A few things about the clock.

1) It would be nice if the game could be paused by mutual agreement, say for 2 minutes at a stretch. Sometimes you just need a bathroom break.

2) When autodraw is on, you lose 2 seconds for every move the other player makes - is there a reason for this? It allows players who are way behind in score but slightly ahead in clock time to run out an opponent's clock by moving 50 weenies around every turn. Add it to the list of cheap, annoying wins.

3) It would also be nice to have the option to not have a game time limit, just a turn time limit. (again, by mutual agreement).

@#2-- You mean autopass?

And situations where someone is "winning" when their opponent has 50 creatures are extremely rare. Just because you have a big glory lead doesn't necessarily mean you're winning. I've come back from 18 glory deficits on plenty of occasions.

Yes I mean autopass. And regarding the possibility for a comeback, all the more reason not to allow simply running down the clock. If you can come back, great! But I shouldn't lose 2 seconds of my time allotment for every action you take.

I had 30 secs left on my clock. was going to win at the end of the turn. clicked autopass. and some how the game managed to use up all my time....

but your suggestion wouldnt have helped. cause my opponent was intentionally trying to do as many things as possible to run my clock.

Pure speculation on my part, but autopass could be a client side function. I'm guessing when the server pings you for your turn, the client automatically sends back pass. There lag involved and this eats up clock when autopassing.

I suppose one way to "fix" things would be to make autopass a server side function. When you hit autopass, the server knows to autopass your turn and does so before pinging you. The problem would be "canceling" autopass, which I guess could be done when the client receives your opponent's moves and updates things. This would mean you wouldn't "un-autopass" as quickly, but I never seem to be able to hit that cancel when I need to fast enough anyways.

Agroagro: it would have helped your situation if autopass took 0 time per opponent's turn, which is how it should work. You'd have still had 30 seconds left when he was done.

Instead, every time he took an action, 2 seconds were burned off your clock. So he took 15 actions and you were done. The same thing has happened to me a number of times: ahead 18/0 in glory, going to win at the end of the turn, and instead opponent just burns out the clock.

Loopy: I'm not sure about the implementation details, but it should be easy to rectify whether it's on the client or server side. I get the impression that the devs chose a 2 second minimum per turn, just from the behavior I've seen. That's probably not a bad idea, to take away any advantage from having a faster connection. But it shouldn't apply to autopass.

I guess on many occasions, I think it's useful to think of this game in terms of chess. You don't have the luxury of "passing" in a chess tournament, but even if you know what you're going to do before it's your turn, it takes at least a couple seconds to move a piece and hit the clock... which may be some justification for why this is the way it is.

Not all chess games are timed - the timed chess gams are considered a whole different game, and many people who do well suck at games without a clock, and vice versa.

Anyway, in chess net lag doesn't come into it. Today because of lag, autopass turns were taking more like 8-10 seconds each, instead of 2. Made it easy for opp to get a big clock advantage quickly.

I've never seen a chess tournament that wasn't timed (and I've been to plenty of them). But I do agree that if lag makes the delay longer, it is an issue. Personally though, I can't remember a time when I ran into time troubles when I was winning. I use autopass and the automove queue, and I've yet to have serious time problems.

That's interesting. It's usually when I'm in the lead that I run into time issues, because I typically have more stuff to move around per turn in that case. Rarely do I run out of time when I'm behind.

Anyway the autopass/automove are subject to lag conditions, and automove doesn't seem to work as intended on Macs in any case, (at least if you want to use the ctrl keys to execute the moves.)