[Civ4] - roboczar's PBEM game

[GuildBoss]

Map: Terra
Size: Standard
Speed: Quick
Schedule: minimum 2 turns/week

roboczar - Greeks, Alexander
Mike O'Malley - Romans, Julius Caesar
balut - Chinese, Qin Shi Huang Di
GuildBoss - Persians, Cyrus
snowmyr - English, Victoria

Feel free to post your AARs here! Hopefully we can keep a nice pace going once we get past the first handful of turns.

[roboczar]

The English were assigned Victoria, randomly.

Thanks for the thread :)

[GuildBoss]

Sooooo, who's got the file?

(can't wait for Pitboss) :wink:

[snowmyr]

For the record, I'm the English. I'm looking forward to this.

[GuildBoss]

Let's try to keep a tracking system in place whereby we post here to report we've taken our turn and sent the file off to the next player. Thus we can harrass any slackers. :?

[roboczar]

As far as I understand it, Mike O'Malley has the turn.

[Mike O'Malley]

I do not have the turn. I got the first turn and mailed it to Balut a few days ago.

[balut]

I haven't gotten any turns at all.

[GuildBoss]

(can't wait for Pitboss) :wink:

[Mike O'Malley]

WTF.

I just re-sent it, let me know if you don't see it next time you check your email. I'm using the email provided by roboczar, which is balut76 at Comcast.

[balut]

Still haven't gotten it. I got roboczar's initial email, but not yours, Mike. It's balut76 (at) comcast.net

[balut]

Hold on, just refreshed again. Apparently my spam filter threw it into the "junk" folder. I got it the second time, though I still can't find the first time it was sent.

[Mike O'Malley]

Monday night at 8:50 PM EDT :)

[GuildBoss]

I have it in my Inbox from balut but won't be able to play my turn until I get home after work. :cry:

[foogla]

I expect Dominion 2-like battle reports!

[Rob O'Boston]

I expect Dominion 2-like battle reports!

I've only played one day so far, but won't a Civ4 pbem game take years to complete? I think a game of Dom2 works better for pbem because you can get into the mid-game in 30 or 40 turns, and the end-game is about 100. How far will 40 turns get you in Civ4?

[Kalle]

How far will 40 turns get you in Civ4?

0 AD? :roll:

[roboczar]

This particular game of Civ is set on 'Quick' which means the game could be done very quickly, even though it might only be 100 AD or so. The build, research and movement speeds are all adjusted to make the game move very quickly.

If everyone does 2 turns a week, it shouldn't take *too* long, but I don't expect everyone to keep up for the whole game. At some point we'll have openings.

[GuildBoss]

File sent to Victoria of England!

[roboczar]

File sent to Rome

[Mike O'Malley]

There has to be a more efficient way to keep this moving than everybody posting every time they mail a turn. It'll make re-reads hellish.

Maybe we each keep a "status" post that we edit with date/time each time we mail a turn?

As below:

[Mike O'Malley]

ROME: Turn mailed to China sometime around 7:30 AM EDT 11/4/05

[GuildBoss]

There has to be a more efficient way to keep this moving than everybody posting every time they mail a turn. It'll make re-reads hellish.

Maybe we each keep a "status" post that we edit with date/time each time we mail a turn?

As below:

Well, we could try that but it seems like just as much work to go back and look for that post which will be a PITA when we're on page 2 and beyond.

I say we just put a blurb in with each post with something to read about the turn. It won't be much for a while but it will get more interesting as our empires continue to grow. It'll read more like a diary but that's how it worked in the Dom2 AAR threads and it was fine.

[balut]

Turn 2 sent off to Persia. Work on Chinese nukes is progressing well.

[snowmyr]

Too late. I've already built the SDI.

[GuildBoss]

Crap. Wheat is just out of reach of my city. Didn't see it until after I plopped her down...shoulda used the Resource locator thingie. :roll:

Turn sent to Victoria.

[roboczar]

Turn sent to Rome. Made contact with China and Persia this turn. Really close quarters here...

[balut]

Turn sent to Persia. Oh, Roboczar, I made a mistake and addressed you as Persia instead of Greece in diplomacy, my bad. Oh, and I changed my leader name from Qin Shi Huang to "David Lo Pan".

