New EitB v12 PBEM

[Aurorarcher]

Glad to hear people being interested in new games! And especially of the bigger PBEM - should definitely start that in a few months (maybe discussion/signups earlier even). I count at least 7 people interested (at least tentatively), that's pretty good.

Heh, in a few months I might also be up for a giant PBEM (or a PB if we can work out the issues with turn order & magic). Might be a fun way to conclude the FFH chapter of RB's history (or revive the community, whichever!). Slow pace is fine if it's established in advance.

I'd rather revive than conclude . Also I think it has to be PBEM, even if we have to eat the slower pace.

Would be great if we could bring back some of the old community members too, a good few of which I've noticed back on the site in the last month.

That'd be so awesome if it happened. So many missed players...

I also wonder if there are people willing to play more standard "normal" PBEM sooner? Or maybe we should just wait for the BIG PBEM, if smaller were to start it might drive some people away from the bigger one. Afterall, I think the amount of players total interested in any EitB games is not very high unless some missed players come back all of a sudden. I might try to setup a smaller PBEM if there are people who don't like waiting so much but want to play instead.

[Qgqqqqq]

I think sequential pitboss is better. Lets everyone keep track of it, and sustains interest by allowing logins when it's not your turn.

[Aurorarcher]

So that would mean players would play by turn order, but could login any time to take a look but not change stuff? I guess that could work, then there's no issues with magic for example I believe. How do city builds work then? Do they happen after all the players have played their turns (when the next turn rolls)? I'm not very familiar with they way PB works at all.

[Dreylin]

I thought that the problem with pitboss was that all Magic effect wear off at the turn roll - or is that just a problem with simultaneous turns?

If that's OK, then sounds good to me.

[Qgqqqqq]

There's still some issues, iirc, but I think just the same ones as with PBEM.

[DaveV]

No, I think Dreylin is right and things work differently in pitboss. In pbem 47, which just finished, the turn order was me -> Mardoc -> Aurorarcher -> plako. Aurorarcher could summon spectres and they would still be on the map till the start of his next turn, so he could use them defensively against Mardoc and me. In sequential pitboss, I believe the summons are cleared on the turn roll, so you can't use summons defensively against someone who's ahead of you in turn order (in the example game, Aurorarcher's spectres would disappear after plako's turn). This would also be a problem for spells with 1-turn duration, e.g. Dance of Blades, Regeneration, etc.

[Aurorarcher]

Yeah, if it's like Dave mentioned for pitboss it makes playing later in turn order a lot worse. If that can't be fixed somehow I don't know how we could play in pitboss. I don't think playing it as sequential makes much of difference to it?

[El Grillo]

Simultaneous Pitboss calls doTurn for each player at the beginning of the turn, but Sequential Pitboss, PBEM, and Hotseat all call doTurn at the beginning of the active player's turn.

The other concern with simultaneous modded games is that if the mod wasn't designed with them in mind and has a lot of Python changes, there's a risk of the game desyncing. Now I've never actually played FFH/EITB, but from the sounds of it, a lot of the spell effects would have to be done via the SDK or in Python. You'd probably have to run some tests ahead of the game to make sure everything works as intended.

[Qgqqqqq]

There's been a sequential PB before, so tests have effectively been run.

[El Grillo]

Ah, I misread, I thought the spell-duration issue Dave and Aurorarcher brought up was exclusive to simultaneous Pitboss.