Summer Update - 029

[BarGamer]

* Oh, and Rob, when do we get a discussion on the more "intimate" aspects of Erfworldian life?

This isn't UNFworld. XD

Seriously, Wanda revealed that units aren't born, they're popped. I don't even see HOW she made Stanley "relax" if, there's no biological imperative behind it. It boggles the mind!

[Anton Gaist]

This isn't UNFworld. XD

Seriously, Wanda revealed that units aren't born, they're popped. I don't even see HOW she made Stanley "relax" if, there's no biological imperative behind it. It boggles the mind!

We know love exists. We don't know everything there is to know about how that works in Erfworld, but lust is most definitely present as well.

Maybe the Titans just wanted erfworldians to have a little fun, simple as that.

[Erk]

Maybe the Titans just wanted erfworldians to have a little fun, simple as that.

My guess is that the titans made the erfworlders in their own image, which includes some of the activities the titans engage in. I would assume titans don't "pop".

[Wyvern]

There's so much I don't understand about this...it's not the fact that the passage of time is relative that's throwing me off, but the fact that the 24-hour day isn't. If I understand correctly, units who remain in a single hex for the entire duration of their turn will perceive the length of a day as being exactly 24 hours, regardless of the content of the turn. Those who move might experience it as being longer, depending on where they go.

So let's consider this example. Two overlords, let's call them Murphy and Bartholomew, each have a side in the middle of nowhere, close to each other, but with no links to anyone else. Since there's only the two of them in the battlespace, the day is split between them. Murphy's side moves from dawn until midday, and Bartholomew gets from midday until dusk. The two warlords are in a state of uneasy peace, and at the moment, neither has any scouting or fighting to do on their turn. They're just letting resources pile up and units pop. If they're anything like us when we're in this situation in strategy games, they'll just end their turns the moment they come up, since there's no action they need to take.

What happens in terms of time? There's no way to stretch "end turn" into six hours or whatever. Will Murphy's turn start at 7:00, Bartholomew's at 7:01, and then both sides get a full day and night of off-turn rules? Will Murphy's side count as off-turn until 1:00, and then Bartholomew gets his one-minute turn, and then everyone is off-turn until the next day? Or is there some other factor in play?

Even in active turns, this might come up. It has always felt like most of an Erfworld turn was spent moving or fighting, but in all the examples, those things only take a few minutes of time for the overlord and other units in the capital. But they still have 24 hours to fill. What are they doing with their days to pass the time?

Then there's the opposite situation. Murphy's turn starts, and he decides that he's going to try never ending his turn. What happens then? Will his turn auto-end at 1:00 even if he doesn't tell it to? But 1:00 in terms of whose time? The capital's time? Murphy's personal time? Which trumps what when it comes to a conflict?

I mean, let's say that Murphy is in his capital city with his dwagon mount, a bunch of casters and other high-ranking advisers, and a squad of pikemen. Dawn comes and the turn starts. The pikemen make a small patrol throughout a few adjacent hexes and return. They experience this as taking two hours. Murphy simultaneously hops on his dwagon and expends all of its move in an extravagant joyride all over the countryside, experiencing the passage of four hours, ending back in the capital. What do all the units left in the capital experience?

Had it just been the pikers who had left, they would have experienced their action as just lasting a few minutes, and the pikers would come back to find only a few minutes had elapsed in the capital hex, giving them the whole rest of the day to kill (effectively giving them a 26-hour day). But what about the warlord? Will he come back to the capital hex ALSO to find that only a few minutes had elapsed, greatly increasing the time he's had to think and plan before the turn forcibly ends that afternoon? If he had another twenty dwagon mounts to switch to, could he be spending days, or even weeks in terms of experienced hours, flying around and around without getting hungry or tired or the day ending? Would his time trump capital-time and send the sun hurtling forward, causing those in the capital to lose lots of time? Or would they have been experiencing both the pikers' and Murphy's absences in "real-time", so as to prevent them from being behind the overlord?

What happens when there are ten sides all sharing the day, and turn lengths are dropped to only about an hour? Do overlords feel rushed in taking their turns compared to when there are fewer acting sides?

I think I was less confused before the explanation....

