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What is LongTurn - intro

Posted: Sun Apr 09, 2017 9:50 pm
by Corbeau
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Longturn is not so much a different variety of Civilization game as much as it is a different playstyle. Basically, the only official difference between LongTurn and any other game of Civilization is that one game turn lasts one day. So, not 30 seconds or 2 minutes or "whatever the players agree", but exactly one day (or, in most cases, 23 hours due to some minor specific technical reasons). This means that the server is running constantly and all players connect to it during the day - when they get the time - make their moves and adjustments, and then log off to continue with their lives.

This, however, has drastic consequences for the flow of the game and the overall gaming experience.

Firstly, when you wish to play a standard game of Civ with other people, one of the main obstacles is getting everybody together at the same time. If you are playing it on the internet, most of the time there will be someone ready to play, but not too many people at once. LongTurn games, on the other hand, have been known to gather many tens of players. Needless to say, a game with so many players offers unlimited possibilities when it comes to diplomacy, war, peace, alliances, cooperation and hostile behaviour.

This also makes a Longturn game a major social event and the closest a Civilization game can get to Massive Mutiplayer ;)

Secondly, another obstacle is finding the time to play. Even the shortest game of Civ requires a time investment and nobody can do it in breaks between other things. If you don't have at least half an hour of 100% concentrated attention at your disposal, it doesn't make sense even to start. LongTurn, on the other hand, can be played relatively casually and, if you can't spare a large block of time, it can be played in small chunks throughout the day. So, basically, if you are a working adult with a number of responsibilities, but you would still like to play a world leader in your favourite game, and do it with or against other people, this is the variant you want to play.

Thirdly, unlike the short and fast games usually played on FreeCiv servers arount the net, you have a lot of time at your disposal to think through your every move, investigate every line of research and analyse everything you weren't able to analyse if you were playing a fast game.

Fourthly, and for me this is the most important aspect of LongTurn, diplomacy is a blast. You can make alliances, negotiate detailed deals, squabble about individual tiles, twist arms, weasle out of agreements in a way you were never able to if you were playing fast multiplayer or just ordinary single-player games. And you have all the time in the world to negotiate, persuade and find the right words to do so.

Longturn is currently being played at longturn.net (desktop client), freeciv.xyz (web and client) and www.freecivweb.org (web only) communities that run several series of games. For more information, feel free to ask here.

Re: What is LongTurn - intro

Posted: Sat Jul 15, 2017 9:38 am
by AndreasR
You can join the latest Freeciv-web LongTurn game here.


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Re: What is LongTurn - intro

Posted: Sat Mar 30, 2019 4:38 pm
by funksh0n
longturn.org is dead. The url forwards to advertising sites.

Re: What is LongTurn - intro

Posted: Sat Mar 30, 2019 5:16 pm
by wieder
The address of longturn.org has changed. It's now longturn.net and while there are "some" issues on the web site, the games are still running and new ones are planned.

Re: What is LongTurn - intro

Posted: Sat Mar 30, 2019 7:29 pm
by funksh0n
wieder wrote:The address of longturn.org has changed. It's now longturn.net and while there are "some" issues on the web site, the games are still running and new ones are planned.
Good to know, maybe the link on openciv.org and here in this thread should be updated?

Re: What is LongTurn - intro

Posted: Sun Mar 31, 2019 8:09 am
by Corbeau
Updated. Thanks for reminding us.

Re: What is LongTurn - intro

Posted: Sun May 05, 2019 1:49 am
by Lexxie
I see he did not really update. freeciv.net is a russian webstore.

Longturn games can be played on the web www.freecivweb.org

Re: What is LongTurn - intro

Posted: Thu Sep 05, 2019 1:34 pm
by wieder
We are now planning to release a warclient style longturn game at longturn.net. The game will be based on Freeciv 2.6 and the base ruleset is multiplayer.

More info about the ruleset can be found from here:

http://forum.longturn.net/viewtopic.php?id=1247

And the current version can be found from here:

https://github.com/longturn/games/tree/master/LT50

It's only for preview purposes and not yet fully tested for actually playing the game.

Re: What is LongTurn - intro

Posted: Thu Sep 05, 2019 2:20 pm
by Corbeau
What exactly is the main change compared to newer LT rulesets?

Re: What is LongTurn - intro

Posted: Mon Sep 09, 2019 10:27 am
by wieder
LT50 will be based on the multiplayer ruleset while most of the recent longturn.net games have been based on heaviliy modified civ2civ3 rulesets.

The modified multiplayer ruleset is also called Multiplayer 3 (a working name) and it is changing the gameplay towards to most ever tested game format. The warlient approach has been tested for a very long time and there have been many games played with it. Now it's the time to bring this classic to longturn.net so that it's more easy to see the ruleset responsible to teaching some or maybe even most of the great players to play Freeciv.

This doesn't mean that the traditional longturn.net rulesets would be going away. There will be also traditional games in the future. Trying out LT50 is a good opportunity to see how to play a game where the intended game length is maybe less than 100 turns. Meaning that the game will be fast longturn. The usual longturn.net games are designed to last 120-150 turn meaning that LT50 is for players who want to try a challenging game with rapture and without playing the same game for half a year.