@Brian_Flowers: You are right, the effect i have described should only happen every other turn. The behaviour you describe really is annoying.
Well, there will always be annoying ppl slowing things down, but sometimes the person you want to trade with already submitted when you get there and then you have to hold your turn to see if they come back on or not… Sometimes, people just forget to trade or purposefully withhold a trade, pretending they didn’t see message. There are many things going on, one scenario doesn’t cover it all.
True, there will always be annoying people slowing things down, but it seems like having an option to force “submit last, submit twice” would cut down some of the most annoying behavior automatically. Incremental progress can still be worth it.
Again, the “submit last, submit twice” behavior would only kick in after submitting last, so it wouldn’t prevent doing what you describe – if someone has already submitted, it means you haven’t just submitted last (at which point a new turn will start and no one will have submitted). The behavior itself isn’t necessarily a punishment, and I’m not saying submitting last is bad behavior. It’s just that once you have submitted last, for whatever reason, you shouldn’t get to hold your next turn, nor should you really need to. At that point you can ask your trading partner to hold their turn if you really need it held. If they’re ignoring your message then what’s the point of holding the turn anyway – to punish them?
Finally, yes, there are probably some (narrow) situations for which there would be no workaround, where a trade might be missed as a result of that behavior. I think for a lot of players, on balance this would still be worth it to keep the game moving. But do note that I’m asking for this to be a setting, I think it’s an appropriate default setting but still a setting. For those folks who this behavior really doesn’t work for, they could avoid games with this setting.
Seems to me that we don’t disagree. 
I did not argue against your suggestion, in fact, I think as an option it could be helpful. I was just describing a situation (trading related) that comes up sometimes that delays submitting a turn on occasion. This is why I would like the secure/escrow/“some name” trading option, but that could be a whole other thread, and it is easier to hijack yours than make a new one.
This would be a great addition to turn based games. And once it would be in the game and everyone knows this rule it could also work as a motivation to join the kind of game that you are comfortable playing. I think currently people favour the shorter turn limit games because they know it is easy to constantly drag it as last person to submit. All they need to do is to submit once every 3 turns and it goes on at slowest possible speed.
So definately submit last, submit twice. And of course submit last should include everyone that didnt submit at all.
Ditto what Brian and Dysp said …
The only possible downside I can see is that a person who is REALLY out of touch could possibly get bounced out in less than 3x the turn time.
I.e. say it is a 12 hour turn game … but due to RL (happens and everyone understands/respects that) so he doesn’t submit … and is first to do so on the next round. Then everyone else submits really quick (say within an hour) for the 2nd turn … so then he only has 12 hours to get online to submit (remember, he’s not longer last to submit) for the 3rd turn or he times out.
So instead of going AFK in 36 hours, he goes in 25 hours … which could be good if he really was going AFK … but bad if RL interfered. Realistically, it’s almost never going to happen that all other players will submit in an hour … but just want to point out that if the player who has RL issues expects a 36 hour window to get back in, it may not happen. Again, in the vast majority of cases, players are going AFK anyway.
You could address this “every-other” approach by making the timeout 4 turns … so in the “final” round, the auto-submit would happen … but the player would have time to login and reset the timeout until everyone else submits.
Yes, we wouldn’t want folks to go AFK faster because of this change, and the mitigation you suggest seems like an easy way to prevent that.
Another possible bad side effect could be that when games are down to a few players and turns are flying pretty fast, one can be last to submit even if one submits quite promptly. And, the other players could be waiting for that having planned out a series of moves they don’t want that last to submit player to respond to, and jump on their submit buttons as soon as the game moves forward. To mitigate that, this should probably actually be implemented by setting that player’s turn timeout to 1 hour, rather than actually immediately auto-submit.
Good thinking suffusion … how about this guys.
If you are last to submit, then it shows as an auto-submit for half the time-interval.
I.e. in a 12 hours game, if you are last, it shows as you will submit in 6 hours (you can obviously submit sooner).
And then if you did the 4 strikes you out I was talking about, you are guaranteed at least 36 hours from going completely AFK. I.e. you wait 12 hours, then auto-submit is done at 6 hours (but you aren’t marked as last), then 12 hours, then 6 more before you are AFK … could be longer if other players aren’t all done at turns #2 and #4.
Or you could have the rule intact otherwise, but maybe it should not be enforced once there are only 4 (or 6) or so players left.
And I know this has come up in a lot of threads, but I wanna take it up here also: The afk rule for turn based games should be changed to 3 days (or xx days), not 3 turns.
Well, in the last game I was in that one guy was still around and submitting at or right before the deadline every turn when we were down to 4 players, so I’d some form of this rule still took effect then.
Is 3 days still reasonable for a 48 hour turn limit game? What about a 6 hour turn limit? I’m really not sure, I’m must bringing it up.
@HULK I’d rather see a shorter limit than that (perhaps 1/4 the normal limit?), as really one just needs long enough to consider a turn, but if it’s to hard to mitigate the AFK issue otherwise 1/2 is still a big improvement.
