There has been this lingering, unfulfilled promise that as we get further into the game the level of detail in the planning will reduce. Maybe it's time we start looking at that.
I'm not sure that the level of planning will reduce, but the focus will slowly start to shift.
For example, once we've had all of our on-continent Cities placed and each has 3+ improvements, the exact Worker movements won't matter as much. Until then, though, eeking out extra value out of our Workers is one of the easiest ways that other team members can provide feedback.
As you said, moving units around is now mostly being left up to the up-player, and that's because exact movement of exploring units has less of a priority in our overall plan. For now, Worker actions haven't reached that stage, but they will eventually.
I found my turn frustrating at the time for taking so long, but in the end it was nice when it all came together.
That's part of the satisfaction and pride that hopefully everyone can feel after a well-executed turnset.
I have to say it was very different to what I was expecting signing up. I'd imagined it was a case of the team picking the overall strategy, and the turn players actually playing the game (in particular looking after the micro) themselves.
You see that effect a lot in Open Succession Games, but often the players are already comfortable with each others' playstyles and tend to be of similar skill levels.
However, the biggest difference is that in an Open Succession game, you're mostly just competing against the in-game AI. So, you can still majorly goof up and achieve your goals with a large margin of safety--there is no need for good micro there, as you can still win the game and meet your goals by missing your victory date by a margin of 100 turns or more than if you'd intensively micromanaged.
In the SGOTM, the AIs are just sort of "in the way" to "steal our Wonders," provide trading opportunities, and to provide Diplo opportunities. We're really competing against the other teams, and the best way to beat them is to have a good strategy backed up by solid play.
It's more of a team game and less of a succession game.
Everyone on the team seems to be comfortable with this fact. Sure, Tata stepped out, but he (or she) may have done so regardless of how we played--we can't know his/her life situation. But every one of you has stepped up to the plate on many occasions and I'm proud of how you have all contributed and found ways to play together and to come together as a team.
* We're all aware now that stepping on non-forest squares prevents potential regrowth for a turn. We should now trust turnplayers to account for that, without having to give a step by step plan of where each unit will move. I mention this first because I think we're actually doing this one already.
I'm not 100% certain that everyone understands this concept, as every time that we discuss it, there are more questions that arise. As always, I'm willing to explain questions. If I miss a question directed to me, feel free to send me a Private Message about it, in case I happened to miss seeing it, and I'll do my best to answer it.
I'm pretty sure that most of us are NOT going to back to old messages very frequently and are "at best" searching through this thread for keywords. It seems to be that we have settled on a partial-Instant-Messaging approach to our messages, which may mean repeating things on occasion, but it is nice to see when people do make the effort to try and understand the info presented to them.
I'm fine if you try to understand and can't understand something. I'm fine if you understand something and totally disagree--differing opinions are not only valid to have but are encouraged to be expressed. I understand when you are busy and can't contribute. But I do appreciate when people take the time to get caught up on things that they may have missed, even if it means that person asking for into to be repeated or summarized.
* It's good to discuss what the workers do (e.g. "improve the marble", "go to Wheaties to irrigate the wheat"), but maybe we can stop writing turn-by-turn plans of every worker movement. Reminders of key turns to press stop on the workers are still good to have though.
As I said, this point will happen eventually, but we're still very low on Workers and have a LOT left for them to do. I don't foresee us laying off on exact Worker movements for a number of turnsets yet (at least until we've all had a chance to play 2 turnsets).
As you allude to, it's not really necessary to state things like "Worker is still irrigating the Corn" on each turn where a Worker is in the middle of improving a square where we plan to complete the improvement before having the Worker do something else. But, other than that point, we're still wanting to see exactly what the Workers are doing, so that those of us who are willing to run test games can help the UP player to optimize these moves. Plus, Mitchum needs to know this info either before or after the turnset, so that our test game can stay in synch with the real game, so I'd rather see us work them out ahead of time rather than make the UP player have to write down a bunch of things AND play at the same time--that situation is just ripe for mis-clicking or mis-typing, potentially creating a situation where it becomes easy to make a mistake while playing. I'd rather that our mistakes be ones where we forgot to do something or didn't do the most ideal thing but thought that what we did was good at the time, in favour of making mistakes where we know what happened was not what we wanted to do but it happened due to a mis-click with the mouse.
