I would love to play a real time game with 1/2 the speed or maybe 1/4 the speed. The AFK time would need to be increased to compensate for the speed change. Instead of a turn every hour, you can have a turn every 2 or 4 hours where the game moves 1 hour at a time.
The turn based games are too slow for me and they go through the tick jumps of 8 hours or more at a time. Taking a turn or 2 every day is a pain. If someone attacked me that is close enough they can and I won’t know they are attacking to react in time. If the game time was slowed down it would be easier to make the micromanagement choices without being on all the time. I like the real time play because it allows you more time to react but you also have to spend a lot of time to win the game. I would like a little of both choices and a slowed down real time game would make this possible and it will also keep the game moving.
I absolutely love the idea of customizable tick lengths.
I’d be very happy with a quarter speed game. That way you could do things like sleep or go to work without worrying.
Currently if that’s a concern you need to play turn based, but having random time jumps can be troublesome. It also hinders a lot of actions, for instance you can’t settle a planet, build a carrier on it, then head off to settle two different planets.
The other option is to play normal speed but on “far” star setting. Everything would then happen at the normal speed (research, etc) but ships would take longer between stars giving you time to respond or go to sleep, etc.
A “very far” setting could help even more with this.
I suggested customized lengths a while back. Not here, but when we were setting up a team game, and @infin8eye was emailing Jay directly about things, I had him ask about customized boxes for Ticks and Turn Timers. I was hoping for a 90m Tick length, so that the Production Cycle would rotate between 2 timezones on opposite sides of the world. It would also let people sleep at night and have fewer Ticks progress. Jay didn’t seem to like the idea of customizable times.
From memory, Jay was busy but would have to check if the current code supports this kind of change.
Brian you mention a 90 minute tick length, but I think you have it the wrong way around.
Currently a real time game is effectively:
Normal speed:
1 hour = 1 tick
Quad speed:
1 hour = 4 ticks
It may be that the game speed is coded per real time hour, so to get the tick to last 90 minutes it would be:
1 hour = 0.66667 ticks
If the code is only dealing in integers then this would require a lot more effort than simply changing a variable in the code.
The game can’t operate that way. It has to know how much actual time a Tick takes, as it counts them down in the timer. Also, if 1h =4Ticks, and the game only operates on integers, then every hour, it should jump 4 Ticks at once. I don’t know what the actual code looks like, but your assumption that it only deals in integers can’t be accurate unless it worked that way.
I don’t know how it actually works. I am making an assumption of how the code may work based on my experience with game mechanics. Jay is the only one who really knows.
The game is definitely not real time it is 1h turns. Quad speed may be implemented in one of a few ways. It may or may not be coded using only integers. I just know Jay said he wasn’t sure if 0.6667 speed was possible and would have to check the code.