[cloudbreaker]

So let's consider this example. Two overlords, let's call them Murphy and Bartholomew, each have a side in the middle of nowhere, close to each other, but with no links to anyone else. Since there's only the two of them in the battlespace, the day is split between them. Murphy's side moves from dawn until midday, and Bartholomew gets from midday until dusk. The two warlords are in a state of uneasy peace, and at the moment, neither has any scouting or fighting to do on their turn. They're just letting resources pile up and units pop. If they're anything like us when we're in this situation in strategy games, they'll just end their turns the moment they come up, since there's no action they need to take.

What happens in terms of time? There's no way to stretch "end turn" into six hours or whatever. Will Murphy's turn start at 7:00, Bartholomew's at 7:01, and then both sides get a full day and night of off-turn rules? Will Murphy's side count as off-turn until 1:00, and then Bartholomew gets his one-minute turn, and then everyone is off-turn until the next day? Or is there some other factor in play?

For this example, I think a lot of the perceived time can be explained away by time being relative. If Murphy ends turn after one minute, I think Bartholomew will perceive it as having taken a full half day. And Murphy will have perceived Bartholomew's turn as having taken the entire rest of the day, even though it only took one minute from Bartholomew's perspective.

But I'm not even going to pretend that I understand how all of this 'time is relative' stuff works in Erfworld. It's just plain confusing to us Earthworlders.

[lovelyluthien]

I - I am so confused.
...
Poor Parson.

[Wyvern]

So let's consider this example. Two overlords, let's call them Murphy and Bartholomew, each have a side in the middle of nowhere, close to each other, but with no links to anyone else. Since there's only the two of them in the battlespace, the day is split between them. Murphy's side moves from dawn until midday, and Bartholomew gets from midday until dusk. The two warlords are in a state of uneasy peace, and at the moment, neither has any scouting or fighting to do on their turn. They're just letting resources pile up and units pop. If they're anything like us when we're in this situation in strategy games, they'll just end their turns the moment they come up, since there's no action they need to take.

What happens in terms of time? There's no way to stretch "end turn" into six hours or whatever. Will Murphy's turn start at 7:00, Bartholomew's at 7:01, and then both sides get a full day and night of off-turn rules? Will Murphy's side count as off-turn until 1:00, and then Bartholomew gets his one-minute turn, and then everyone is off-turn until the next day? Or is there some other factor in play?

For this example, I think a lot of the perceived time can be explained away by time being relative. If Murphy ends turn after one minute, I think Bartholomew will perceive it as having taken a full half day. And Murphy will have perceived Bartholomew's turn as having taken the entire rest of the day, even though it only took one minute from Bartholomew's perspective.

But I'm not even going to pretend that I understand how all of this 'time is relative' stuff works in Erfworld. It's just plain confusing to us Earthworlders.

So the time in Bartholomew's capital would be afternoon when his turn starts, but if he suddenly up and attacked one of Murphy's garrisons, the sun could still be in its early-morning position in that hex? I guess that works.

Of course, it could just as easily be that the defenders don't experience the attack until the afternoon has started in their own hex, too. The sequence of events works out either way. So I guess it's really just a cosmetic question of whether Erfworld prefers to fill in dead time between turns, or save it for the end of the day. I suppose it doesn't make much difference from a game-mechanics point of view. Maybe it even varies between the two depending on which is less confusing...the former is easier for units that don't know about one another, but the latter makes more sense for units that can watch each other move...why watch the other side stand around doing nothing for five hours until their turn officially starts?

Come to think of it...can't multiple sides occupy the same hex at the same time if all the stacks have warlords in them (to suppress auto-attack-until-someone-dies)? Could they converse with one another regardless of whose turn it its if they don't have any other orders? How would they fit into all of this? It's impossible to hide the dead time for them, because each side sees the same sun at the same time. It's relative by hex (which is determined by who's observing it), but it can't be different for multiple observers within the same hex.

And then there's still the long-turn question, which I think actually might affect what sides can and can't accomplish during a single turn, in addition to being confusing from a "how-is-it-experienced" point of view.

