As discussed many times in this forum, the most pressing issues with freestyle games stem from the "anti-double-turn block":
The player who triggers a new round is not allowed to take a second back-to-back turn and must wait for someone else to begin their turn.
I am thinking of changing it as follows:
The player who triggers a new round is not allowed to take a second back-to-back turn and must wait for either someone else to end their turn or half of the round to pass.
Let's say Player A went first the previous round and is blocked, waiting for Player B to go.
The first change, extending the block to the end of the Player B's turn (instead of the beginning), is designed to prevent situations where Player A conquered a continent he can't hold and lurks around waiting for Player B to begin his turn, at which point Player A will immediately refresh, click Begin Turn, and gets the bonus before Player B has time to attack.
The second change, timing out the block after 12 hours (or 2.5 minutes in a speed game) is designed to prevent situations where Player B delays his turn to the last minute in order to block Player A from playing at all. Another solution, the "rolling 24 window", would have been to extend the time for Player A to 24 hours after Player B ends his turn. The reason I'm chosing against this is that (a) it is harder to program and (b) it can lead to longer rounds, up to 48 hrs.
I think these two changes will balance out freestyle so it is more fair, but is still flexible and still allows players to use timing to their advantage. Please post your feedback here, before the changes are set in stone (well nothing is really set in stone, but I do plan to put this in the upcoming update).
And just to clarify, anti-double-turn block is only meant to prevent "surprise" double turns when the round ends before the 24 hours are up. Any other sort of double turn (e.g. when someone didn't play or ran out of time) is allowed because everyone knows when the turn expires and it isn't a surprise.
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