state of Llamaserver's backup status?

It would be terrific if someone would intelligently debate the relative merits of the question at hand rather than using straw men arguments or telling people that they're welcome to leave instead. I'm aware that I'm able to leave, thanks for the friendly reminder. And no, the game wasn't set to be PBEM from the first post. Neither am I saying that the game MUST be Network.

What I don't see is how anyone could consider PBEM games to be anywhere near as convinient as a backed-up Network game based on the actual realities of the two systems. If you want to refute the fact of the matter, please do it with actual logic instead of unsupported opinions or thinly veiled hostility.

The truth is that a network game does exactly the same thing that a PBEM games does, except that it is vastly easier to upload and submit turns. And nobody can possibly deny that. So I'm not really sure where you guys get your opinions and aggression from, but to me it just sounds like argument for the sake of being contrary. I'm only trying to simplify the game, which some of us may be playing for a long time. I could sure use the extra hour or two in my life that I'd gain from NOT having to deal with PBEM over 100 turns.

[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.