Darvond: Play by email is a concept I like in theory, but no game since the early 2000s has really toyed with the concept.
In this modern age where not everyone has the time to be online at the same time as their peers, you'd think there'd be a resurgence with the ease of file sharing at an all time high, but alas.
Now, have you ever played a game by Email? I haven't, but I was also but a teenage/lad when PBEM was at it's biggest.
One game I recall being famous for PBEM was "Stars!", a graphically simple, but fairly deep and fun 4X space game. The problem being that the service one could have used to buy registration keys is defunct and the other problem is that "Stars!" is a 16 bit program.
Now, this discussion is on the matter of PBEM memories, mostly as I doubt there's still much a scene for it.
First of all, the email part probably outlived itself. In thie modern age where everyone is online always I think that file sharing is mostly down via cloud services. The part that remains is asynchronous multiplayer. So basically they all play in turns but they have some freedom when to make their turn.
I played PBEM with Civilization III and IV and I enjoyed it. One turn per day was doable for me (sometimes more than one) and that nicely stretches a whole game to several months, sometimes years. We would basically communicate over a forum. It works well. It works especially nice for turn based strategy games and for players who know each other well and know that they aren't quitters.
However, today I would implement it as cloud save feature with asynchronous turn execution which should work even better.
I have to look if Civilization VI has something like this to offer.
Maighstir: ...Civ 6
got a third-party client to do the work for you (automating what would be manually done for Civ 5).
Thanks. That's what I was looking for. Pity, it's a third party service, but if it's well made...
