BTS & Fall From Heaven MP Community

[JackArmstrong]

Hey, all. I belong to the Realms Beyond [realmsbeyond.net] gaming community. On the off-chance that people are still browsing this forum and are interested in joining a PBEM or Pitboss, we regularly launch new games and are happy to welcome fresh faces into the community.

Realms Beyond emphasizes reporting, and our site hosts hundreds of threads detailing player's progress through their games.

[Ville Valste]

What are PBEM and Pitboss?

[JackArmstrong]

Two of the multiplayer modes in Civ IV, intended for longer games.

PBEM stands for "play by email" - after you play your turn, the game is paused and a save file is automatically generated for the next player in the turn order, who you have to email the save to. The game is played by passing saves around in that fashion- generally you'll expect to play about a turn every day with a 5-person game, and it's fairly common for games to last around four to five months.

Pitboss games are hosted on private servers. You sign log into the game, select your civ, play your turn, and then leave- once everyone has played their turn, the game automatically starts the next turn, your builds will complete, and you will be able to move your units again. You can log into the game at any point after playing to review the status of the game, even if you have already played your current turn. Although Pitboss games technically run in real-time, the turn timer is usually set to something like 24 hours, so it runs at about the same speed as a PBEM game- but it can handle many more players, since multiple people can log into the game at the same time. Pitboss functionality has disappeared from the in-game multiplayer menu as of a recent patch, but there are legal ways to restore it, which we use at RB.

[Ville Valste]

Isn't that Pitboss one of the launching options in Steam?

[JackArmstrong]

Yes, but you can't play Steam Pitboss with people who have non-Steam versions of the game, which is a fair amount of players. Regular Pitboss isn't hosted on a Steam server, so anyone with a copy of Civ IV can play, whether they use a disk or the Steam version.

[Ville Valste]

Ok.