recommended PBEM play style

[gwgardner]

recommended by me, not by Matrix, Slitherine, etc.

Just my opinion, but after playing many games with the PBEM++ system and now a game in hotseat, I suggest:

1) use the PBEM++ system for the short duration scenarios

2) use hotseat for playing any of the longer scenarios PBEM. This hotseat system is easy.

a) It lets you and your opponent (can be any number of players) see all events and make their own decisions instead of leaving it up to the system to choose event options randomly (albeit weighted randomly);

b) Lets you set any country from AI to human controlled at any time;

c) When the next turn is for an opponent's country, simply go to the save folder and zip up the whole folder for your game, send it to the opponent. Your opponent simply unzips that folder into his/her save folder, and so on;

d) inter-turn, for events and naval battles - This is the only dorky part: these always occur just before the next German turn. Save before the inter-turn, send to the German player. Let him step through the events, and if there are any for his opponents, he can send off an email giving the opponent the options, and once the opponent has responded with those choices, the German player can complete all the events.

Part d there is not ideal. I hope the devs eventually make all events during each player turn instead of inter-turn, but currently you have to do something like part d in hotseat.

[Chocolino]

Fully agree with you on playability of the Hotseat PBEM method. Yes, I also wish that we had events at the end of each countries turn instead of in the inter-turn. I hope Doom goes for it.

Once that is available, PBEM++ should also allow you event decisions and you could actually argue that then PBEM++ is the way to go since the only remaining benefit of the hotseat method is switching countries from AI to Human control and back. (that's convenient but not really essential in my opinion)