my suggestion (yes, me again), is you play in vdiplomacy.com
You'll see it's easier to deal with civil disorders and that.

I find 3 days phases pretty reliable in terms of competition. In my opinion, far more CDs in 18-36 hr phases, less if you go up. I suggest you bet 100 or more and it will help.

Vdip is also a way better site for most things.

Don't underestimate how this influences the game though. Slow games have much less dynamic, you tend to forget who the other players were and what your alliances were precisely. I find the a lot less enjoyable, but for the same reason also a lot less taxing.

Longer than what?
48 seems pretty ideal for me. The quality and pace are quite consistent but you have some leeway if you're afk for a day or so.

I find 48 to be the worst, to be honest. It is the time of a weekend, so sometimes I can be gone the whole time. Miss a phase on chatting in 24 and people are not so worried as long as you get orders in.

But that is just me and my schedule.

I also disagree with MoW. I think that 3 days or more allow for good dynamics as people have more time to change the dynamics each phase. But this only happens with 7 committed players.

Yeah, well maybe those seven players are the key issue. I'm stuck in a game with three non-talkers. Those are pretty long phases I can tell you.

In my opinion 2 day per phase is the optimum for the game of diplomacy. I did play several games with longer phases but results were mixed I have to admit. In the games with longer phases ( longer than 2 days) I noticed that most of the diplomacy happen in the first and second day and than correspondence level drop rapidly, and besides some people lose track of the happenings in the game.

More than one time I even got message from other player one the last day before the deadline with question: "We did talk about strategy for the next turn, but that was few days ago and I forgot what we did agreed on, so could you please repeat important parts, I do not have time to read all old messages".

Basically, long term games could be lot of fun but with people committed to it as Lando stated in his response. It would be interesting to try 7day per phase game some time in the future :)

Also, if you include retreats/builds each season is almost always longer. I couldn't imagine a 7 day phase game where people don't finalize and fall takes almost an entire month.

7 days to see whether Austria will raise new army in Vienna or Budapest seems crazy to say the least :))))

For me, I think I'll be able to play more but longer phase games, since I will have open schedules for part of the week. I'll just see how that works out. It sounds like, with most games, the key is committed players as opposed to phase length (the ideal length of which apparently varies by person). Thanks for the responses!

I'm a big fan of 36-hour phases.

Is there any reason why 25 or 50 hour options exist? They seem pretty redundant.

@ Yonni
For people who are on the metric clock.

Thanks. I will now spend the next hour looking at cultures that have used decimal time keeping.

1. Star Fleet

End of list.

France for parts of the 19th century?
Where would the world be without Wikipedia?

I just started a game with 10-day phases to see if anyone joins. I'm considering trying a Gunboat 10-day variant, just to see how long we can make it last. Who's in?

Live game starts in 30 minutes

gameID=107946

Sorry! Put it on the wrong thread.