Five minutes for a 60 min game is just ridiculous. Especially in MME MA LD, when you have to do many orders every turn.
Especially annoying when your mouse malfunctions and your opponent is stalling.

Edited 7/21/2023 21:07:27

I think they are all fine except ComLD. Sometimes when I play that I can't even deploy everything in 2mins because I have too many bonuses, and then all those armies still need to move.
My Clanmate Hatter ones won a ComLD game down 71 income because the opponent didn't have the time to move his armies and eventually lost his commander.
While that's good for us, obviously, I don't think that it should be the strat to purposefully stop expanding to still have time to make moves.

SE1W is borderline unplayable on 1 minute + 2 banked. It doesn't have to be 3 +5 (like the old boot time and auto coin game), but it does need at least 2 minutes before bank. 2v2 FE is stressful to play well, but manageable if you apply a "blitz" chess mentality. I don't play either LD template but I imagine both of those are problematic. To summarize:

Boot time is ok:
Strat 1v1: Fine rare for time to be an issue
Guiroma: Fine time is never an issue
FBrawl: Fine time is never an issue
SEAD: Usually ok, it can have the same issues as SE1W but it's much rarer, because the beginning is a lot less strategic
Comm-bomb: I don't play this but that timer is very luxurious for any SE format

Boot time is problematic:
SE1W: Unplayable. In a complex game there is not enough time to physically watch a turn and enter orders which means you have to skip turn and miss details. Plus picks require actual thought here and the first few turns can as well so burning time early is much more common than in SEAD
2v2 FE: Hard to discuss with teammate on this timer, and picks are really complicated on this format. Basically have to adopt a blitz mentality of time management. In a long game there will come a time when I say to my teammate "no more communication because of timer"
LD-comm/LD-MA: Anything with LD takes a long time to enter orders.

Edited 7/21/2023 22:08:49

SEW1 is fine.
Meanwhile, LD is always asking for pain, so you shouldn't get to complain about how painful it is...

Orcus mimics my thoughts exactly. +1.

I will say, though. Combomb is very math based. It needs time to make sure you’re not going to get your commander killed, especially when bombs come into play and you’ve got to math for subsequent turns too. Does it need 3+5? Probably not. Top players will use all of their banked time to stall for second pick cycle anyway. But I don’t see the logic behind S2v2, CommLD and Cancer having lower boot times than Combomb lol.

My suggestion for boot times would be:
SEAD & SE1W: 2+2
Combomb: 3+3
S1v1, Guiroma & FB: 2+5
CommLD & Cancer: 3+5
S2v2: 4+4

I agree that time management is a massive part of being a competitive player. There is only so much time to review turns, enter orders, and make adjustments. Typically the longer a game drags on the more time is needed (this is particularly true about LD templates where you'll often need to put in dozens of orders to advance your train of armies.
Suggestion:

Have a graduated/progressive time scale where you get an additional allotment of time per turn?
say with MME LD you could get +5secs/turn so by turn 12 you've got an extra min and by turn 24, 2 mins, etc. or something along those lines. maybe less like 3 secs. whatever.

I personally like to review each turn "slowly" if I can to watch every interaction and track armies lost vs opponent etc, but that takes time and when the clock is on fumes it forces blunders.

How much do we want the clock to play a factor in determining the outcome of the game? In pro sports it's said that you want a fair and unbiased referee who doesn't determine the outcome of the game. Is the clock the equivalent of a WZ referee?

In chess there are slow matches (60mins+) and rapid ones(20mins) and blitz(5mins) and bullet ones (<60sec) where its really all about the clock and your ability to think and move VERY fast. Do we want that with WZ or do we want slow methodical calculated play?

How about this: Should there be new categories for each template with different time controls?

Would you like to be the best "Hyper Bullet" SEAD player with 5/10sec time controls? That sounds cool :-) All speed, no skill!

Just think, we could quadruple the number of templates if we added 4 sets of time controls for every template! then we'd all have a hard time getting opponents... maybe that's a horrible idea. And who on earth would want to play a 5/10min LD game? yuck. 4 hrs later you'd still be playing. I guess MD games cover this, kind of.

Keep throwing stuff at the wall and maybe something will stick.