The AFK counter could be changed as Dysp suggested to actual days for turn based games. Also, his suggestion that it auto submit for players that didn’t submit at all is good too. Just don’t have that Forced submission reset the AFK counter for the player.
Another method to consider is that the submit button gets automatically entered for a player if they are last, but have also logged in during the current turn. That way, the players that come in and message, build or route ships get counted as having submitted only after the others have all submitted their turns as well.
I suggest not using a fraction of the turn time, but fix in 2 hours. If someone submits a turn last he probably will be able to submit another one in less than 2 hours. And if he won’t, it’s not a deadline, he may have the luck to be in time before everyone else submits. Also, this feature will only be a real problem if this player does that every time. It will only affect the compulsive delayers, forcing them to consider when is a good time to intentionally delay the turn.
And I think that counting turns instead of time for kicking some player in turn-based games make much more sense. To miss 3 turns in a row is a big deal in most games, but would be good if this number could be customizable.
Sorry to drag up an old post - but I’d be really keen to see a “submit last, submit twice” feature implemented (or some iteration of it). Any more progress on this one?
As someone who plays turn-based games pretty often it would be a great thing to help keep these games moving.
I haven’t read all the suggestions, but on face value I think this is a bad idea.
I play turn-based games so I can go about my daily life, work, sleep, travel, and still have an appointed time to seriously consider what I’m going to do next in the game.
Somebody has to be last, and I don’t think it’s fair to punish them, because they might not be slowing down the game on purpose.
Even if they are, we all have the choice to join these games, and if you’re going to join a turn-based game the turn limit should be a limit you can live with.
I worry about trying to punish people purposefully delaying their turns (which they have a right to do) turning in to punishing people who happen to go last for who knows what reason.
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Also, you don’t want to screw players out of spending their production income just because they happened to be last.
If you sign yourself up to a 12 hour turn limit, expect it to take 12 hours.
Somebody might do one turn last, then not do theirs immediately because they have real-life stuff to do, a ton of stuff to think about, a ton of carrier loops to change, or a ton of battle math to do (or all four!)
You simply can’t assume that just because somebody is messaging that they’re not submitting their turn because they are being a jerk.
This is why there are turn limits. I think it would be really stupid to add some ridiculous mechanism to add a turn limit to your turn limits.
Valid arguments Dakota, but there are players that have specifically stated they don’t submit turns on purpose, because they like the time frame the turns are due on, and screw everyone else. It is specifically a problem when turns are shorter, and people might be asleep during an entire turn (anything 8h and under) or with really long games where some players may have to quit if the game takes more than a couple months.
My answer to the Jerks (and they do play this game, the first Team game had one of them holding the game specifically at the full 12h limit) is to make the turn time an odd number. 11h rather than 12h. It forces the turn times to shift so one player can’t hold it at the time of his or her choice.
As for punishing people, I agree you don’t want a system that punishes people indiscriminately, but people need to be considerate to the other players as well. I feel if someone is taking the time to read and respond to many different messages, they should also be making their moves and submitting their turns.
The current system counts only missed turns until you submit the next turn. I would suggest a secondary counter, that does not reset, and has a higher count. That way, players that routinely skip turns would have a maximum limit.
After all, lots of games have a Delay of Game penalty. If you don’t have time to play, you probably shouldn’t have joined.
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Just to play devil’s advocate: I do many things from my phone, but after hyperspace and scanning gets too large and you have to zoom out, it becomes impossible to do your turn on mobile. Think, read, and respond to complicated messages? Sure, I can do that, but lots of time I just have to wait until I get back to my computer to actually do my turn.
Anyway, I do hate it when I’m doing well and somebody else is holding the game up, but I’m not sure there’s a mechanic that could fairly punish these people, because you never know.
I agree with wanting odd turn limits to roll the time around the globe, so to enforce that what if there was a turn-based game mode where you didn’t submit? The turns would always go at the appointed time and everybody would have the whole time to do what they wanted or come back and make changes. AFK would have to change to be based on whether you’d actually made any moves in the last several turns, but that might be a good change for turn-based games anyway.
Making production every 11h so it rotates in a real time game could be nice too.
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I have actually been seriously considering a shifting production period that would come online in the next major update (with the new techs and the team game mechanics.)
I thought that instead of making it earlier I might push it back later, the question is how much.
I was thinking 30 hours, (24 + 6) or 32 hours (24 + 8). In 30 hours there are 4 different times through the game for production in a game, in 32 there are only 3 different times a production might occur.
I might make this a top level post and gather peoples thoughts.
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30 sounds better over 32, mainly because the one extra time it gives. Although 31 would give all the 24 possible production times. But the best possible choice would be to make it totally configurable.
I would also like to see this for the turn based games. Currently there is for example no way to configure 6 hours jumps with 6 hour limit and 2 productions per day.