Longturn Forum

Not really, I hope. But if there would be no fog of war, what would we see? Probably the same I see in my little part of the world: Some players are locked in by geographical reasons and other players, which is just bad luck. Other players have abundant space because of geographical reasons and neighbouring idlers, which is just good luck.
Of course there are also the very good players, that could cope with nearly any situation.
The lucky or very good players now just need to build their VLEs (very large empires), and for sure there is one that is very capable and very lucky. If there is the theoretical possibility for the other players to prevent the emergence of a sole superpower by joint action, it is completely ruled out by fog of war. Indeed fog of war is the enemy of strategical thinking, at least at the global and regional scale. So it well could be that the game is decided, and we could stop playing now.
But wait, fortunately LT40 is different: There is the city number limit/empire size restriction. It will hopefully prevent the lucky ones from exploit their luck, and mitigate the misfortune of the unlucky. I really can think of no reasons why somebody would want to waive a restriction that is so apt to compensate for the unfairness of chance that comes into the game with the map generator and the random start positions.

Some of the fog of war will be gone with electricity. With electricity and Atlantic telegraph Company everyone can have an embassy with everyone. This will greatly help to understand who is doing well and who is doing too well.

I am having trouble with understanding the first post in its entirety.

If you could see the full map and the stats, you might be able to guess the probable winners eve around T36. A veteran player who knows most the players or someone who could evaluate how well people are playing could probably have a good chance of guessing who are going to be among the winners.

However without knowing the politics and without the full knowledge of units and stats knowing that this early might not really work that well. Not in a game where people can ally freely, can gain surprise victories by stealing techs and also where people have not really play tested a new ruleset in a real game with lots of humans.

In some games the winners were kind of know once about 70% of the turns were played. In some games almost anything could have happened until to almost the end. Of course if someone would have all the embassies with everyone from the start, winning would be so much more easy. A single embassy does not that much but multiple ones may make the difference.

In a real game it's often very hard to say how well the others are doing.

Well, that's the point of the score ranking. If you get all embassies and realise you're 6th, maybe you won't be able to climb all the way to the 1st place, but you can try to become 5th or even 4th. It may not amount to much, BUT of there is a league, 4th place instead of 6th may mean much more.

I think that's kind of different matter. Score based ranking makes the game different and in one way more realistic. In the past it has been really hard to merge two nations. From that point of view making it harder to go beyond city limits is kind of realistic. That's a different matter.

I believe what fran was saying is that in some cases it's relatively easy to know who might be one of the top players and who might not be. Fran, feel free to correct me