Current Active Servers

[VanderLegion]

While I understand the complaints about people who only play for a short time every day not standing a chance against someone who plays for hours a day, complaining about the win coming out of nowhere or having nothing to show for weeks of babysitting your empire make no sense at all. That's how the game is set up, you should have known that going in. It's a game with potentially over a thousand players, and at least over a hundred on every server I'm on, where only 1 person can win. It doesn't matter how far the game is in regards to play time, you'll still have nothing to show for it if you don't win, that should come as no surprise. I could understand wanting to at least see progress that other players are making so you have an idea if they're getting close to winning, but that won't change the fact that you'll have nothing to show for your work if you lose.

And the problem with changing it so that players who only play a few minutes a day have as good a chance at winning as those who are willing to devote hours is that it basically would require it being changed so you CAN'T play for hours at a time, you'd have to essentially artificially limit what you can do in a given amount of time. I HATE games that do that. If I've bought a game, I want to be able to play it as much as I want. And a game that won't let me play more than 10 minutes a day or something is one that I'm quite simply just not going to play.

[JetJaguar2000]

In my post, and previously, I mention adding features that support "micro-competition" within the broader "there-can-be-only-one" game winning competition. Leaderboards would be the simplest, most uninteresting example. Of course I know going in that I'm not going to win the whole thing, but if there were leaderboards I could at least measure my results against my friends (or enemies, or neighbors) and have some feeling of "well, at least I beat that guy this time." You said it yourself, it's a game of hundreds of players. Does it seem at all reasonable or fun that one guy gets a "Congratulations, you win!" message, and 149 just get "You lose, try again next time!" after 2 MONTHS of playing?

Another dead simple example would be to have a large number of "awards" handed out at the end of the game, hopefully designed in such a way that the game winner doesn't get all of them. Even stuff like "Built Most Small Harvesters Award: JetJaguar2000!" would give me something to smile about at the end of it all.

As to your point about artificially limiting game play time, it's not an artificial limit if that's how the game works. If you refuse to play games that you can't spend hours on at a time, that's another issue. I think they could change the mechanics in a variety of ways that make the game slightly more "turn based" on top of the fundamentally realtime gameplay. There are also enough games being launched that if you somehow ran out of stuff to do in one game, there are plenty more to keep you busy.