Here is a dumb question?

[mashkis]

How long does it take to play this game from start to finish in real time? I have never played the previous version of this game but I remember reading that each turn was 3 months in length. This would mean that there are only four turn for every year so this makes a very quick game.

Please give me some insight into how the game plays since I am thinking about getting this new version.

[WanderingHead]

ORIGINAL: mashkis

How long does it take to play this game from start to finish in real time? I have never played the previous version of this game but I remember reading that each turn was 3 months in length. This would mean that there are only four turn for every year so this makes a very quick game.

Please give me some insight into how the game plays since I am thinking about getting this new version.

Each turn is 3 months. The full scenario is Summer 1939 - Fall 1946, 26 turns.

It depends on the individual and where you are in the course of the war, but playing a turn of a full "side" (Germany+Japan or USSR+China+WesternAllies) can take from 5 minutes to 20 minutes near the beginning of the game or 15 minutes to an hour of more when deep in the game.

It really depends on the individual, I must confess that it often takes me an hour or even more to do a single turn once I'm around 1942, 1943 (and all the powers are in the war swinging their hardest).

When I play against the AI I'm a bit faster, a game takes me between 4 and 10 hours (it's hard to believe as I write it, but I've looked up at 3am and 5 hours passed and I'm only half done).

If you do PBEM (a human opponent is the best, highly recommended), unfortunately you will often be slowed down to only 1 or two turns a day and a game can take a few weeks.

There is also a online TCP/IP way of playing simultaneously (still turn based, just all players hooked up) with a timer to enforce reasonably fast play. Haven't done it myself ... not sure I could live with the timer.

[Uncle_Joe]

I'm on the opposite end of the spectrum from WanderingHead. I can easily play an entire hotseat game in an afternoon with a friend. Neither of us ponders stuff forever and we use Auto-supply to speed things up as well. We dont use a timer, but we probably dont take more than 10mins per turn at most per nation (with Russia and China going MUCH faster at the start).
 
There will be a few turns here and there that take a bit longers, but by and large we pretty much move through the turns at a pretty good clip. Sure, we make mistakes here and there and probably dont optimize in certain situations, but we can play through a great many games fairly quickly and learn a lot doing it.

[PyleDriver]

Steve, I bet you play speed chess too, huh...lol

[Uncle_Joe]

I used to play chess with a timer, yes. We never did the super fast games, but its always more fun on a clock.