Longturn Forum

I browsed the forums and saw this.

http://forum.freeciv.org/f/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=89699

This is a very preliminary and rough idea.

That made me thinking about what are the biggest issues with new people trying out the games. Games that run for one evening or games that will be run in 23h turns. There are of course many reasons why the game is not tried out but time must be one of the most important one.

I was thinking about implementing a new ruleset for games that will be completed in 40-50 turns. Or with short turn the game could end in one hour.

This would roughly mean cutting away roughly 60% of the techs, improvements and units. The unit costs would need to come down and the same goes for pretty much everything. Maybe citymindist 3 and smaller granary sizes. And relatively low empire sizes. Like 5 cities and another unhappy from the next 5.

And yes, this would be a cut down version. Not necessarily a dumbed down one.

The idea would be to make it possible for people to try out the game without investing so many months into it and also make it possible to run some really short games.

Or simply start with 10 or more settlers and the first 2 tech columns already discovered?

That would speed up things but the end game might still last for a long time. The player should get about 1.5 techs / turn for ending in T50.

This is a difficult concept and I'm not sure if it would work.

Or simply do a deathmatch: all techs discovered, just go and kill each other

Anyway, moving to a different topic.

I won my first games by lowering (by half IIRC -- years ago) the scibox and foodbox settings in island games. Since the AI sucks at big cities and often gets stuck at Gunpowder, you win if you can get to Tactics.

Here is another idea for the problem. Maybe worth documenting here:

wieder_fiToday at 12:59 AM
I'm pretty sure we will not do this kind of game but here is one idea for a super fast casual game
what about making pretty much all the units unique and the map really small
it would be almost like the one city challenge but it would be possible to have more cities
CorbeauToday at 1:02 AM
That may be good for short-turn. Longturn would be pretty boring.
wieder_fiToday at 1:05 AM
well the game could end in 30-40 turns
in the big games too fast tech is bad because stuff is obsoleted really fast
but yeah well... this is for just documenting this idea in case it could be used for something in the future