* We can say "Dehli prioritises food, then specialists, then commerce, then hammers", without needing to detail every citizen for every turn. Reminders for when the citizens may get set wrong are good, criticism for failing to mention which citizens are working which tiles on a single turn could be avoided.
Again, Mitchum needs this info if he is going to keep the test game up-to-date. Maybe we'll eventually not care that much if the test game stays in synch with the real game, but as long as we do care, then he will need this info. It's not like you can just open up a cheat screen to edit your Flasks, Gold, Food, Hammers, etc, so unless he knows precisely what was done, we will be unable to have a test game that accurately represents our real game.
From reading past SGOTM threads, it's clear that the Fifth Element team finds test games to be important and at least a majority of our current team seems to feel the same way, so I'd rather just make it easier or both the UP player and Mitchum to have this info detailed.
Think about it: if you have the exact squares and Specialists that your citizens need to work written down, it's just a way of capturing the decisions that were already made. Why make the UP player check a City screen every turn and then have to deal with a situation where they forgot to change what a City was working on one turn and will have to alter things on a future turn (for example: "oops, we didn't hire a 2nd Priest... now what do we do?"). So, rather than having to make the same decisions over and over (which gets boring very fast), making the decisions once and writing them down allows us to focus more on playing and less on mind-numbing repetition. It also leaves us more agile to react to unexpected decisions that arise during the turnset and to also be able to be more observant for other details, such new info that our Espionage points tell us or to watch for an AI possibly building up for war (things that we can't plan for in a test game and need to have our wits about us to watch for).
* Beaker rounding, working a multiple of 4 hammers, bulbing a whole tech while wasting a minimum of beakers and similar issues are of decreasing importance the bigger the empire gets, at some point we can start to leave these for the turnplayer to figure out.
Are they really less important or are they just something that we will hopefully be able to trust the UP player to figure out? Because it sounds like you are hinting that it may be better to leave more of these decisions to the UP player, but that you still expect the UP player to at least somewhat be aware of them.
Well, let me tell you that there are situations that are coming up that many of us have never played in mind before.
For example, are there players on the team who have never run Representation, a 0% Science Rate, and have tried to get an extra Flask out of their Library? Yes, there are. So, while it's nice to think that we'll eventually be able to leave some or all of these decisions to the UP player, others amongst us are still learning these nuances and are going to benefit from us discussing these issues.
Thus, until we're all comfortable with keeping these points in mind while we play, it's still worth discussing them, in my opinion.
I think it's always going to be worthwhile playing through the turn in the test game at least once (and usually more times), planning ahead and taking notes of things easily forgotten, but as the empire grows the level of detail in the notes should be starting to decrease, while so far it hasn't. If the turn player can acheive the same goals on the same turns as the people who ran test games then they can probably consider themselves ready.
I understand what you are saying and as I have said, some decisions will mean less over time, while others will still remain important for quite some time.
Another way to look at things: once our Cities start to grow and we've already improved a lot of the squares that a Worker could work, then there'll be less emphasis on which squares in a City get worked. For example, if our Rice City is at Size 7, we'll either be working shared squares or will not have to worry about what we're working with our citizens, as Coast squares will be the only unworked squares that will be available. At that point of the game, we're almost certainly going to be able to abstract what Rice City does to concepts such as:
"Let's grow the City as much as possible"
OR
"While we're still running Representation, let's hire 1 Scientist and grow slower"
OR
"Every time that we switch into Pacificism, work as many Scientists as you can, even if we lose Food in our Foodbox, as long as the City does not shrink in Size; later, when we're out of Pacificm, go back to growing the City as quickly as you can, while still working the Plains Cottage square"
