PeZook wrote:Or we could, say, move the time ahead so that we're not awfully close to a 1:1 ratio?
[Groans as events outrun own desire to write big honking storylines...]
I'm not opposed, but there does seem to be a certain amount of inertia at work here. The original build times were declared before we even considered the pace at which time might progress in-game; as far as I can tell they're a logical carryover from the old SDNW3 rules.
But unless we greatly increased the pace of the game, by about a factor of four (which I doubt many people
really want, though I could be wrong about that), there's still going to be a build time problem.
Since the build times are arbitrary and no one has much stake in them being exactly what they are now, there's no reason NOT to adjust them. At the same time we could also try to pick up the pace of the game, of course. But that way we wouldn't have to pick up said pace quite so much, which would arguably be to the good.
This is a game where we can have major events going down in the span of a few days of game time, events that may very well
demand a timely player reaction if the player is to roleplay their nation convincingly. If we accelerate the timescale to, say, one month per week, then the physical constraints of writing replies to in-game events will start tripping people up.
We lose extended coverage of in-game events; it's a lot faster to write "We won X and lost Y, the end" than to write an interesting narrative about what happened. And we'll see people simply missing the chance to become involved in events that they would normally be interested in; a lot of people have mentioned what happened in SDNW1 when military procurement decisions were made within a few hours of real-world time. Or when the whole "Shep goes berserk and nukes everybody" disaster was resolved in... what, a few days?
Something similar may happen here if we're forced to resolve week-long in-game crises in a day or two in order to keep up with the game clock.
I'd be happy with one month per two weeks
on average, and arguably I'd benefit from the discipline that would impose. But if we go much farther than that, we're going to have to take steps to increase the amount of time it takes for ships and messages to move, so that in-game decision cycles don't outrun out-of-game decision cycles.
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