Posts by Generalissimo Hitch

Here is an example:

You have a unit that is 3 hours communication distance from your HQ and 2 hours communications distance from the enemy HQ. If you order this unit to advance on the enemy, it will take 3 hours for that unit to start moving and another 2 hours for that movement to be communicated to the enemy HQ.

You have two options: order the unit to attack, or pause your view of the game for 5 hours and then order your unit to attack.

Note that when I say pause YOUR view of the game, I mean that only your interactions with the game will be paused for 5 hours. The game will continue as normal and all other players will continue to play without impact. Any of your other units on the map will continue to move and interact with other players. Only your ability to manipulate your units and/or see what is happening in the game will be paused.

Back to the two options you have: order your units now or pause for five hours before ordering your units.

If you submit the orders now and do not use the pause feature at all, things progress normally and in five hours, your enemy will see your unit start to advance towards him. You won't see the unit start to move for 6 hours due to the 3 hour distance between you and your unit.

Now lets examine option 2. You pause your game and come back to it in 5 hours. In 5 hours, you send the same order and un-pause your game. Your view of the world is 5 hours out of phase with the map everybody else is seeing. You will now start receiving the updates to the map that you would have received 5 hours ago if you had not paused your view of the game.

For example, a Tank Build event that completed 6 hours ago that was only 1 hours communication distance from your HQ would be received now and you could order that Tank to proceed towards the enemy. That tank would receive the order in an hour and in a total of two hours, you would start seeing it move. BUT, if you fast-forwarded your game by two hours, you would start seeing the tank move immediately. Note that no enemy unit can see this unit, so there is no impact to any other player.

You can fast forward the game because your perception of the game is 5 hours behind the universal game clock. You need to make those 5 hours up in order to be in sync with the rest of the game players.

Now if you advance your view of the game another 3 hours (for a total of the 5 hours you paused), you still won't see your original unit move (that won't happen for another hour). Your enemy would have seen your unit start to move a few minutes ago (depending on how many minutes you needed to fast forward the 5 hours).

Which is the EXACT same outcome as if you had ordered the unit to move 5 hours ago without pausing anything!

The enemy sees the exact same thing whether you use a pause or not.

**Notes: some questions that may arise from this example:

1. What would have happened if you had waited 6 hours? That's an excellent question because based on this example, the maximum amount of time you can pause is only 5 hours (the minimum distance between the two HQ's). Your game would have been forcibly un-paused at the 5 hour mark.
2. What if the enemy had attacked you during those 5 hours? Assuming he sent his attack order to units 2 hours from his HQ and the orders were sent at the beginning of those five hours, he would see his units start to move in 4 hours (2 hours to get to the unit and 2 hours to see the results back at the HQ). Assuming his units were 1 hour from mine, at the 3 hour mark the actual combat would occur but he wouldn't see the results until hour 6. For me, I'd see his units start to move at hour 5 (2 hours for his orders to get to his units and 3 hours for that event to reach my HQ). If I had not used pause, my orders would have reached my units and they would have started moving at hour 3 but I still would not have seen my units move until hour 6. In this case, his units are moving towards mine and would initiate combat at hour 3 so that means my units would start to move just as his attacked mine. If I used pause, the same result would take place. I'd send my orders, advance the 5 hours and then see his units start to move. At hour 6, I'd see the beginning of combat just as my units tried to move.

First off, I'll describe the effect this suggestion will have on game play and then discuss a brief technical implementation approach. Note that I am actually a game designer and have found this game to be ideal for introducing the concept of Asynchronous Real Time Strategy (ARTS) functionality to an existing game.

Imagine you are playing a game of S1914 but you only have an hour or so a day to play. You get home from work/school/etc and log on. You notice that your game detected your neighbour has started moving some heavy forces towards you and that has triggered the game to FREEZE THE GAME until you got home to deal with it. Yes, you need to suspend your disbelief here and just take it as faith that it is technically possible to freeze your game without freezing or impacting the game for others. So you notice that the game has been frozen for 5 hours so your own personal game clock is 5 hours behind the universal game clock. You give orders to your units to react to this incursion and start some build orders before you start your clock again. After ensuring that everything is going as you expected, you fast-forward your game at 2x speed, and then to 4x speed and finally at 10x speed until you catch up with the universal game clock. By this time, your neighbour is only 2 hours away from contact with your forces. You make some fine tuning to your units and restart the fast-forward to now go into the future a couple hours and start combat with your neighbour.

I know this sounds farfetched, but again I ask you to suspend your disbelief and just look at the functionality. Is it something you'd like to see in Supremacy 1914?

To give some hints to how this is technically possible, it deals with a communication delay between your HQ location and the location of the unit you are sending your orders to. If we assume that orders to your unit would take as long as a cavalry courier, there would be a delay in affecting the actions of your units at the front line. This delay allows some flexibility in when you, as a player, is forced to insert those orders into an 'order queue' that would eventually be delivered to your units (or be delivered to the HQ from the frontline). This would have some significant impact on HOW you play the game. For example, when you see the map, you are only seeing where/what you think should be happening on the front, not what actually is happening on the front. Your army may have already been destroyed (and you may be sending orders to something that no longer exists) but you haven't yet received the message from the front telling you that it has happened. An additional impact would be that when you give an order to a front-line unit, there will be a delay before the unit attempts to execute that order because of the time for the order to reach the unit.

In some ways, this represents a completely different game. But from an implementation approach, it could be introduced as an option to the game creation process and only those interested in this type of game style need to participate.

Thoughts?

I am also unable to join. Is this issue global or are only some of us impacted? And is the game advancing while we are unable to access it?