Is that “in a normal work day” as in playing the game as their normal work day, or playing the game while they do their normal work over the course of the day?

A work day of military people using this wargame as a simulation tool for analysis.

It's not a game and it's not supposed to be fun. It's a military simulation, a tool for military people. 2-3 turns in one day may be entirely within reasonable range for military analysis.

You cannot buy it in a store. You need to work for the DoD to have access to it.

In war games the terms “turn” and “round” are inverted from how board gamers usually use them.

Yeah for real. So much for "one more turn" syndrome ala Civilization

It's not uncommon for 4X to be Played By E-Mail (or any other way to transfer save files these days), in which case 1 turn per day is a common agreement.

P.S.: The most recent thread for MP Civ4 on the biggest Civ forums is literally this :

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/new-returning-players...

> Please note this is a long term commitment of multiple months requiring you to play a turn every day. We all realize life happens and when it does we just ask you post and ask for an extension.

Is that one player per day, or all players complete 1 turn in a day? If the latter, how does that work with player turns needing to be made serially?

There are several concepts here :

- Orders can be executed either immediately

(you select a unit, tell it to move to another tile, it moves immediately, which also changes the state of your fog of war, or even starts combat),

or during turn processing on the server/host

(you select a unit, give it an order, but it will only execute it during turn processing).

- Play can be either sequential turns (one player after another), or simultaneous turns (everyone at the same time).

- Play can be either in real time, or in hotseat / by transferring saves (either to the next player, or the server/host).

All of the 6 combinations are in theory possible, though of course some are more common and make more sense than others, and will be more supported than others. For instance various Civilizations support both sequential or simultaneous turns (Later Heroes of Might and Magic even support simultaneous until players meet, then sequential !), and Space Empires 4/5 supports both immediate or delayed orders.

Then it gets even more complicated depending on whether the tactical combat happens directly on the strategic map, or is instanced on separate, tactical maps. Some games even have instanced combat where the game becomes an RTS when unit groups meet ! (Like Total War or Sword of the Stars or Space Empires 5.)

I have played PBEM with sequential turns and 1 turn per day, though of course these games then tend to limit the number of players.

Some PBEM games, like the venerable VGA Planets, had all players complete their turns and then play those simulatenously by the host program, resulting in the next universe state.

There are rules within the game engine to disambiguate in which order some interactions resolve. If I remember correctly, the classic boardgame Diplomacy plays the same way (all orders are simultaneously, with some precedence rules for conflicts).

Oh I know, I've observed more day-by-day War In the Pacific Let's Play's than I care to admit.