Dominions 3 Middle Age "GROGHAMMER" game [running]

[elitesix]

A little stronger Gamin grows, forcing other strengths to serve!

In regard to turn length: I will probably pull it back to 48 hours after this weekend, but the past weekend (when we started) I had pushed it out early because I had gotten word Friday that I wouldn't be available at all Sunday (and naturally not Monday until after work sometime of course). We still had turns within 48 hours, from Saturday night to Monday afternoon/night sometime, but the system clock pushed the cutoff further ahead as the turns were completed.

At about the time I was going to fix this, we heard from people they were going to be out of pocket over the weekend, so I pushed the timeclock ahead to next Monday to be safe. Once we're past the weekend I'll contract it again.

This is a large game with many human players, so odds are good that we'll have more real-life delay issues than a smaller game with only five players (for example). No one signed up with the understanding and acceptance that they would be penalized with auto-turns regardless of real-life circumstances, and I'm not about to change that policy to a hardline 48 hour autoturn. Not without a unanimous request from the other players anyway.

Four turns in a little less than eight days (from last Friday until today) == 2-day turns on average. So until that significantly increases on average over meaningful amounts of time, I'm not going to worry about it.

from my point of view personally, as previously mentioned, if you put up an 80 hour limit someone will use it, if you put up 48 hours the same person will use 47 hours and 58 minutes - the more relaxed you are with it the more it will slow down - it was originally 48 hours and you put an awful lot of effort into researching what would happen if that wasnt adhered to and how to work it - extending it to 80 shouldnt have been the fix. It should be a fixed time amount - probably 48, and if someone cant make that then nobody in the community would complain if the limit was expanded for whatever reason, and if anyone else wants to duck in under that extension umberella then they dont need to say anything by confusing you with more extension requests - its already been extended by the first request.

But to arbitrarily extend it to 80 and say the community will police themselves isnt right for the other 20 players all watching the one guy whos going to take 79 hours without asking for an extension - because at 80 he didnt need to

anyway - lets game, its all about the gaming and im enjoying it very much - glad the elitesix battle went well - mine didnt

are we allowed to know what the secret weapon is?

If Jason wants to talk about, I'm ok with that. He may or may not want to talk about it because he could use it against most other nations.

I'm not going to volunteer it, because his secret weapon weakened me significantly (in a very specific way though) and other nations could take advantage of that if they knew.

Oh, and I agree with you geek :)

[JasonPratt]

But to arbitrarily extend it to 80 and say the community will police themselves isnt right for the other 20 players all watching the one guy whos going to take 79 hours without asking for an extension - because at 80 he didnt need to

The extensions were not done arbitrarily, but for specific reasons based on explicit scheduling concerns.

I considered keeping the (first) extension (to 80 hours) in place permanently, due to the size of the group and in anticipation of problems cropping up regularly in a group this size. Also not arbitrary, except in the sense of an arbiter having reasons to do something. ;) But not arbitrary in the popular sense.

Since that seems to be unpopular, I won't do it, and I'll just try to provide extensions when alerted by players. But I said from the beginning that players will be allowed extensions if they ask for them ahead of time due to scheduling issues.

From experience I tend to expect people who are currently having connection difficulties during moving/travel to still have them over the weekend, so I moved the timecounter up to Monday for Bison's sake. If you think you're in good shape to continue from here, Bison, I'll put the normal counter back to 48 hours (although the system will still have to catch up to the current mark before that goes into effect).

[JasonPratt]

are we allowed to know what the secret weapon is?

If Jason wants to talk about, I'm ok with that. He may or may not want to talk about it because he could use it against most other nations.

I'm not going to volunteer it, because his secret weapon weakened me significantly (in a very specific way though) and other nations could take advantage of that if they knew.

I actually talked about it in detail yesterday, back upthread somewhere. I'll let people research it. :) (Of course I'm assuming that that's the part of my plan that worked -- I still haven't seen the game video, and won't for another four hours probably.)


What I can reveal beyond what I already talked about in detail, is the other (actually secret) factor I hadn't talked about (but mentioned that I hadn't talked about already. So to speak. ;) )

That other factor was this: part of my reason for exposing so much of my plan publicly, for defending myself against Elitesix, was to see if he would change his orders and back his pretender out of my capitol city. (Also to provide a bit of colorful drama while waiting for Bison to send in his turn.)

See, the final player hadn't sent in his turn at that time, so E6 could have read my strategy, decided it had too much chance of working, and then pulled his pretender back to safety, if not his whole besieging army: he could have adjusted and resent his turn.

I wasn't at all sure my main tactical plan had much chance of working; nor was I sure I could beat his besieging army if he pulled back his pretender while my troops were set for my current tactics, since he did have quite a number of elite troops on the field and my troops might not have time to work through the scripts and then be adjusted by the tactical AI for the current situation.

But I figured (a) I had at least some chance of winning if he kept his pretender in the area; and (b) I had at least some chance of winning if he moved his pretender out. So since I couldn't decide which chance was better I decided to balance things by setting up a situation where either one of those situations might occur.

That meant explaining my tactics in public, thus giving Elitesix an opportunity (if he decided to take it, though he might be chivalrous and/or confident enough not to resend his turn to adjust for it) to choose which situation I'd be walking into.

Thus explaining why I revealed my tactical plan publicly before the fight, and also what the secret factor was that I hadn't spoken of yet and which I couldn't know yet how it would play out. (But which I also mentioned publicly in case that helped with bluffing the pretender out of the area.)


