Quote Originally Posted by Agent Smith
I don't know, perhaps we should just agree to disagree
Probably.

So some of us can't comment on gameplay if we use a mod?
That depends of course on what your mod does - how it changes the gameplay. In so far as it changes the game, then no, you should not discuss those aspects of the game in general discussion threads where people are assumed to be playing vanilla, or at least close enough to vanilla not to affect whatever discussion is at hand. You can of course discuss other unchanged things, but even that is gray area since some people have not played vanilla sufficiently to even KNOW how it is different from the mod(s) they are using (note Carl, who played only about an hour of the game before changing to 6 month turns. I'm sure he's not alone). This lack of knowing the difference leads to people posting things without adequately prefacing them as mod-related b/c they don't realize it's due to their mod(s), and also to quite jumbled up threads due to talking about 2 or more versions of the game at the same time, which are both things you can already see cropping up with the shield fix, pike/polearm fix, and various other mods that have gained some popularity. I fairly regularly see people having to go back and explain that their comments were based on "mod x" that they are using. Prefacing comments with what personal modifications you're using is one possibility, but surely anyone can see that if that becomes widespread enough, soon it will be impossible to tell whether anything anyone says actually applies to the version of the game that you are playing. It actually already is difficult to tell to a large extent: I get the feeling that nearly everyone on here uses mods of some sort, and if that is the case then FAR too few comments are being prefaced as mod-related, and we're already on a sinking ship where we're likely hearing advice that may not necessarily hold true to the base game.

I don't see why there has to be such a purist attitude about generally discussing the game.
Because, as I said, you must be discussing the same game as someone else in order for your comments to be relevant to that person. If you personalize your game enough, then nothing you say is relevant to anyone because their game operates differently in every respect.

No hard feelings. I don't want to start a fight or anything.
Likewise. I may seem harsh sometimes, but don't confuse it as personal: I intend only to attack ideas, not people.

Quote Originally Posted by Carl
1. A poll a while back showed a very large percentage of the responders did not use the defualt time scale, that implies a fairly big part of the online community in fact is giving results at somthing other than the defualt timescale.
Such self-motivated response polls are not scientific and should be assumed to be inaccurate. People who see such polls typically are far more motivated to vote if they feel strongly on the matter. It seems unlikely that many people would feel strongly that the default time scale was best, where obviously many feel strongly that non-standard ones are best, so we can reasonably assume that the poll in question is skewed in favor of the non-standard time setting, and presents an inflated estimate of people using non-standard time scales.

Not everyone changes the timescale to get an advantage, they often change it because of other in game changes or because they want a diffrent style of gamplay, or as in my case just to make the game make sense.
Honestly it doesn't much matter why anyone has done this, only that it has been done. Even if we assume the people using this change are not trying to get an advantage, the fact remains that they do get one, and it changes the gameplay in some way, intended or not. Having a longer campaign affects the strategies you use on the campaign map because you know you have all the time in the world. Having 4 times as many turns pass before the mongols turn up likewise changes the campaign substantially for many factions that would otherwise have to divert significant resources to relatively early army build-up to combat that threat. I freely admit that the game mechanics remain largely unchanged, but the strategy decidedly does not. Thus far everyone has tried to trivialize the difference that a 6-month-per-turn game has from the standard 2-year-per-turn sort, but the differences simply are not trivial. That everyone keeps trying to say they're trivial just lends more credence to the idea that people are not sufficiently paying attention to how their mods are affecting their game, and thus are likely making some potentially misleading comments in general discussion threads as a result.