MERGED: Overall Speed of Play (poll)

[hudson]

Most of the suggestions in the first post are great, I would also like to have round 12 auction skipped - it's completely pointless and just makes you sit there waiting for the scores to come up.

[Robbie]

I would more like to see that auction 12 isnt piontless... 

[Intergalactic Mole]

In the original game, it is not pointless.  Only the computer players think it is.  But the human players have the opportunity to change things up in round 12.

[poobslag]

If you really wanted to shrink a game from 75 minutes to 60 minutes, you could just increase the speed of everything by 20%... Obviously, this wouldn't be in the spirit of recreating the original M.U.L.E experience - but I don't think it's completely absurd. Characters would run faster, goods would be traded faster, the results screen would pop up faster - a good ATARI/C64 emulator will let you try this yourself already, if you want to see if it's any fun.

Some parts (like the Land Grant) might be too fast at 150%, while some parts (like Land Auctions) might actually be able be sped up even further. Maybe they could tweak it, keeping the important parts slow and speeding up the other parts, so you can get a faster game in. And then, just have "Fast Play" as an option, without fundamentally changing M.U.L.E