Keep in mind, I still don't know at the moment what the results ended up being, other than hints from Elitesix that he admired the attempt and that it has crippled him longterm. I probably won't reveal what specifically happened on his side of the battle this afternoon either (unless he's okay with that, in which case he can do that himself so far as he wants to). For all I know my own pretender still died and most of my forces were wiped out and/or he still holds a besieging position on my capitol city. In which case, even if I hurt him longterm, I might as well forfeit because I will have no way to recover and withstand his siege (other than to wait a few turns while he reduces the walls).

So things are still quite up in the air. And as I said earlier, even in the best case scenario (from my standpoint) I expect to be badly hurt and I will still have a hard row to hoe trying to uproot him from nearby territories (if not to eliminate him from the game instead).

[Philippe]

From what's been posted and from what's happened so far I suspect that it's a bit too much to hope for, but thinking in terms of one turn a day as a goal to try to move towards would probably make most of us very happy.  This is a game for newbies, and you don't really need to put much time into making a move.

Before anyone panics, goals are something that are meant to be strived for (and probably not achieved).  80 hours seems like a long time, but with this many people it's probably inevitable that this is going to be a slow game. 

Having said that, we'll be lucky if we get off one turn each this weekend and the next, which is a a bit of a shame because in an ideal world people can usally find time to get off more turns on the weekend than during the week. The weekend is when you get in the extra turns that make your averages look a little better.

The reason I signed up for this was to give myself an excuse to learn the rules, so any speed will work for me.  But I do not intend to have more than one Dominions game running at any point (even if I become addicted).

[JasonPratt]

Submarine people already started killing each other? Must be quite a sight. I have to reach a coast yet.

Personally I'm curious about what's going on up northwest on land. One post is like "That guy in the northwest is going to have an easy time expanding and will be a powerhouse midgame"; and suddenly I'm reading about a multi-national fight of some kind going on up there...? Not so easy expansion after all?!

[Huw the Poo]

Well, at least this is one game in which I'm managing to keep a low profile!

[Philippe]

I was confused by the original post that mentioned it, and finally concluded (perhaps wrongly) that it was a post about the northeast corner of the map, but that the word west had crept into the discussion because the poster then proceeded to talk about the western islands.

When I looked at the northeast corner I had trouble seeing any crowns at all, but that's probably because I haven't figured out how to get the three graphics mods to run (and don't want to run the risk of being accused of a hacking attempt by Llamaserver) after I neglected to enable them for the initial setup.  The plain vanilla crowns tend to blend in to the terrain.

By the way, I had something odd happen when I sent my turn in last night.  I zipped it before sending it, and got a message back from Llama saying that the zip was apparently empty and that I should resend unzipped.  Can't remember if I had sent a zip or a rar, but Llama accepted the uncompressed format.  I only mention it for future reference. 

When I used to play Combat Mission (back in the days before the flood) I learned always to zip my moves before sending them because aol's invasive software had a habit of scrambling every fourth move.  But that took place in a different millenium...

[byrdman57]

Although the server is supposed to be able to handle compressed files, the turn files are small enough that I think it would be easier to just send them uncompressed.

I didn't even think AOL still existed...

[Philippe]

The happiest day of my digital life came over ten years ago when I ripped their software out of my computer and immediately noticed a significant improvement in performance.

AOL is still around.  It might be useful in areas that are too remote for broadband.

[Huw the Poo]

The happiest day of my digital life came over ten years ago when I ripped their software out of my computer and immediately noticed a significant improvement in performance.

Substitute Norton Antivirus for AOL and I could say exactly the same thing!

[undercovergeek]

lol - loving this game and the LA one so far today

yet to open EA

[JasonPratt]

Philippe, don't worry in the least about Llamaserver complaining about the graphics mods. It isn't going to happen, because a graphic mod (per se) doesn't change anything "objective" about the units (how the units behave in-game), only the "subjective" graphics.

So experiment as you like. I have all the graphics mods listed in the very first post installed and enabled, with no problems. Actually, I wouldn't mind a further mod that changed the color of province names, since on some maps (like this one) the standard color is too light to easily read. (Of course a map like this one usually has the territories clearly labeled anyway. And any territory's name can be read from the main province info screen at the top, once it's right-click chosen.)


I'll also try to remember to look for all the crowns on the map this afternoon and list where they're located, here in the gamethread.

[JasonPratt]

lol - loving this game and the LA one so far today

yet to open EA

No rush. Delay as long as you like. Two, three days even.  :D

[mkivcs]

Likewise I was somewhat confused by the blurring of the concept of west and east (I hope none of you are real world leaders.) but after examining the map I conclude we are talking about the northEAST.

Jason your suggestion of turning the clock back to 48 hours after the weekend but allowing anyone to ask for a delay seems the most reasonable course of action and fully in line with the original plan. It would have been great to get extra goes in this weekend as the game is just starting to get interesting but totally understandable that people need to work the game in around other real world events.

Just in case I get wiped out in short order by some super powerful tribe stomping on me can I thank you for organising this, I've learnt more in a few terms under the pressure of real opponent's than I would have in weeks of playing the A.I. even though I've not seen a trace of any of you!

Finally I have a idea, about your secret weapon along the lines of if I go you will go as well, probably a more experienced player will know better but its my theory no 1 and I'm sticking with it.

Cheers all and if you meet some undead on your travels in Faerun be nice to them they are just like you, but deader.

[elitesix]

Just to let you know (you can probably tell when you watch the battle) I didn't change my scripting after reading your post for honor reasons, and of course the chance you'd be luring me into doing just that.