Hello!

We absolutely love the game, the problem is HOW much we love it. It takes over our lives. As such, with many of us having family commitments, we are having to stop playing.

To overcome this, we suggest the ability creates games with fixed schedules (weekdays only, certain hours) during which the game clock runs.

We understand this would be a significant undertaking, so in the near term, we would be happy with the ability for the game creator to pause the game clock as needed.

Thanks!
Michael

Agree. Having a pause or "active time" would be extremely valuable from a strategic perspective. It's difficult to react to conditions that occur at 3 AM or when real life demands your attention.

Fun to see this keeps getting mentioned, and new forum members find these new posts, even though there have been lots of discussions about this.

I think the majority of the members here would prefer the current way of playing the game, because if issues with time zones etc. But apparently there are quite some requests about this, and I believe some sort of control over playing times is being worked on.

There have been two games that have been broadcasted on the developer blog, and they were paused during the weekend. This has been done manually by the developers though.

If you feel like, you can search this forum to read the other discussion.

Stefan,

Thanks for replying. I would imagine this would be a great selling feature for paid users. We have been playing private games, where we don't have the time zone issues.

I will search for the other posts but the fact that the devs can pause the game seems to imply the feature is built in and just not exposed.

Excited to see this feature come to life!
Michael

Great idea! I wish I thought of it. This would certainly make the game more appealing. Perhaps the game creator could adjust the master clock as well.

I agree with robotoverlord. The only other thread I've seen about a time control feature is this one about pausing. Pausing would be a great starting point, but as mentioned having finer grained control over the time progression for private games would be a huge benefit. Time zone issues likely wouldn't be an issue for private games, and even if players are across different time zones, at least it would give them flexibility to determine a game time progression that works best for everyone.

Curious, do the developers have a list of features they are adding somewhere?

Thanks,
Michael

robotoverlord wrote:I will search for the other posts but the fact that the devs can pause the game seems to imply the feature is built in and just not exposed.

Not really. Processing is done automatically by their servers by a process that runs every 10 minutes (i.e., one tick) for each game. Now, it's possible that someone with access to the server could disable processing for a particular game, but that would very much be a manual endeavor. Someone likely had to remove the game ID from the database of games to be processed, and then re-enter it after the weekend. And they would have to do that every weekend. It's simply not a scalable solution.

Gotcha. That is unfortunate, hopefully, they can find another easy way to implement this feature.

I think it would great added value for those who are willing to pay for the game.

Michael

Two words: yes please.
I love this game but it gets to be stressful, I'd much rather not have to worry about playing during work hours or the middle of the night.
And as this is a suggested feature for private games, I doubt time zones are a huge issue-
Even if there are multiple time zones involved, these folks already know each other and can come to some sort of agreement on hours.