I corped with him last game I remeber He's not 100% manual.. try again.

John,

What I would like to see is this delay mode activate if the ship delay settings were set for anything but 'None'. The rule of thumb is "No one likes Delays" but if they were on, this mode would be made for it.

H

Helix, I'm not sure I understood the recommendation. But what I had in mind was actually first a main toggle, "Use different delays for interactive and noninteractive play", more or less. Then if you enabled this, you'd have two sets of timings to configure. One for interactive and one for non-interactive play, with a description of what defines the two modes. Then you could have any combination of delays for either mode. If this option proves popular, then there could be some well-proven presets so every gameop doesn't have to figure this out for him/herself. But initially, I would want as much configurability as possible so the ops can figure out what works based on feedback from their players.

interactive delays/noninteractive delays = active if any ship delay was set
no ship delay set = normail behavior

The dumb sysop defaults (of which group I am definitely a part)

H

Ok, so you're saying if someone sets delays for ship movements and attacks, they probably don't want them under most circumstances anyway, but only when time actually matters, like against a Gold alien, human player or when Photons are active. I guess I don't know why anyone would want delays other than these cases. Turns limit what you can do, so what's the harm in doing it as fast as you can. But when it comes to interactions, turn limits mean nothing. There need to be other ways to limit what one player can accomplish compared to another player given their tools, connection speed, etc. If that's what you're saying, I see what you mean.

I mean if you are going to do this, then do it automatically when the ship delay is set to 1-5 and if ship delay is set to none then use normal behavior. I am looking at this in term of setting up a game for players that want to use these settings. If it isn't easy to do, then it will be ignored for the most part I think.

My thinking is that if players want to use ship delay then they want all the delay mode options set for both players and aliens too.

H

I think we can do away with ship delay entirely now. The Emulation modes do a great job at slowing everything down to a pace gone by. I'd like to see the ship delay "bar" eliminated as well.

So if we have the battle or combat delay mode, that's more an event delay then a ship delay? So based on the set emulation the events will have the pace of tpw?

As an example, take emulation speed X the constant ship movement x the ship twp.

Is this what you have in mind JP?

I think that delays are more important in a high turn/unlimited game, but of coarse those are the players that don't wany any delays.

If you have animations off, the bar is off. I didn't want to make that a separate setting. But I did want it to be something that can be set per-player. I've had a lot of people say, when they experienced ship movement delays, "for some reason my game is just running so slow". The bar makes it obvious that there's a reason for it. When you do something with a very long delay, if you choose to have that in the game, you really need a progress bar. Once you're aware of it, turn it off if you like.



I'm not sure. I do think that delays will be necessary to have the kind of control we need to balance gameplay. I would agree that we don't need to take a second to warp from sector to sector in open space, which is most of the time in the game, but I think most people would gladly have some delays in place once they're interacting with other players. It gives you a chance to actually understand what's going on and react to it, and different ships and attacks will have different times associated with them, so you'll be able to take that into account in your tactics.

Another important thing to realize is that there has always been issues with the game running at the speed it runs at during interactions. Loss of data sync, corrupted data, loss of messages, message spamming, etc. There used to be natural limitations on how fast things happened in the game. There need to be limits. "as fast as it'll go" just doesn't work that well.

As for the dumb sysop thing, I totally get that. But what I want to have eventually is a normal settings mode and an advanced settings mode. Normal would be one or more standard presets. Advanced would allow you to go in and tweak anything you want. And I need it to be advanced right now because we don't yet know what the presets will be. It's time to playtest.

Delays that limit the speed of actions between players are important in any situation. The reason people don't want them is because they spend most of their time away from other players and it unnecessarily slows the game down.

In an unlimited turns game, delays are the only thing that can control how fast players are cashing.

Ok, yeah, but I'm not concerned with that. You can use turns to control that. I see your point, but why add a way to control it when it's already there? What we need is a way to control the speed of interactions because turns don't do that. That's what ship delays were for, but the jury's out on that. Nobody is going to use them. So maybe a compromise will be better.

Unlimited turns is a style of play. Not a style that I would choose, but it seems to be a popular style. These players want to make as much cash as quickly as they can, so anything that I do as a GameOp to slow them down isn't popular.

Maybe combat needs to be more like Risk. Each player has a chance to make their move before the next player can move again.

Right. So don't use this setting. It's not for that kind of play. Well, I could imagine some players maybe wanting to slow down interactions while still allowing trading and such to be as fast as possible. This setting would support that. But yeah, they're never going to have move delays on as it's currently defined. Very few people are interested in the current move delays option in any game style. Maybe you know from your game list, are there many games running standard move delays, and do they get many players?