EDIT: Oh god, I think I just thought of an even worse problem. A Thinkamancer takes a squad of pikemen on a two-hour patrol route, starting and ending from the capital. Another Thinkamancer stays home in the capital, monitoring their progress on a big board like Goblin Knob used to have. Normally, today's update says that the trip will take two hours for the pikemen, and a few minutes for the Thinkamancer at the capital. But what if the traveling Thinkamancer and homebound Thinkamancer start a telepathic conversation...and continue it for the entire duration of the squad's journey? How the hell could that conversation possibly work? (Edit again: or even if they just both had Eyebooks, for that matter.)

[Majutsukai]

This can be made much easier to understand if you simply look at days, hours, minutes, and seconds as measurements of how much you can get done. So "ending turn without taking action" is the same as "doing nothing for x hours", there is no "simultaneous" sunrise or sunset because there is no such thing as inter-hex simultaneity, there is no such thing as waiting without either taking action or ending turn, and the amount of stuff you can do in one day and the amount of stuff you can do in one turn always coincide.

A scouting party can't set a "trap" in a hex by waiting out the day and returning right before sunset, because if the opposing side still has a turn to take in that hex, then the sun will not set before they enter. Time in Erfworld is a means of measuring action, not something independent like it is in our world.

EDIT for above: The traveling Thinkamancer would probably just perceive longer pauses in between their exchanges than would the one that stays stationary.

[moose o death]

too many people trying to see our version of erfworld in this time update. we don't have a parallel and parson can't leave the hex to have experienced it himself. each hex has it's own time zone using a non linear method of calculating time elapsed. 1 second is still one second. but the speed that the one second happens at changes.

because it seems to baffle people comparing it too earth. look at the world from their perspective.

the overlord runs the whole show.

if he has 200 squads of patrol to co-ordinate each capable of surveying 20 hexes. he has 4000 orders to act upon assuming nothing goes wrong. like sizemore keeps saying how else COULD it work? each squad takes approximately 12 hours of their time to move the 20 hexes. (erfworld doesn't fight at night remember) so the individual units don't really start their days until they are ordered too move. this may occur several hundred linear hours after the turn starts. but twenty seconds may have elapsed in their eye's. so the leadership (casters and overlord) spend an hour issuing patrol orders to all patrols and each patrol spends (for arguements sake) 12 hours wandering around checking hexes, their findings relayed back to maggie at each hex checked. if one patrol finds some wild beasts to kill for rations, other squads may be intercepted and sent to assist. they wouldn't all arrive at the same time but without active orders time would stop mattering to them so seconds later the other squads would all arrive for a co-ordinated hunt.

they engage in battle until the beasts are divided up for rations, stanley may move them on to new hexes or end turn at which night would fall and everyone would go to sleep.

time isn't linear in erfworld. it's fluid. the update even says the sun can move backwards if need be. if it's getting late in one hex when you move to the next and have heaps of move left you might start moving faster or the hex time might move backwards to allign with your own.

in battlespace situations, the sun might just stay at midday. no-one fights at night. the sun sets when all sides end turn.

personally i think the sun is what's confusing the most people. if this was planned from the start the sun should've been written out of the world. it's simply day or night.

although i'm pretty happy my original claim that turns simply take as long as they take proved valid.

[Wyvern]

although i'm pretty happy my original claim that turns simply take as long as they take proved valid.

That's the thing, though. Turns DON'T take as long as they need to, because Erfworlders have the concept of a 24-hour day. If the Overlord never moves from the capital, he only has six hours (assuming two sides) to make all his decisions. Troop movements just eat into much less of that than it does from their perspective. What I really want to know is what happens if the Overlord himself is traveling...if that travel time eats into his 6-hour turn or not.

[vdragan]

For the record: Late Saturday night/ early Sunday morning (check)..drunk (check check). A deeper understanding of the time system (...nope)

Turns DON'T take as long as they need to, because Erfworlders have the concept of a 24-hour day.

