Moving the Game along a little faster.

[larrywrose]

Having lost players in games becuase of the pace of the game, I would like to suggest a couple of things to help move the game along. Some of these things have been mentioned before I know, but I thought I would try to bring them back to the top of the discussion list.

1. In the Reinforcement phase allow a player to select phases to skip. Prussia and Austria rarely need a naval phase. During peacetime once you are set up to forage a lot of time you don't have to move your forces for several months until the next war. The program can check to see if the next phase is skipped, and if so then process to the next players turn.

2. Allow simultaneous processing of the Economic Phase and the Political Phase. The order that they are loaded does not have to be changed. But if everyone can Process their Political phase starting at the same time this could save 6 days on a game that does turns every 24 hours. Multipy that by 132 turns and you have just taken the time to play a game down by over 2 years.

EIA is a long game, we know this. But I think that we should try to shorted it as much as possible. Please add your comments and help push these and other changes through to speed the game up. I think everyone in a PBEM game would really appreciate these changes.

Thanks for your time and work.
Larry W. Rose

[gwheelock]

ORIGINAL: larrywrose

Having lost players in games becuase of the pace of the game, I would like to suggest a couple of things to help move the game along. Some of these things have been mentioned before I know, but I thought I would try to bring them back to the top of the discussion list.

1. In the Reinforcement phase allow a player to select phases to skip. Prussia and Austria rarely need a naval phase. During peacetime once you are set up to forage a lot of time you don't have to move your forces for several months until the next war. The program can check to see if the next phase is skipped, and if so then process to the next players turn.

This part can be done NOW - just let your host player know that it is
ok to skip the Prussian & Austrian Naval phases & he can do so with the
host button options. You could also let him know if it would be ok to skip
various player's land turns ... If he is paying attention; it should speed things
up at least a little.

[larrywrose]

True, but this again is a manual proceedure where you have to inform the game master. And still you are creating an additional file to both upload and download. On the other hand if you use the SKIP button lets have Prussia and Austria decide to skip their Naval phases. Now when Turkey processes his Naval Phase, the program checks and sees that Austria and Prussia have Skipped their Naval. Now it moves to Frances's turn. You have just created 2 less files and nobody has to wait for the game master to skip the turns.

It will take several years to play out a single game even with a 24 hour turn limit. The whole advantage of a PC game is automating the tedious parts. The Skip feature is already in the game as a selection as the game master can do. Let's make it even simpler and give it to the players. Remember in a complete game you have 132 turns. Every day you can save really does add up. I really hope the games I am in do finish. So cutting off a couple of years to finish a game will be a great improvement.

Larry W. Rose

[Minedog]

I absolutely agree.. and another would be to allow the Defender to remove casualties first in Round 2 of combat before sending the file back to the attacker (and thence Round 3).