Tech trading and diplomacy made PB3 miserable to play in, but it actually only collapsed around T140 or so, when at any given time there were a couple teams who either needed long pauses or were outright missing their turns. The game had started in a similar fashion to this one- a lot of people were pumped to just go play some civ with a ton of other RBers- but by the time the game ended the players were split between those who were taking it very seriously, and people who were in various stages of burning out.
And although it's easy to say that you can just turn control of indigent civs over to the AI, in practice that's a lot more difficult when doing so will dramatically imbalance the game (making playing on much less appealing for the competitive players not gifted an AI on their doorstep), and/or people have no intention of abandoning their civs- they just need long, game-killing pauses due to RL and have nobody to cover for them. And bear in mind that PB3 had multiple players for most of the civs- this game would be mostly one-man teams, and you know real life is going to take a fair chunk of them out of the game before someone wins.
In sum, I think there's absolutely no way this will work in its current form, and a lot of the people caught up in the hubbub now aren't going to feel the same way in a few months. But hey, should be fun to mock lurk if you manage to round up enough players!
And although it's easy to say that you can just turn control of indigent civs over to the AI, in practice that's a lot more difficult when doing so will dramatically imbalance the game (making playing on much less appealing for the competitive players not gifted an AI on their doorstep), and/or people have no intention of abandoning their civs- they just need long, game-killing pauses due to RL and have nobody to cover for them. And bear in mind that PB3 had multiple players for most of the civs- this game would be mostly one-man teams, and you know real life is going to take a fair chunk of them out of the game before someone wins.
In sum, I think there's absolutely no way this will work in its current form, and a lot of the people caught up in the hubbub now aren't going to feel the same way in a few months. But hey, should be fun to mock lurk if you manage to round up enough players!