I was thinking, on some big boards it is mind boggling for a standard member to count the opponents territories in the even that it is important to know.  Any chance it would be possible to add "count" to the tabs at the top, "place" "attack" "fortify" "end turn" "refresh" "count" such that if "count" is selected at any time the player can click on territories whereby the territories would light up or turn off so that the player could count the territories they want to count without losing track of where they have counted already?

If there is already a way to do something like this that I am not aware of, I'd be keen to learn!

Thanks!

When I played as a youth, as I recall, there was no automated counter. You either looked at the board and guestimated the counts, or you counted them by hand (or until your opponents complained that you were holding up the game).  Point is: the presentation for standard members is every bit as good if not better than what you get playing the RL game.  My feeling is that metrics are (and should be) a Premium Feature in that they don't give you an inherent advantage - but they make analysis and assessment easier - not to be confused with "better.

berickf, I know you live in a location that prohibits you from transferring funds easily to the site, but if the site is to thrive/survive, there needs to be as much incentive as possible for players to pony up to play.  In my mind - count is a huge incentive; I'll bet there are a number of Premium members who would not have considered paying for their Premium membership if 'count' was included in the standard list of features.

When my premium membership expired I missed that particular feature enough to cough up for another year. So it worked here - I'm sure it works elsewhere too...

M57 wrote:

When I played as a youth, as I recall, there was no automated counter. You either looked at the board and guestimated the counts, or you counted them by hand (or until your opponents complained that you were holding up the game).  Point is: the presentation for standard members is every bit as good if not better than what you get playing the RL game.  My feeling is that metrics are (and should be) a Premium Feature in that they don't give you an inherent advantage - but they make analysis and assessment easier - not to be confused with "better.

berickf, I know you live in a location that prohibits you from transferring funds easily to the site, but if the site is to thrive/survive, there needs to be as much incentive as possible for players to pony up to play.  In my mind - count is a huge incentive; I'll bet there are a number of Premium members who would not have considered paying for their Premium membership if 'count' was included in the standard list of features.

When we played this in our youth, it was on the standard WarGear Warfare board.  Counting to 13, 14, 15, 16... on a board with big, easy-to-remember, territories separated by oceans is not really the same thing.  I'm talking about a board like Viper's Civil War whereby counting from left to right can leave many moments where one is left wondering... "Did I already count these territories over here, shoot, start over!"  Also, I'm not saying an automated count, just a way to mark the territories manually so that as someone counts across the screen they can light up the ones they have counted or put little flags on them, or some way of keeping track of the manual process.  It would still be manual, tedious and a chore, but, not completely befuddling.  Sometimes when players choose similar colours on Civil War it becomes nearly impossible!  I figured the point of premium was to give ease of use and not unfair advantage.  For 90% of the boards here the feature is not needed as manually counting is not a problem, but, for about 10% of the boards it does verge on unfair advantage because the territories are too close, too small and too difficult to cleanly and easily count without being 100% sure you didn't make a mistake on your way across the screen.  You end up tripple checking, just to be sure.  I'm not asking for it to do the counting for me, just to be able to put marks down so that an old brain like mine doesn't have to twist itself doing a manual task like counting territories from left to right.  It would still be a chore, and it would still be manual.  I doubt many would let the aid stop them from getting premium if they wanted the easy chart that displays everything automatically...  If you still want to keep it exceedingly tedious, maybe, instead of "count" we should have "marks" whereby a player is allowed to light up say ten territories only.  By using such marks as a front-line of counting, I could make my way across the screen with 10 marks and still know my count is correct when I get to the other side.

Ratsy, if such an aid existed, where you still had to manually click on every territory as you counted across the screen, would that really have been enough that you would have forgone taking premium?

M57 wrote:

berickf, I know you live in a location that prohibits you from transferring funds easily to the site, 

I hope this is true because I didn't fact-check this assertion before buying a 3-month gift premium membership for berickf.

I don't know if there is anyway to fact-check that other than Tom looking at his IP address (which has it's own limitations), but as far as I'm aware that is true and accurate.

Also, there should be browser plug-ins that let you make annotations. Looks like this one will let you draw on top of a website: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fireshot/?src=search

asm wrote:

M57 wrote:

berickf, I know you live in a location that prohibits you from transferring funds easily to the site, 

I hope this is true because I didn't fact-check this assertion before buying a 3-month gift premium membership for berickf.

The best I can come up with would be to send you a picture of me holding today's local newspaper... Like a proof of life ransom photo, only, in this case it'd be proof of locality, lol. 

