Increasing turn lengths

[Barleyman]

One of the themes you see with TI as it is, is the whack-a-mole agent management game. This is endlessly repetitive business that's mostly taken up by defending interest and countering propaganda with side-order of investigating alien ops and burning xeno terraforming projects.

In the beginning the turn length is one week. After a bit it turns to two weeks, according to the game as bureaucracy sets in after the initial shock of alien contract. I propose that the turn length should be increased as the years pass. So after a while it'd go from two weeks to four weeks and four weeks to six weeks or two months or something along those lines.

Since the agent actions are tied to the turn length but otherwise armies, fleets and bases/habs proceed in real time, this would reduce micro without affecting game pacing otherwise. Possibly the agent XP accumulation should be adjusted as well or perhaps the bonus from persuasion/command/admin increased to avoid progress of empire-building from crawling at the same time.

[bane]

Or get rid of turns entirely?

In my current campaign, I am in 2036, with 15K research, starting to poke holes into the alien fleet. Obviously, I will win the game. The AI is horrible. The other human factions... are not even worth mentioning at this point.

Now, I will quit this campaign for one reason: the councilor mission assignment madness. At this point, I should be able to focus more on space combat, base building, and space economy because this is what matters now. Yet... the game forces me to do (for years) the same missions over and over again, even though I did unite most of the (industrialized) nations under my banner already.

Removing the turns in general, removing some silly missions such as "Defend Interest", and allowing certain counselor missions to run infinitely (i.e., public campaign), until I am satisfied with their progress would make the end-game mission assignment more fun.

[Barleyman]

I'm not sure removing turns would really help, then you'd have agents doing things at different times which would blow up micro, not the other way around. Increasing the turn length would be very straightforward, main thing to balance would be the experience gain, or perhaps just add some more agent training techs, so you're not completely crippled by losing an experienced agent.

I can see that turn length increase is mentioned in the road map.

• Late-Game Councilor Management
- Considering some options here, like granting some councilors autonomy to perform some limited range of defensive and support missions, or reducing the turn frequency a second time.

Now why stop at two? The longer the game has been running, the less fun playing whack-an-agent game becomes. Keep increasing the turn length and make things less of a chore. Perhaps this should be triggered by e.g. number of habs or exceeding a set CP thresholds?

[pestig]

I do not like the idea to reduce frequency at all: That is the part of the game I love, the space is just so so for me. To address the chore you mention limited automation can be the answer or a mid game tech granting defense interest permanently in exchange for some tradeoff.

And 1-2 new action for councillors to spice things up.

Finally: Automation.