PBEM Lessons Learned

[Cossaky]

Howdy folks,

Most of the comments so far have focused on the AI and user interface. Have folks gotten a full 7 player PBEM up and running, and if so, what problems have you encountered?

Also, if you're playing without fast combat resolution, what house rules are you using to speed up play?

We've lined up seven players and are still trudging through the setup phase.

Thanks!

Cossaky

[JavaJoe]

ORIGINAL: Cossaky

Howdy folks,

Most of the comments so far have focused on the AI and user interface. Have folks gotten a full 7 player PBEM up and running, and if so, what problems have you encountered?

Also, if you're playing without fast combat resolution, what house rules are you using to speed up play?

We've lined up seven players and are still trudging through the setup phase.

Thanks!

Cossaky

One good thing to do is set up a Yahoo Group for your game. You can post files on it. You can also have one location to send messages out on. If you're in several games this helps keeps things organized. Starting emails with the game name then country you're playing then the country the message is going to helps a lot too when trying to juggle games.

Hints: Don't redo your turn. Remember to click the complete button. Diplomacy is never ending no need to bog the game down..

[Grognot]

Just checking -- in a France vs. UK game, all others AI, then one sends ALL the AI-associated commout files as well, correct?  They're not redundant?

(Observation -- testing with tar / bzip2 suggests that these files compress really, really well.  5 ~3.8MB diplomatic-phase PBM files compress down to 214KB.  That, and the to-the-last-byte identical file sizes for the PBM file suggests to me that these are something like uncompressed dumps of some data structures of fixed size, probably with a lot of zeros at this point.  Some simple lossless compression would help.)