Otherwise, you'd have to wait for me to go on safari and get a picture of me and an elephant, or something.  There is a urban myth in Kenya where a Japanese tourist was on safari by himself and saw a pride of lions lazing around.  He had to take a video of himself with the lions so he put the camcorder on the hood of his truck, framing the lions, then backed into the picture.  As is said, when the search party tracked down the lost tourist, all they found was a video of his demise... So, no picture of me and a lion ;-)  It must be an urban myth though, because, I have never seen a Japanese tourist traveling by them self before...  Though, in corroboration of how far a Japanese tourist might go, when I was staying in the South Pacific some time back, there was an active volcano which had claimed a few lives.  One of the said deaths was a Japanese tourist who wanted to get a closer looked and hiked down into the crater only to be killed in one of the volcano's routine eruptions and witnessed by the rest of his party watching from the edge of the crater.

Or, to be less dramatic, I could go take a photo of myself in front of a sign somewhere for something that is on google maps.  I live in Busia Kenya, so, not a lot to choose from, but, there are a few dusty dirty landmarks around here ;-)

When b first joined the site and took an interest in creating boards, he turned to me for advice. His design projects were very ambitious so there was a lot of correspondence, not uncommonly peppered with conversations about our RLs.  My sense is that if he is lying, he's living in a pretty big one - and deserves whatever support we give him ..if only for the entertainment experience.

M57 wrote:

When b first joined the site and took an interest in creating boards, he turned to me for advice. His design projects were very ambitious so there was a lot of correspondence, not uncommonly peppered with conversations about our RLs.  My sense is that if he is lying, he's living in a pretty big one - and deserves whatever support we give him ..if only for the entertainment experience.

That's exactly what I was thinking, but couldn't figure out how to say it!

Ha, you guys are hilarious. I did not mean to imply that he might have actually been living an elaborate lie. At the most I was suggesting that M57 might have misremembered.

But this thread is definitely super entertaining now. And off topic.

I don't have anything philosophically against this feature, but especially with the plugin korrun mentioned, it would be way way way way down my priority list.

You make a good point there Korrun.  If the board fits on the screen I could take a screen shot and then count the territories in an art program where I could mark the picture up.  If it's bigger then the screen, I could use a pluggin like the one you linked.  That would basically be achieving what I was asking for.  Thanks for the idea!

In the past I have avoided playing some CW setups when I didn't have premium or an ally with premium (who would agree to let me know the territory counts), for this exact reason, but, I think screenshots would probably be a suitable workaround to get the job done without twisting my mind up too much and taking so long to know I've got it correct.  The only question remaining is if those who now don't take the time to long form manually count, or do not do a manual cheat using screen shots, or do not have premium... if they are at a disadvantage?  Personally, I think they are, hence why I didn't play some CW setups previously when in that position simply because I knew it would take too long to manually count the board so often, but, I feel more comfortable now knowing I can at least screen shot my way to accurate, and fairly quick results.  I'm not sure if others will, even if they stumble upon this thread, so it might be nice to still have markable territories for manual counting so everyone has an inbuilt and available option for manual counting at a mouse click, but, at least Korrun has presented me with a workaround to bridge the gap for the time being.

Thanks for taking us back on topic Ozy, and thanks for the proposal for a workaround Korrun.

Erik, I'm left wondering whether you noticed that you don't have to worry about this for another three months, thanks to asm?

NewlyIdle wrote:

Erik, I'm left wondering whether you noticed that you don't have to worry about this for another three months, thanks to asm?

I'm aware, I'm just thinking about everyone, and not just me.  And, what I'll do in 3+ months.

Ozyman wrote:

I don't have anything philosophically against this feature, but especially with the plugin korrun mentioned, it would be way way way way down my priority list.

Sorry to throw your idea under the bus berickf, but as a standard member, there are other (non-designer) features I would use more. An easier to use history viewer and improvements in the board explorer would be higher on my list for helpful features.

And of course there are lots of designer features I would rather see, like randomly assigned capitals.

Korrun wrote:

Ozyman wrote:

I don't have anything philosophically against this feature, but especially with the plugin korrun mentioned, it would be way way way way down my priority list.

Sorry to throw your idea under the bus berickf, but as a standard member, there are other (non-designer) features I would use more. An easier to use history viewer and improvements in the board explorer would be higher on my list for helpful features.

And of course there are lots of designer features I would rather see, like randomly assigned capitals.

No prob.  I asked for many reasons.  First, I was thinking maybe something like it existed and someone would tell me.  Secondly, sometimes Tom does things more quickly because they'd be easy to implement.  It's not even the top of my list.  Like I said, I was just avoiding certain games where I felt I was adversely affected, so, that was always an option as well, but, if it was something that he could do quickly, you never know?  Third, I figured maybe if it didn't exist that somebody might mention a workaround, which you did, so if that workaround works well enough, and it probably will, then, I can play some of those games I always enjoyed and not feel at a disadvantage or like I'm wasting too much time doing something so menial.  Most standard probably won't even go to such lengths, so, in such games I might feel a bit guilty by holding an unfair advantage, but, it is what it is.  Fifth, I had never read the point being brought up before and any suggestion no matter how insignificant deserves a little lime light... yes?