[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Play By E-Mail - PBEM

["T.J.T van Kooten" <thomas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Astarot,

Another gamestyle concept that might work for you is 
"Longturn". It's a Freeciv game where the server timeout 
has been set to 24 hour. Meaning you can only play one 
turn a day. So you log in, make your moves, end turn 
end disconnect, wait till tomorrow and...rinse and  repeat.

Gislan and LarryN from the Polish civ site have set up a 
server for hosting longturn games 
(http://forums.civ.org.pl/index.php). They've added a 
password patch that you need to login with. So no else 
can take over your civ. I've been playing for over a month 
now and the concept works great in practice. The start is 
slow at the start but once you've got a couple of cities 
going it becomes interesting as the chess like aspects of 
civ take over.

Only downer during the game being two powerfailures 
which meant the server went down as well. Although I 
see it more as proof that the Freeciv longturn concept is 
robust in multi player. It was just a matter of restarting 
the server and loading the save to continue were we left 
off. 

 -the players come back-

Cheers,

Thomas (CapTVK) 

> Hello!
> 
> I have a mad idea about the subject of the letter. Not everybody can
> play over the internet - here, in Russia, internet is quite expensive,
> and people are not very rich. Still, FreeCiv is very popular here,
> because many people have old computers, where Civ-3 (which has
> miltiplayer option) can't run. So, there is a FreeCiv almost in every
> local network.
> 
> Online mode is too expensive, modem connection is, as I suppose, hard
> to support... What about PBEM mode? That seems to be quite easy, only
> one option is to be added - a password on each nation in savegames.
> 
> In fact, sometimes we tried PBEM mode already - it works ;) I mean, we
> used to send savegames to each other. The problem is that we used to
> look, what is our opponent doing every turn - we loaded the nation of
> the opponent, examined it and only then loaded our own nations. The
> solution of the problem is to ask the player to enter the password of
> the nation before loading it.
> 
> How d'you like the idea?
> 
> Anyway, thank you for developing this great game!
> 
> ---
> Astarot.
> 
>