| How Best to Fast-Forward the Early Game |
Fri, 20 September 2013 12:28  |
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 skoormit |
 | Lieutenant |
Messages: 665
Registered: July 2008
Location: Alabama | |
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I'm thinking about starting a game similar to No Monsters Allowed sometime in the next couple months.
I would like to shorten as much as possible the calendar time required to play through the very early part of the game.
You probably know what I mean. The early turns do not require very much time for an individual player to play. But with eight people spread out around the world, it is nevertheless uncommon for turns to generate faster than every 24 hours. As a result, the early portion of the game drags on for weeks and weeks in calendar time, during which time nothing very interesting is happening. Scouting. Colonizing. Building mines and factories. Maybe having a minor border skirmish here and there. How long this period lasts depends on the crowdedness of the universe.
There are four ways I know of to shorten the calendar time of the relatively unexciting early game:
1) Change the game parameters
2) Blitz start
3) Jump start
4) Multi-turn start
#1 means to change the game parameters so that conflict happens right away, and the turns are therefore interesting to play. In other words, make the universe smaller or add more players. I don't like games with immediate conflict. I prefer having some wiggle room to start with.
A blitz start means the game starts on a specific day and time and everyone plays turns very fast (<5 minutes or so per turn) for at least a few hours. I've never done a blitz-start with more than 3 players, but I know of many games that started this way back in the day, usually using IRC for the blitz portion and then transferring the game to SAH.
A jump start means that the players start with more stuff than in a standard game. Usually the game host submits orders for each race and generates the turns until the starting conditions are acheived, and then the players take over their own races. The extra stuff can be colonists and/or ships. A common approach is for the players to start with a few colonizer ships, a fleet of freighters with 1 million colonists on board, perhaps a few scouting ships, and a homeworld at 33% of capacity.
A multi-turn start means that for a specified number of turns, multiple years are generated per turn. For example: if the start is five years per turn for 50 years, then you will submit orders on year 1, 6, 11, 16, 21, 26, 31, 36, 41, and 46, and the other years are "skipped". In the skipped years, your ships and planets are following whatever orders you last submitted. Starting in year 51, you will submit orders each year just like a normal game.
I'm interested in hearing of the experiences of players who have played in games with these types of starts. Is there a type that works better than the others? Are certain types better suited for certain games? What are the unexpected challenges of playing these types of starts? And of course, are there other ways to acheive the desired effect (fast-forwarding through the early game in order to get to the good stuff as soon as possible)?
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