Civ V Pitboss Server

[Joseph Moskie]

I'm not sure if any devs are going to be looking at the 2k forums, but I just wanted to wish you the best of luck in working on the game. Fall 2010 seems fairly ambitious to me, and I know how grueling the game industry can be. I hope you all don't plan to sleep during the late summer / early fall.

One thing I'd like to ask for is a Pitboss server, or equivalent, right out of the box. Pitboss was an amazing innovation for Civilization, allowing players to log in and play their turn at their leisure is fantastic. No longer does everyone have to be logged in at once, or passing around a save file through email.

There is a rather large Pitboss community, and I wanted to make sure that you developers knew how important and well received Pitboss really was.

In addition to that, I'd also like to mention that I am running a website devoted to the tracking of Pitboss games. It essentially just scrapes the Pitboss window, generates events, and logs them so that players can see them. Players in these Pitboss games can see when it's their turn, and look at score graphs out of the game itself.

The website is located at www.playyourturn.com. You can check out the website's features and play around with it if you want.

If you are intending to release a Pitboss-like tool for Civilization 5, I'd suggest creating a similar website or some other interface to expose information like this.

Conversely, you're not opposed to the way I am currently supporting this functionality, I'd request that you structure the Pitboss tool in a similar fashion, exposing interesting information on the screen, or in other ways, so that an application running in parallel with Pitboss would be able to publish information to the internet.

I would gladly work with some of you developers in synchronizing any such tool with my website. The community would certainly appreciate having a website / tool like this right at release.

Feel free to email me at joe@playyourturn.com if you have any questions, or would like to talk about this.

[CanuckSoldier]

I agree, Pitboss was one of the best innovations for MP in Civ4 and is much superior to PBEM, and I hope that a similar but improved system is on the "to do" list for Civ5.

CS