Shifting Production Times

I have been seriously considering setting the production period so that it changes throughout the game.

Sometimes production would be at night, sometimes at day.

I was thinking 30 hours, (24 + 6) or 32 hours (24 + 8) between pays.

In 30 hours there are 4 different times throughout the game for production, in 32 there are only 3 different times a production might occur.

Example 30 hours: midnight, 6am, Noon, 6pm.
Example 32 hours: midnight, 8am, 4pm.

I may be able to make this configurable, but I’m looking for a new default, as the economy will be balanced against this value.

I have resisted this change in the past because I like have a fixed time to play my own games, but I have been thinking that we have a small international community here and it would be nice to have a default that was more fair for everybody.

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DEFINITELY! Yes!!! this is so cool

I would like to see a 22 and 26h setting as well. 20h is also fine with me, though I would mostly play the 22h or 26h.

What is it about a just 2 hour shift that you like. I was thinking that this would be a problem because as the production moved into the night there could be several days that you are at a disadvantage.

I’d like 6 hours the other way making it 18h or maybe 20h.

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We are already used to have production at 4 AM and you will be disadvantaged for 4 days only, that’s not much. Also keeping in mind the 6hour shift can be confusing. 2 hours is still near the time you managed your empire last day, which is much easier to keep in mind.

Why not just have production every 12 hours?

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Would that give the people in the time zone where the game starts at 8 an advantage over the ones when it’s at 4?

I’ve suggested 1.5h Ticks, which would result in the 36h production cycle, but in a different way. It also provides the benefit of letting people get a decent night sleep while missing fewer Ticks.

It’s much easier to count in 1 hour ticks. Given your example, I think it’s better to put 36 ticks in a cycle, rather than stretch 24 ticks to 36 hours.

That may be true, but my original suggestion (from very early this year) was to allow customized Tick lengths. That would allow private custom games to be set up based on player needs. In my suggestion, it stretched each Tick, resulting in a slightly slower game and a cycling Production time.

I don’t know of anyone that plays using the Slow setting; at least I’ve never seen one in the list when I was looking to join a game. With a 90m Tick, you get a slower game, allowing for a decent night sleep, without dragging it to double the length.

Using a Custom length box, you could go with 75m Ticks to give the same effect without quite slowing down as much, or go short (5m) for a LAN game.

I would prefer an option to set the production time when configuring the game. This way everyone knows that before joinning. The system-gerenated matches should shift this production time value, maybe by 7hs, so today’s game would have 12 am production time, the next would have 7 am, the next 2 pm, and so on.

We already have variable length ticks, there is 30 mins and 2 hours. I just don’t have a 90 minute option at the moment. I would like to have productions shifting without changing the speed of the game.

@Arth That is a good idea as well, but I think I would like a solution that has a rotating production time so all games are equally fair for everybody on the globe.

What if each player could choose his/her own production time?

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Or remove production times and integrate the gains into each individual tick… for example, current banking tech formula remains the same except divided evenly over 24 ticks.

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Just allow us to manually input tick length and game start time. If you are on the opposite side of the world, I’d rather you stay out of my game anyway. I prefer to play with people who get to sleep at a decent hour. It’s less likely someone will attack me in the middle of the night.

That’s no way to achieve universal mastership of all creation.

Production ticks is now a configurable option when creating games. The default is still 24 but the next 64 player game to kick off (after the one that is filling now) will have 28 tick productions as a test.

Would love some help testing if you want to create game games with variable times and let me know they work out.

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I’ll set one up tomorrow. Suggestions for setup anyone?

How does this affect turn-based games?

I would think we need adjustments to the jump times as well.

You should be able to select a production time that coincides with your turns. if you are doing 6 hour turns you might choose 18 or 30 hour productions for 3 or 5 turns per productions.

Of course, production times do tend to shift around a bit in TBGs so you could just leave it at 24!

Note: The amount of cash and research experiments does not change so if you have productions more often you will get more cash and more research!