OK, I love playing freestyle games when they're realtime.
It's fast and it's fun, particularly if the bonuses are escalating.
One thing keeps annoying me though, and it's usually in an escalating game.
Picture a game that's been realtime since the start, with everyone playing quickly, right at the start of each turn. The game's been fairly even, a hard battle, but about 10 turns in I'm doing comparatively well and have, say, a large continent and one or two small ones at the end of my turn.
I was last to play so I need someone else to start the turn.
Both players vanish.
I wait.
And wait.
And wait.
And wait.
And wait.
...and eventually decide they've left and so I leave the game table/go to bed/do something else/play another game/whatever.
The next time I come back, one of them has had his turn, in which he's cashed in some cards for 20 armies (or whatever), piled all of his armies on my border and ploughed through all of my continents, taking away all my bonuses and meaning I only get 4 or 5 armies instead of, say, the 20 I would've got if they'd continued playing realtime.
To me, this is a really shady tactic, and an abuse of the way the system works (in my opinion).
My suggestion is this:
To prevent this from happening, and therefore make freestyle games more enjoyable, could bonus armies be allocated to all players at the beginning of each round, regardless of which player starts the turn?
By this I mean that the amount of armies you will receive will be determined at the beginning of each round, as oppose to at the beginning of each player's turn.
It would make it so that it wouldn't be worthwhile for a player to wait until a more dominant player has left to begin the turn, therefore speeding up freestyle games and keeping them exciting from beginning to end.
What does anyone think?
Possibly make it an option when creating a game?