We know courtesy of Bogroll that the sun rises when the first side in the battlespace starts turn. Symmetry seems to demand (and the segment showing Ansom ending turn strongly implies) that the sun sets when the last side in the battlespace ends turn. We also know that a day is 24 hours, a unit of time which is based on a length which cannot be malleable (because if you said "a thousand and one" enough times to make up a day, the speed at which you say it cannot be influenced by when you end turn, since the world doesn't know when you are planning on ending turn.). Before today's update i would've said erfworlders DIDN'T have a 24 hour day concept of time.

So you either get a timer that's counting down to a "default end turn" which depends on sides in battlespace or..well.. really the alternate answer here is "pass the vodka".

[moose o death]

although i'm pretty happy my original claim that turns simply take as long as they take proved valid.

That's the thing, though. Turns DON'T take as long as they need to, because Erfworlders have the concept of a 24-hour day. If the Overlord never moves from the capital, he only has six hours (assuming two sides) to make all his decisions. Troop movements just eat into much less of that than it does from their perspective. What I really want to know is what happens if the Overlord himself is traveling...if that travel time eats into his 6-hour turn or not.

still haven't disconnected from earth. if you made a conscious decision to count like that for twenty four hour. you'd look foolish for wasting all that time doing nothing at all. wouldn't stop everyone else working through their own personal time dilations. in their eye's it might sound like your counting very slowly or very quickly.

flip your logic to the other direction, a day takes 24 hours to happen, everything you do happened within the 24 hours. the order in which events happened only matters to you. so just because it seemed to be 2pm when you talked to stanley, he recalls it being 9am as it happened earlier in his queue of events. if you want a real head screw there is no up, down left or right in space. the constellations count for squat because they are only in groups 2 dimensionally, and because everything orbits suns which orbit galactic centre's which could technically orbit a universal centre....if we start exploring space we will get totally lost almost immediately. every world would have it's own time.

now one last thing the faster you travel the slower time moves, gps satellites have to to account for that in order to accurately relay global positions. not accounting for it can put postions as far as 17KM's off target. it also means astronauts in the space station age at something like 17ms slower than terrestrial humans are.

time is not a constant in our own world. it's even less constant in erfworld.

[teratorn]

now one last thing the faster you travel the slower time moves, gps satellites have to to account for that in order to accurately relay global positions. not accounting for it can put postions as far as 17KM's off target. it also means astronauts in the space station age at something like 17ms slower than terrestrial humans are.

For GPS the major effect isn't the speed of the orbit (clocks slower by something like 7 microseconds per day), but the change in the gravity field, which works the other way around (clocks faster by about 46 microseconds per day). Time moves FASTER at GPS satellites.

[mortissimus]

In Catch-22 there is a character whose goal it is to live as long as possible. Therefore he avoids all excitement and intentionally seeks out all boring situations. I think that is a delaying tactic as obvious to humans as not ending turn would be to an erfworlder - you have done all you can do and you will not get any opportunity to do anything again until you end turn.

[Wyvern]

although i'm pretty happy my original claim that turns simply take as long as they take proved valid.

That's the thing, though. Turns DON'T take as long as they need to, because Erfworlders have the concept of a 24-hour day. If the Overlord never moves from the capital, he only has six hours (assuming two sides) to make all his decisions. Troop movements just eat into much less of that than it does from their perspective. What I really want to know is what happens if the Overlord himself is traveling...if that travel time eats into his 6-hour turn or not.

still haven't disconnected from earth. if you made a conscious decision to count like that for twenty four hour. you'd look foolish for wasting all that time doing nothing at all. wouldn't stop everyone else working through their own personal time dilations. in their eye's it might sound like your counting very slowly or very quickly.

The passage of time is the same for everyone within the same hex. So if I counted the seconds for a full day without ever leaving my starting hex, everyone else in that hex would experience it exactly the same. Another individual who traveled three hexes away and back might have counted to 20,000 seconds before I got to 1,000, but that's a separate issue. If you remain in one hex, the day passes in exactly 24 hours.

So if I'm the Overlord, and I'm sitting in my throne room in the capital, and I never leave the hex, I have a flat amount of time to give my orders. The day is only 12 hours long, and my turn only lasts 12/number-of-sides hours. If I have a magic stopwatch (like Parson's calculator), I can time it down to the second. I can't take longer than that amount of time to plan just because I need time to think. If I could, the notion of a 24-hour day would be meaningless, but apparently it isn't.

