Spectator Slot and Export Diplomatic Archives option

I’m playing in a game right now with a small forum community, and we’ve got a few other people on the forum watching the game. We’ve been posting semi-regular updates to keep the people who aren’t playing up to date—screenshots of the galaxy map, empire stats, and intel graphs—but it can be a bit of a pain when we’re all playing under aliases because of the need to hide our identities. Additionally, we were hoping to do some after-action reports and post-mortem discussion once the game is over. I’ve got two suggestions that would help us a lot, and anyone else who’s doing something similar:

First, the ability to have spectators would be really useful. It would be a special optional player slot (or slots) that the game’s creator can turn on or off (and password protect, maybe?). A Spectator’s galaxy map would show star ownership, but no other information about a star (just like you currently see if you open a game you aren’t playing in, or that you’ve been defeated in). It also wouldn’t show carriers or ship counts. They’d have access to the leaderboard, intel graphs, and empire stats panels, and should also be able to choose an alias and send and receive diplomatic messages. Essentially, they’re like a player that just starts without any stars, and doesn’t take up a normal player slot.

We’d use this as a way to have a war reporter covering the game for our community, but there are plenty of other uses it could be put to.

Second, it would be nice if we had the ability to export diplomatic messages—a single message at a time or a player’s entire archive—in HTML format. Plain text would be okay, too, but I’d really prefer if it was in HTML and styled like diplomatic messages currently are. I’ve been planning to try writing a Greasemonkey script to do it, but any implementation I came up with would be a lot clunkier than one that was built right into the game.

Thanks!

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Giving this thread a bit of a bump, because the game I was playing in—the one I wanted to export the diplomatic archives from—just ended, so now there’s a timer counting down until it gets deleted. Does anybody know how long games stay available after they conclude?

Games stay available for exactly one week after the game ends.

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Hey Kane,

I’m sorry to say I don’t think I’ll get this done for you in the next week.

You can copy and paste the text from each diplomatic message. It’s not ideal I know but at least you’ll have it.

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No worries, I wasn’t really expecting it’d be a priority. I had screenshots of most of what I needed, anyway. Thanks for considering it, though!

Actually, I wonder, have you thought about changing the “time to delete game” so that it’s based on when the last player looked at it? Say, a completed game is deleted 7 days after the last time someone views it. So, if someone really wanted to keep a Completed Game on record for a while longer than normal, they could just log in every few days to keep it alive. My guess is 95% of games would still end up deleted within a week or two, so it probably wouldn’t be a huge additional strain on your space limits.