I really like what you guys are doing, too! That looks and sounds very cool.

You're feedback is certainly appreciated! We're still early enough in the implementation of it all that we could take in suggestions for large and small changes to design and function. In fact that's something we hope to gain by sharing our goals and progress with you all as we're developing it!

A notification within the desktop client for messages with links to them would be nice if it hasn't been mentioned before.

Ah yes, that's a great idea!

I have no idea how easy this would be to implement, but I thought some sort of 'player schedule' page would be very beneficial, especially if it started supporting players putting in their prime time to take a turn. What I mean by this, for instance, is say it is ideal for me to play a turn from 2000-2300 GMT, or something like that. Everyone puts in their times (maybe tied to their profiles?) and when players join a game, a schedule of all joined players is generated. This would let the host set up a much more efficient order to minimize delay between players' turns being played. I realize it wouldn't be perfect, since players' schedules are likely to change, but I think in general it could be useful.

Other than that, it looks amazing. I particularly like the idea of changing around conversations and showing turn data. In my opinion, the more data the players see the better.

Originally posted by Tanuvein:

Everyone puts in their times (maybe tied to their profiles?) and when players join a game, a schedule of all joined players is generated. This would let the host set up a much more efficient order to minimize delay between players' turns being played.

That is a great idea. It seems that people generally like to order players by timezone, but that's not always the best choice.
For instance I finish work between 6 and 11 pm each night, and am generally online until around 1am, whereas some others may only be online between 6 and 10pm, which could seriously mess up the turn order if we were nearby (timezone wise) but got positioned based on GMT +? rather than the actual, specific times we can play.

It might not be the EASIEST thing to implement, but the return would definitely be worth the effort.

I've actually been considering something similar to what you're both describing. However, rather than have a player designate when they tend to play their turns, I was planning on making Multiplayer Robot intelligent enough to figure it out on its own. The plan is to use this data for estimating when turns will be taken (visible on the game overview page on the designs) and auto player ordering. We can probably display this information in detail on player profiles, too.

Originally posted by Tazzik:

I was planning on making Multiplayer Robot intelligent enough to figure it out on its own. The plan is to use this data for estimating when turns will be taken (visible on the game overview page on the designs) and auto player ordering. We can probably display this information in detail on player profiles, too.

That would be incredibly awesome! As long as there is a way to over ride the player ordering manually, just in case my history is showing that I'm likely to take my turns between x and y, because that's the trend over the past 12 months, but I've now moved to working midnight to 8am or something similar.

When I said the previous suggestion might not be the easiest thing to implement, I was forgetting that you guys are clearly GENIUSES when it comes to this type of thing.
Maybe we should try to think up the most insane, but useful and awesome features we possibly can, to really test you out.

You know how steam has the "looking to play" status tag? Something that would show "waiting on turns" would be cool.

I had another thought on the way home from work.
It would be great if we could list all the DLC we have on our GMR profile, or have it pick up the DLC from our Steam account, if that's at all possible.
The ability to search players based on the DLC's available would be even better, as it would make finding potential players a breeze, and possibly stop me from getting invites to games I can't join without spending between $12 and $70 on the DLC I don't have yet.

A thing that would be great to have is a way to temporarily let another player play your turns. Say when I'm going on holiday and I'd like to have a friend of mine play my turns. Currently I would have to share my steam login information, which is not something I'd like to do. Some sort of delegate button or expanding the vacation mode that it offers the option to delegate to another member, instead of AI.

How about the ability to resize the "Your Turns" and the "All Games" boxes, especially when the client is maximized, to see more games at once.

How about the ability for a game host to eject a player. For example a new player joins a game, playes 1 or 2 moves and never plays again. The player will eventually become removed if he is skipped but this can lose the game 4 days play if set to a skip level of 4. Give the host the option to remove the player if its obvious a game is being disrupted in this way.

I like the the player turn scheduling idea suggested by Tanuvein and Tazzik.

Delegation is a great idea. The game I am playing just now has ten players, five teams. Each team shares their authentication token with their buddy, which allows them to take their friend's turn.

It would be cool if you could "delegate" access to somebody else, and they get to play your turn and receive notifications. A bit like vacation mode, but without AI.

Another feature which might be useful is allowing players to hand control over to another player, should they not wish to continue in a game. This could either be someone already playing the game, or another new player :-)

That is possible now Gump. The player that wants to give control to another player just leaves the game, then the player taking over joins as their Civ, before that Civs turn comes up.
The repeat in reverse to hand control back.

Since GMR doesn't check or care if you actually have Civ V in your linked Steam account, a player could create a new Steam account if they want to play more than one Civ, or take over for a buddy, and sign into the GMR site/client using the dummy account, while staying signed into the Steam client with the account that owns the game.

Could easily get a little complex or annoying though, and it would be absolutely awesome if there was a way to have GMR do all the work for you, either allowing 2 players access to the same Civ, or at least allowing the same player to play multiple Civs in the one game.
Not sure how possible it would be though, technically speaking.