CA clarifies turns

[Duke John]

Posted on .COM by prasthereaper

Reading through these forums, it seems there's a number of issues with the whole turn limit thing and there seems to be a tendency amongst some of the more vocal members to start making a lot of assumptions. Given that we are limited in what we can tell you at any given point, I guess that's only natural. The issues I have identified from reading through all these posts seem to be:

1) Game length - too few turns to suit certain play styles
2) Role-Playing - how do characters age?
3) UI - not showing the year
4) Eras - lack of multiple starting positions

Just spoke to Bob, our lead designer, for further clarity and taking each in turn:

1) The game is currently paced to be a 225 turn game, and is optimally played at that length.All this information is still being kept in .txt files.
2) Characters still age 1 year every 2 turns, so you will be a ble to roleplay them as you did in Rome. This issue is actually one of the reasons for dissociating years and turns. We wanted to cover a large period of history and streamline the gameplay whilst still allowing players to get some kind of attachment to their characters.
3) While some may argue it eliminates immersion, as wikiman mentioned previously, it's surprising how little you realise the change once you actually play it.
4) Each era is effectively a completely new campaign that needs to be individually setup, tested and balanced. Having multiple eras would inevitably delay release of the game.

So 500 years played in 225 turns while characters still age 1 year per 2 turns. That means that you will get 112 years of character development if you played the game optimally. However it appears that if you play less optimal (by roleplaying, not rushing or doing silly things) you could play more than 225 turns.

I agree with point 3. If the game shows events anchoring the turn into history then it will give me enough immersion and I won't realise it. But I think that the people who roleplay their characters or pay much attention to them will notice how the entire middle ages can be played with just 5 characters or so and that might kill the game for them.
And I am glad that they won't bother with multiple eras. I rather have the game released sooner than they spending time on something that could easily be done by modders.