classical_hero
In whom I trust
Dave, can you update your second post that have the complete new proposed ruleset, so that it is easier to compare the differences. That would be greatly appreciated so we can see the changes in full.
Does this mean that binary research is outlawed? Seems that way.You must wait 20 hours between major changes to your research rate
I think we need to make an exception for binary research, because otherwise it's going to be a pain in the you-know-what for everyone when we have to wait a whole day almost every turn just because some civs that people have met are doing binary research. Turns would never finish early after civs met each other, which would be a real shame. So I definitely think this should be rephrased.Does this mean that binary research is outlawed? Seems that way.
That's true actually. Unless you're playing last every turn, you risk going a turn with the wrong research / wrong build if you switch it around mid-turn and then the turn ends before you can log back in. So Earthling has a good point that this should be less of an issue with simultaneous turns.I don't particularly care as I wouldn't be planning to do so myself, but anyway, isn't the problem fixed anyway as far as Demographics and Espionage go? If you have Espionage you can see their charts and they won't be able to hide it. Unlike the last game teams wouldn't be able to change what they're building/teching/tiles being worked at all - unless they actually didn't want to work those tiles and have any food/hammers/commerce applied I guess.
I don't see the need for the anti-espionage tech setting rule at all.
I don't see that it's "neccesary" per-se, but I look at it this way. If we don't have a rule against it, then to play optimally and give your team the best advantage, you need to stuff about switching techs all the time to hide what you're up to. This involves a lot of essentially metagaming with login times and who finishes the turn last. If you think it's a waste of time and couldn't be bothered with it, then technically you're losing out. So it makes the game better and faster if there's a rule against it so that no-one has to bother with it.
The other question then is whether the rule itself makes life more complicated in other ways, which it might, but a bit of leeway and discretion ought to be able to cover that in this case.
The difficult thing about the tech switching rule is that it's very hard to enforce. How are you going to know when the tech was switched? A team that wants to use espionage and be protected against tech switching has to take a screenshot every couple of hours to have evidence if it does switch. That's more work than trying to time the tech switch to hide your research, isn't it? And finding out tech goal and rate is still not foolproof since tweaking the tiles worked and number/type of specialists can make a big difference in turns without changing the percentage.