If you're onto that, could you make it so that when you take a civil disordered country in control the previous moves (holds, better said) are erased and you can put your own moves?

Sure, will do

"Remember, though, that finalization isn't required any more."

hmm thats fine; but now a smart player will not finalize his moves anymore and wait and check if his opponents logged in or not, to be able to exploit if an opponent was inactive;

the results might be, that noone finalizes his moves anymore and all turns will take the full 24h

so ending a phase should not be dependent on everyone finalizing his turn, but instead everyone has made valid moves for his units

otherwise personally, I would prefer to switch back to the old system

Well Merano when we were on the old system everyone wanted to switch to this system ;) I was arguing for just what you're now saying back then, but eventually decided to stop finalization being mandatory.

First off, everyone wanted it, and I didn't care about it so much, so why not.
But second I think the notification box gives people a good reason to finalize now, which wasn't there before; if you want to get a nice listing of games which you haven't yet entered your moves into you have to finalize, otherwise you can't know which ones you've entered moves into and which ones you haven't.

Also if a player wanted to wait as long as possible to exploit info on who hasn't logged in they could do that whether or not they were required to finalize.

If you don't want 24 hour turns you have to arrange a group of friends to play, because with gamers all over the world with different schedules you're not going to cut down the turn length by that much anyway

don't get me wrong; the new feature is nice and welcomed by many players; I just expressed my personal opinion and my fear of the feature being abused

but how about allowing an undo or change after finalization? if everyone finalized, fine; but if I still have to wait for others, I could change my mind

btw.: props on the notification box

Sure, I'll add that

Actually, can't you solve the problem by simply hiding who has turned in their orders? This will prevent players from taking advantage of another country who accidentally misses a turn, etc. At the same time, they'll be more willing to turn in orders early as they don't know if they are the last person or not.

I like the idea, but I also quite like seeing who is slacking and being able to encourage them to hurry up.
Perhaps hide it in public games but show it in private games

I like the idea of not having to finalize orders. It's a good idea, and 24 hours is not a long time to wait, considering Diplomacy is typically palyed over long periods of time, by mail or e-mail, with a LOT of time for interaction and consideration.

I think you should leave the option up to the individual country, whether to show if their orders are finalized or not. But I definitely do use the finalized orders to my advantage, often only issuing stab related messages AFTER the to-be-stabbed has finalized and can only watch in horror.

I agree with Merano, now we have the un-finalise button you SHOULD have to finalise for your moves for them to count. You now have the option to change your moves later, by unfinalising, so in a sense the original reason for counting unfinalised moves is now irrelevant. I think this would move games on more quickly

Chrispminis, I wouldnt be doing that any more with the option to change finalised moves now!

Mand, I totally agree with you!

Finalization is there for one reason, which is to let the game go on once everyone is ready. There's no reason to not count people's orders if they don't finalize.
If they want to hold up the game by not finalizing they could do that before or after this change because they could always just wait until the last minute like Chrispminis.

There were also problems like when civil disorders get taken over; should they be unfinalized when they are taken over, in which case other players may have finalized moves which didn't take the new player into account. Or should the new player be finalized, in which case the person taking over has to wait a turn.
Now that people can unfinalize this isn't so much of a problem.

Thanks for starting up this dialog I'm interested ot hear opinions

I find it very frustrating when I take over a country in civil disorder and I have to wait an additional turn before any of my units can move.