Development: Simultaneously

[buybuy24germany]

Played now some games here online. Very very good thing. But each game takes a lot in time. Why the development gameplay is not working simultaneously ? Each player would develope simultaneously and then the hole game would be a lot shorter. In the past on the Atari or Commodore that would not had worked, because players must play one after another . But now online it would be no problem to play it simultaneously, or ?

[Robbie]

In this case you will not see what other players do. What they build, etc.
To see what the other players go for (eg. Energy, Food) give you decisions what yourself can build and what not to build.

[buybuy24germany]

You would see it in the production phase and could decide round for round what you would build.
I suppose the long playing time factor is clincher...

[buybuy24germany]

At the game settings you can also disable "show computer player development" - that should be also possible for human...would realy be nice....

[Big Head Zach]

Turn order in the Development phase is vital to the gameplay, as it may determine who gets to buy MULEs and who doesn't, not mention giving some players a chance to see which way the developments are going (so they can decide which goods to try and produce more of).

[data2008]

Some insights from our testing of the prototype:
Given the fact that via internet play, each player has its own screen,
this idea just comes to mind naturally, so we did tried it in various playstyles:

Plain "all-at-once" development proved to be very confusing actually, as the town really got crowded,
so we tried a "ghost-sprites"-mode, meaning all other players than yourself were half transparent on the map and completely hidden in town.

We found that while it shortened gameplay quite some bit, it was very hard to follow what happended in that round by just looking at the resulting map during production.
The game had turned into a very hard memory game of "before-after" and blind out-guessing your oppenents. The original idea to adapt your strategy by clsoely looking what your opponents are doing and what might be in short supply and need this round was almost completely lost.

It's somewhat the same effect like with making the land grant phase into a land rush phase (or even further combining those two phases rush+dev to an all simultanously played superphase):
Subtle strategies of the original are lost, and the game merely becomes an excersise in placing mules at plots in the given time.

The exciting part of the original (from our conclusion) is not the actual placing of the mules (thats a rather boring necessity of the game), but in the strategic optimization of the plots... so making the game more action and less strategy tends to take away fun.

Now while that is what we found out in testing various playstyles, I am still thinking of ways to alter and possibly shorten the development phase without the side-effects of taking away strategy or losing oversight...

[buybuy24germany]

Could you tell me the playing time with 4 humans in your tests ? Normaly a hard game takes up to 90 minutes I suppose ?! Maybe I have good ideas for shorten the development phase , but my english is not good enough to explain that ;-(
The ghost mode is a nice idea, also there could be a window with all informations or after all player did their moves could be a very fast motion summary...
Must be all done in real time ; for example there is a low number of mules and then first come, first served...
Because MULE is no game like WOW or similar the playing time should be around 30-45 minutes each tournament game (thats my opinion...) that would be a lot more attractive.
Played some more games here and very often player leaves the tournament after some rounds. Thats a reason of playing time, I suppose... Thank you.

[data2008]

We had a version, where all combined shortening effects pushed a full game towards the 45 minutes line...

What we did was combine land grant + development to a single, simultanously played phase and also shortened the auction by altering how its played.

I personally think 30 minutes is not possible without compromising the game beyond what it can take.

45 minutes is doable, but we have not found the results to be equally fun.

Note that its also not worth trying to save on what we call microtiming, like cutting some seconds right after production etc., which we found people need to adjust to comprehend whats going on. The savings that matter would have to be in those phases that make the game what it is: Land rush, Development and Auction, where Auction currently takes the most time (and yet people still feel the species move a little too fast).

[buybuy24germany]

Yes, you are right, I see. Thanks for the response... Hope you will have a brainstorm to find a resolution to shorten playing time. But anyway, the whole thing will be a wow sucess with a  very very large potential. I suppose here in Germany you could decoy more than 10000 people... If you would give me a career decision for distribution here in Germany , I suppose I would charter it 

[GabrielPope]

Note that its also not worth trying to save on what we call microtiming, like cutting some seconds right after production etc., which we found people need to adjust to comprehend whats going on. The savings that matter would have to be in those phases that make the game what it is: Land rush, Development and Auction, where Auction currently takes the most time (and yet people still feel the species move a little too fast).

Personally, I think you may be able to cut out a lot of complaints about the speed while simultaneously speeding things up. Currently the timer speed slows to a crawl whenever players are moving; I don't know if this effect is somehow necessary to compensate for lag, but it does make busy auctions take a lot longer while also simultaneously allowing for ridiculously high price surges.

If the timer decayed at a steady rate even while players were moving, then this alone would greatly undermine the land auction shenanigans that get people up in arms while still keeping prices reasonably volatile and speeding up auctions overall.

(Also, it would be nice if auctions ended once there were no more goods to buy, similar to how it just skips the phase entirely if there's nothing to buy from the start.)

[vaylen]

At the game settings you can also disable "show computer player development" - that should be also possible for human...would realy be nice....

If a human player takes a minute to do his turn, how will disabling "show player development" warp time so it only takes 10 seconds for everyone else?

[vaylen]

I am curious. Did you ever try a version of the game where in a land auction, you could only move up, but not down?  I'd sure like to know how that affected things.