Pitboss 11 Organizing Thread

[Sisu]

You're missing Team Unpronounceable Unicode Symbol, me.

[teleh]

Ah memes. The "I've just learnt about them" antidote to everything.

[teleh]

And ever since I spotted BRickAstley's's Steve Carrell avatar, I have trouble 'unseeing' it.

Perhaps you US folks are sleeping right now.

Lullaby, lullaby, go to sleep dreaming of hammer overflow mistakes... psych

[teleh]

You're missing Team Unpronounceable Unicode Symbol, me.

Right you are, it's in the spreadsheet but not the list. Updated:

team 1: Oxy
Team Alpha: teleh
Team 2: Kuro/BaII
Team ʥ: Sisu
Team BoldXenuBrick: Bold, Xenu, Brick
I am Molach: Molach
T7: WilliamLP
T8: Azza
T9: retep
T10: suttree

..in order of team naming, I guess.

[teleh]

So spam-wise, I've updated the front as much as I can. If anythings need changing, yell out.

Kuro - if you're happy to keep tally feel absolutely free to dump the excel I reckon. Most things are decided already imo, you could probably narrow it down to whatever's still to be decided.

Have put my own votes in (as I was missed in a few votes from earlier posts):
* Map: Mapmakers Choice, no munted starts
* Civ Picks: Random / Norm / Assigned by lurkers for splits
* Espy: No spies, Gspy settled or GA
* Tech Trading: off
* Standard bans: (Eles, nukes, India)
* Corps: off
* Huts: on if all Civs get a scout
* No cheese gifting (prob redundant under the "don't be a dick" rule)
* Blockades: Go with Sisu
* Events: On for my vote
* Barbs on too

[spacetyrantxenu]

Posted at BGN's request:

12:32:55 PM - boldlygoingnowhererb: what's your speed preference for the PB?
12:33:06 PM - boldlygoingnowhererb: currently kuro has it summarized as normal
12:46:41 PM - Xenu: normal
12:46:57 PM - Xenu: pitboss should be normal speed, for a big game you want it to take longer...quick speed makes war tough on a large or huge map. on a small map your units can make it to the fight before they're obsolete so quick speed isn't as big a deal.
12:47:08 PM - boldlygoingnowhererb: ok
12:47:18 PM - boldlygoingnowhererb: what about a recommendation for the clock?
12:47:49 PM - Xenu: i'd say a 22 hour timer is best to get a turn per day. first turn can be 44 hours to allow 48 real hours to grab teams and make T0 decisions

[teleh]

Sweet I reckon, however, would like to nullify pauses.

Originally suggested AI takeover if turns were consistently dragging past 24h.? To me there's not much difference between 'hey it's past 24 hours again wtf' and 'pause the game, x hasn't said anything and the 24h is coming up'.. Except less pauses.. Mebbe also a bit more give (with notification from players) for wartime.

[spacetyrantxenu]

I'd be OK with slightly extending the turn timer, as long as we're all in agreement that we're trying to maintain a turn pace of one turn per day. Less frequent turns than that can cause interest to wane, which is detrimental to the game (people may drop).

AI takeover should only be used as a last resort. Imagine that the player you border drops out of the game and his empire is now controlled by the AI. We all know how to exploit the AI...that would give a huge advantage to anyone neighboring the AI as their land gets snapped up by more tactically competent humans. So game balance goes out the window. The AI takeover option should definitely be set to ON in game setup to allow us to regain control of an abandoned civ if needed, but we should not play the game under AI stewardship unless there is absolutely no replacement who can be found. Just my opinion.

[teleh]

Absolutely agree with *everything* just said. Actually wondered when the timer would come up heh.

It has the tiniest relevance to quick and normal only if you expect people to drag the timer.

Otherwise the main thing is how do you tell if folks are dragging the timer, and what do you do in that case? Is the 48h an encouragement to drag? Do folks get kicked if they consistently don't say they're going to miss a 24h period? And what if they do say, but just keep doing it?

Thing is, sometimes RL does come into things and you want to be able to go 'it's fine, I'll post and it's cool for this once.. Or twice'. (Not to mention time zone turn splits when they happen with several players).

Couple others things Icon think of, but sheesh I haven't played one of these before either, just watched several played out.

[spacetyrantxenu]

I know from personal experience that I sometimes need a clock ticking down to prompt me to play my turns on time. And I can't be the only procrastinator in this bunch, right? (Maybe I am). I don't want people to feel under the gun and under a lot of pressure to play the turn as soon as it's available. If our intended goal is to play a turn per day, though, everyone should be able to commit to that turn pace. If most players are only looking for one turn every two days or so, that could be OK too as long as everyone who has signed up knows what they're in for. I'd prefer a faster turn pace than once every two days but I'm just one vote. I only want to avoid a situation where people get bored because there aren't enough turns to play and then they drop out. From the past games played here at RB it looks like 1 turn per day is the sweet spot between enough turns to stay engaged and not having your life dominated by the ticking clock.

Now, if we feel like people are dragging the timer and habitually not ending turn when they reasonably should, there are both in game and out of game actions that can be taken. I don't want us to need a game admin to adjudicate those kinds of situations, so if we follow the "don't be a dick" rule then we won't have problems with the turn timer. If it does turn out that some people don't end turn...well, there's always a good, old-fashioned PYFT dogpile that could enforce change. My PYFT tolerance is pretty low and I've been willing to play irrationally in the past to speed up a game (sorry Kuro!).

But yeah to answer your questions...I think 48 hours would be an encouragement to not play turns quickly. I would say that if someone consistently has problems playing within 24 hours that would be a conversation for the game players to have in the tech thread. Maybe adding a few hours to the timer would be OK, if that's all the problem is...but if someone can't play in 24 hours they probably can't play in 26 or 28 either. At that point to keep the other players engaged it would be best to boot someone if they can't keep the turn pace. Players missing turns is hugely unbalancing and unfair to the other players.

I don't think we should put a hard cap on pauses. Sometimes RL does intervene. But if someone makes a habit of it, well that's different. And we can handle war time zone splits as needed. I don't know what time zones all of you guys are in, but if the PB8 players could manage it (with modest pauses sprinkled in as needed) we can do it. In PB8 players from some teams are offset about 12 hours from some other players, but they've worked it out okay.

Anyhow, we'll be fine. If at any point we have questions about how to manage the game we can ask the lurker community or, if we can't govern it as players, we can get an admin. I don't think we'll need one, RB players have been able to self-regulate the last few games OK (in games that aren't billed as super-competitive, I mean).

Sorry for the long response. TL;DR - We can do this!