[gameboy1234]

I think the important thing here isn't the relative perception of time by units in different hexes; that's just the intriguing ground-level view of what it feels like to live in a tactical strategy game. The real meat of the update is in the concept that "the only thing that matters is the ORDER of our actions".

Right. It's just Burlew continuing to describe what it would really be like to live inside a board game. I don't think there are any huge, earth-shattering (Erf-shattering?) revelations here. A unit can spend all of it's move, and subjective time, to scout ahead, while the main army just waits for a report that seems to come relatively quickly in their perception.

This will make some nice drama later, when we see one unit on it's own perform a lot of actions, but then we'll shift back to the main action, where time might be different, but the single unit's actions have already taken place. But I think that's all it will really get used for -- drama. As you mention, the order of the actions, just like in a board game, are all that matter.

The thing that actually intrigued me about this post is that the sun moves at all in the sky; I'd have guessed, based on prior revelations about turn structure, that dawn is a universal event, and the sun hangs in the sky without moving until some milestone passes (determined by unit order), at which point it cha-chunks into noontime position, until further turn-based actions snap it forward into Sunset mode, signaling end-of-turn-near, then the moon popping up to signify that the turn is over.

Yeah I was thinking the same thing actually, based mostly on an early panel when Ansome ended turn for (I think) the first time. I wonder if that was the original idea, and things got switched around later?

[Wren]

I really like the relative time in each hex, but I think he is setting himself for some huge metaphysical problems later by making the movement of the sun relative to the movement of units within the hex. You could easily have more than 24 hours pass within one hex while no time has passed in surrounding hexes.
this leads to problems of what the sun should be doing in each, as it only becomes night when turns end (as shown in the comic when Ansom ends turn and the sun sets)
i.e.: unit a has 3 move. he moves from hex 1 to hex 2, scouts for 12 hours, circling the hex repeatedly. The sun has gone down. He returns to hex 2 where no time has passed.

If a unit stays in a hex until the sun has gone down, then its turn (and everybody's turn) is over. No moving to another hex until tomorrow.

They explicitly stated that the sun could be different in different hexes, and that the sun changed relative to time passing for a unit in that hex. If this is true, a unit could spend enough time "scouting" in a hex that the sun will be down, while in other hexes the sun is still up in the hex he is reporting to. Either this or the sun will stay at sunset and not go down while time passes. The sun cannot be tied to perceived time passing AND to turn ending and remain consistent.

[moose o death]

the scout reports seem all but instant. to me this implies erfworlders just look at the hex stats not waste time wandering around a hex.

failing that scouting a hex would count as move, if one move is moving from one hex to another. that implies it would take an aditional 3 move to scout a hex (1/2 move from the centre to the edges, 2piR, 3.14 move to walk around the hex.

would simply count as an order which subtracts move i would expect combat to subtract move as well or else battlespace would be finalised very quickly within city walls. committing troops to a fight should need to take away from move stats assuming they survive. but i don't play these kinds of game

personally i still don't see the confusion over this. my only problem with it is why they even bothered to have the sun.

[Anton Gaist]

my only problem with it is why they even bothered to have the sun.

So they could fight in the shade.

...

Sorry, it was just too easy.

That aside, I think of Scout as a special ability, one that allows the unit to quickly survey the hex as it moves across it. Vinnie's bats, for one, did quite a lot of flying round the hex. If it was only a matter of looking at the hex stats, Vinnie would have known about the dwagons in the pincer from the moment they entered the hex. Instead, he received the report as the bats were being destroyed.

[Krennson]

If the sun ONLY resets if someone else is in your (new) hex, doesn't that mean you can tell if an enemy is hiding in the hex you just entered, based on the sun resetting?

That would require that you leave the hex, the enemy enters the hex, their time passes, and then you reenter the hex, all in the same day.
Since you can only move on your turn, this would not be possible.

no, i mean, what if an illusomancer hides a ground army in a forest, and an enemy air unit flys over them on it's own turn. is it possible that the enemy air unit can't see them, but it CAN see the sun being in the 'wrong' place, thus suggesting that someone it doesn't know about has already observed that sun?