[GuildBoss]

Persia 3900 BC - My scouts bumped into scouts from Greece. We offered them to partake in our peace pipe...

turn sent to Victoria

[roboczar]

turn off to rome. not much to report. I feel claustrophobic :(

[Tom Chick]

Not that the rest of us aren't fascinated with who has the latest turn, but you guys may not be aware of a cool new invention called email that works not only to send your turns, but also to announce your sent turns. :)

-Tom

[roboczar]

sounds like pagan witchery to me.

[Tom Chick]

sounds like pagan witchery to me

That's the most likely explanation why my name is changed to that of another player or another player's computer every time it's my turn. Man, is PBEM borked in Civ4. Here's hoping the pit boss mode benefits from the extra development time that PBEM obviously needed.

-Tom

[GuildBoss]

sounds like pagan witchery to me

That's the most likely explanation why my name is changed to that of another player or another player's computer every time it's my turn. Man, is PBEM borked in Civ4. Here's hoping the pit boss mode benefits from the extra development time that PBEM obviously needed.

-Tom

If Pitboss is done properly (ie with ability to "force" turns) it will make this whole primitive emailing crap obsolete. Because at our current rate we'll be lucky to have Pottery by Spring 06... :roll:

[Mike O'Malley]

Somehow my nation got password-locked. Now I can't log in to play my turn. Roboczar re-emailed to me, so it doesn't see to be a goofy turn file. I don't remember ever entering a password and I've tried all my common ones.

Any ideas?

[Alan Au]

Somehow my nation got password-locked. Now I can't log in to play my turn. Roboczar re-emailed to me, so it doesn't see to be a goofy turn file. I don't remember ever entering a password and I've tried all my common ones.

Any ideas?
You might see if you can get the master password from Roboczar, and then when you're in the turn, hit Alt-D and set a new password. If that still doesn't work, you're probably out of luck (or you got the wrong turn file).

- Alan

[snowmyr]

I guess the pbem games take too long for firaxis to actually test that they work.

[Rob O'Boston]

I started a direct-ip game with a friend of mine, using xfire for chat, and it has been terrific. We can fit in one hour sessions and then save the game for the next session. We also tried a pbem game, sending turns back and forth over an 8 hour period, and we realized that we would never try that again since our direct-ip game covered the same ground in about 5 minutes. However, I think pitboss could be the ultimate method.

[Troy S Goodfellow]

I started a direct-ip game with a friend of mine, using xfire for chat, and it has been terrific. We can fit in one hour sessions and then save the game for the next session. We also tried a pbem game, sending turns back and forth over an 8 hour period, and we realized that we would never try that again since our direct-ip game covered the same ground in about 5 minutes. However, I think pitboss could be the ultimate method.

I'm hoping that PBEM will get more interesting when I have more to do than "move warrior one square north"...How many more turns till I hit that goody hut?

Troy

[GuildBoss]

I started a direct-ip game with a friend of mine, using xfire for chat, and it has been terrific. We can fit in one hour sessions and then save the game for the next session. We also tried a pbem game, sending turns back and forth over an 8 hour period, and we realized that we would never try that again since our direct-ip game covered the same ground in about 5 minutes. However, I think pitboss could be the ultimate method.

A lot of the PBEM games on CivFanatics/Apolyton usually have an IP session like this to kick start the game and then switch to PBEM. But then again, Pitboss ought to make this a moot point.

[JPR]

...using xfire for chat...

The game actually has built-in VOIP support and text chat. If you stare at the keyboard map thingy for 10-15 minutes, you can find the push-to-talk button (I think it's Scroll Lock or ALT-Scroll Lock or something crazy).

Text chat isn't the best, because there is no tone to tell you there is an incoming message -- it just puts it in the log in the top left-hand corner to be not noticed.

[roboczar]

Any luck with that save file, or are we stuffed?

[Mike O'Malley]

No luck at all. Can you unlock it with the master password or something?
This is BS, I never passworded this thing.

[GuildBoss]

So do we have a master password?

[snowmyr]

It's too bad pbem is so borked.

I finished a tcp/ip game last night were it was two of us teamed up against 3 other teams of 2. Amazing game. We actually sucked and were in last place most of the time, but were able to barely scrape by a space race victory thanks to snagging the internet and a very fortunately timed war between the first and second place teams.