Pride of Nations: Anyone want to join a PBEM game?

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

Undercovergeek and I are planning on having a crack at a PBEM game of Pride of Nations.  As neither of us really appears to know what we're doing, it should be a glorious shambles.  Anyone want in?

Just trying to gauge interest as of now.  We will have to ensure that we've all got the same version of the game running and then we can figure out what scenario, who will play what country, who will host, how often turns will be done, etc.

[Tuna]

hmmm would that mean the turns wouldn't take forever since it's 'people' that already did them?

[undercovergeek]

with pbem the turns can take as long as you like - sip a cup of tea and contemplate your nations goals - noones going to rush you

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

The bottleneck would be that whoever hosts has to send an email to everyone with the turn update, then collect the orders files from each player, throw them into the game folder, process the turn results, and then email the next turn update to each player again.

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

I've been farting around with the 2nd Anglo-Boer War scenario using the 1.04RC2 beta patch with the speed hotfix and the game is very fast at processing turns now.

I still have trouble wrapping my head around the AGEOD system though.  No idea why certain leaders refuse to activate, why losing units always seem to retreat in the worst possible direction, and a bunch of other stuff like replenishment, how exactly the siege mechanic works, and so on.

[Nefaro]

I've been farting around with the 2nd Anglo-Boer War scenario using the 1.04RC2 beta patch with the speed hotfix and the game is very fast at processing turns now.

I'm pretty sure the individual scenarios in PrON (not the full campaign) are as fast as other AGE games since it doesn't have the complete world economy and accompanying AI being calculated every turn.  It's the grand campaign that has slow turn speeds, although it's a bit faster than it was on release.

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

Yeah, I messed around with a few turns in the GC as well just to see if the speed had improved and it has.  It's still slow, but nothing like before.  Turns that were taking 2-3 minutes before are processing in about 45 seconds now.

[Tuna]

hmm might have to give it another shot then.. I"ve never made it past the first turn.. the time would always make me close the game

[undercovergeek]

3 way pbem?

[jomni]

Yeah, I messed around with a few turns in the GC as well just to see if the speed had improved and it has.  It's still slow, but nothing like before.  Turns that were taking 2-3 minutes before are processing in about 45 seconds now.

That sounds promising.  But are there still late game bugs, unimplemented features?

[smittyohio]

Yeah, I messed around with a few turns in the GC as well just to see if the speed had improved and it has.  It's still slow, but nothing like before.  Turns that were taking 2-3 minutes before are processing in about 45 seconds now.

That sounds promising.  But are there still late game bugs, unimplemented features?

Has anyone ever gotten far enough to be able to tell?   ;-)

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

Yeah, I messed around with a few turns in the GC as well just to see if the speed had improved and it has.  It's still slow, but nothing like before.  Turns that were taking 2-3 minutes before are processing in about 45 seconds now.

That sounds promising.  But are there still late game bugs, unimplemented features?

Pocus says there are still problems that need to be address but that he's working on them in his spare time.  There is some missing text on the population screen and some unit descriptions are still showing placeholder file names instead of data when you view the detail page on the element detail tab.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and most importantly, all the pretty uniform art on the details page is gone. 

[Nefaro]

There was some people playing a multi-player game since shortly after release.  They seemed to be finding a lot of bugs along their way, and one had been reporting them for a long time. 

Not sure if they ever finished or continued finding them.  They seemed pretty steady though, and not just grammatical errors either.  I recall numerous historical event scripting errors being reported.  Hopefully they were all addressed in updates.  There were also some fairly recent reports of a bug with gold, or some such economic mechanics problem that would pop up after playing for a time.  Not sure it's been fixed yet.

I would like to play the GC in PrON sometime, but I get the impression that it still needs some patching on bugs that were broken, or had returned, from previous patching.

[Rayfer]

I got PoN on Steam last week on sale. Did the tutorials. I didn't realize how deeply complex this game was. It would require a full reading of the long manual (the tutorial only covers some very basic concepts) to make sense about what to do, what to build, how to balance trade, economy, military, etc.  I'm not being critical. It just is what it is and these sort of games can be very satisfying once mastered.  I've been playing Ageod's ACW2 for awhile and love it. But PoN is significantly more complicated; four modes with multiple sub-modes, with each opening up their own set of builds, decisions, etc. It will require a commitment of time and effort I just wasn't prepared to make right now. Good luck everyone!

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

OK, so who's in?  What scenario should we play?