hey mark, if you need someone to fill the empty spot, I would certainly be more than willing to help...
though, in order to get all the Ftf people in, shouldn't it be non-anon? Wouldn't that be much more fun?

Great, Wiz, that would me it 100% WACcon!

I'm not looking for things to be fair based on F2F standards, my view of fair is not knowing who is who and that all must be judged by ingame press and actions, you should know that by now! :-)

Damn, I thought you said fair, not fun... You're right, it would be more fun for us to know who is who... In one respect, though it would also be fun for F2Fers to *not* know who is who, right?!

I'd definitely still prefer to be able to skip the weekends entirely, but I'd likely still play with 48 hour deadlines (I like to think that I'm good enough to recover from the occasional NMR if necessary :-)).
Either gunboat or a press game would work for me, although I don't know that you get much of a measure of how good people are at *Diplomacy* from a gunboat game.

One problem with adding code to skip weekends is, what is the definition of a weekend when you have people playing from all over the world in all timezones? One person's Sat/Sun is another's Fri/Sat. To be sure of skipping everyone's Sat and Sun, you'd have to pause for 3 days. Or you just let the creator of each game select the hours of the weekend pause and anyone joining accepts it or doesn't join.

cbrand, it will actually be very difficult for you to not log on at all over the weekend with a press game, unless you have 3 day phases (48 hour phases is probably my max for a press game). Personally, I lean heavily on press/communication on press games, and if an ally of mine NMR's my knee-jerk reaction is to kill that ally since I consider a NMR a stab (since I am typically the sort to heavily coordinate units with my ally)... Not talking every weekend will encourage others to gang up against you, with people that are talking, it's one of those "if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem" sort of paradigms, at least to me...

That said, if we got a group together that all agreed to the concept of "weekends off", then it could work. I was speaking more in general about joining some random game without such specific conditions agreed to beforehand...

Still waiting on two cancel votes, though it is kind of interesting to see it play out a bit...

I have a problem with the interface.
I entered a full set of orders - all my units moving. I clicked "Save". A checkmark appeared, but the "ready" button was greyed-out. So I clicked "Board" to refresh. One of my units now has a "Hold" order instead.
I believe this actually happened earlier in the game, too. I don't enter "Hold" orders in gunboat games except in very, very rare circumstances, and yet I've seen my orders go through with one unit holding. On that occasion, I figured it must be user error, but it definitely wasn't this time, and so I'm actually almost certain that it wasn't that time either.

To be honest, if I can't trust that the orders I enter are the orders that will get processed, I'm loathe to actually play a game for real on the site... Of course I'm open to some explanation that does make this "user error", but I can assure that what I said above is exactly what I did (I'm a SW developer by profession, so I understand the importance of documenting *exactly* what happened when the problem occurred).

As a follow-up, I just re-entered that unit's order (leaving the rest intact), clicked "Save", and it's still got a hold order entered.

Is the order complete? If you don't enter a location (or in the case of support moves and convoys two) it will revert to a hold after saving.

Yes, the order was complete both times (and almost certainly that earlier time, too).

Hmmm. Looking at it now, maybe that isn't true. It seems there's sometimes an extra "via land/via convoy" dropdown. It's certainly possible that I didn't expect that...

If a unit could move by land or by convoy, you must specify. If you do not specify then the order isn't valid and apparently gets reset to just a hold.

Note, if you say via convoy but the convoy doesn't happen, the move by land can still happen. I.e. you order Bel-Hol via convoy but your fleet in North Sea which was ordered to do the convoy is dislodged, or you decided to have it do something else than convoy, the unit in Bel will still try and move to Hol by land.

The point of this option is to keep your unit from being transported via convoy by the enemy. Saying via land says you want the unit to only move via land.

I just tested not setting the via land/convoy option on an order that was previously a support move and when I saved it changed back to the support move. So it just doesn't save the order when it is missing the via land/convoy option.

Bleagh. If this is just to avoid an unwanted convoy, it should be either "via convoy" or "don't care", with "don't care" being the default. Ignoring the move order altogether is really nasty.

My earlier problem was a support order, so it sounds like this wouldn't apply there...

cbrand, "via convoy" IS "don't care". It will try to move by convoy, if that fails it will attempt to move by land. "Via land" will only try to move by land.

cbrand, did you finalize your orders and see a green checkmark? Sometimes I will finalize just to verify I've entered everything in a valid way, and once I see the green checkmark, if I don't want orders to process early, I will then unfinalize.

d31, that's why I suggested that it should be optional. If it's the default anyway, why ignore an otherwise complete order that doesn't specify one or the other ? Not selecting either option from that dropbox certainly isn't "please silently completely ignore this order and use whatever order I previously entered for this unit".

MadMarx, I've generally being pressing "Save" and then "Ready". In these cases, "Ready" stayed greyed-out, which I guess is my clue to look more closely at which of the orders I entered have actually been stored. Very annoying, though. If I tell it to save my orders, it should either do so or tell me why it can't, not silently ignore some of them...

Totally agree. If it's not specified, then upon saving the machine should input, "via land".

I've just been doing a couple of the 5-minute turn live games and those extra clicks can really add up under that time pressure

Sounds like this is something to pass on to Kestas to incorporate into the code, thanks for the feedback guys!

How does playdiplomacy handle this situation?

Speaking of live games, you can set up games with 5, 10, 15 or 20minute turn games. I think a 10 minute game might best simulate the 15-18minute turn games at a FTF tourney. Since you don't have to physically move to a corner of the room to talk with someone. It might be fun to set one of those up. We'd all need to set aside a bunch of time though.

playdiplomacy had the same problem at first then it made it so that if you don't make the choice it assumes "by land".

...* supposedly *... I've never empirically tested it.

I have had my butt saved before though when someone accidentally(?) entered "by convoy" so it prevented a move that would have hurt me.

Suppose that if you make "by land" automatic, and you meant to convoy, you would not have any sort of indicator that you need to change it up, so I'm not sure that's a great idea either...

there is an indicator. a little popup window, but supposedly if you fail to choose anything, the default becomes "by land".