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So first, I want to say I absolutely love the game of Polytopia. I'm a big Clash Royale player myself and I genuinely enjoy games that use your head. With that being said, I am absolutely furious with the creators of this game on one specific thing, how they handle the STRIKES for a live game.
If you miss even one turn on a live game, whether or not it's one of the ending turns (or especially one of the beginning), you suffer the entire game. In addition, the starting turns with four players gives you about 50 seconds to do your turn once the game begins. Sometimes the notification for my turn won't even appear for me until about 15 seconds after or more because the game can be so slow to send notifications sometimes. After getting that notification, I frantically try and log in to finish my turn before I get a penalty. This small amount of time is not the problem I have. You see, I completely understand the penalty for not completing a turn, but this begs the question, why does the penalty last you the whole game? Basically, the penalty is so steep that theres almost no point continuing the game from then on, and that is with ONE strike. ONE. If you get a total of three strikes, then the game removes you.
To put this into perspective, I missed my third turn on accident, and I was rushing to try and do anything before it gave me a penalty (This was the ONLY turn I missed AT ALL). I got a penalty and I thought to myself "alright, it'll probably go away after a while". I didn't resign because I thought it would be a waste of my ELO points and I believed that I could manage. Boy, was I wrong. At first I could sort of keep up because there wasn't so much going on, but the longer the game went on, the more obvious the deficit. By the end of the game on every turn I would have roughly four minutes and my opponent would have thirteen minutes. At one point on my turn I had four minutes and thirty seconds, and I was thinking that my time would finally keep going up and that the longer I played the more it would balance itself out. Wrong again. The next turn my time was three minutes and fifty eight seconds which made absolutely zero sense. I wish I had a picture of that to attach as well but I didn't have a picture of the turn prior so I cant offer the physical comparison, just take my word for it. Trying to keep up with someone that can basically twiddle their thumbs as I'm trying to be the freaking flash moving every single one of my troops so quickly and not even being able to think is really annoying. I ended up resigning because it was becoming too stupid, I didn't have the time to think anymore as it was just spam and move everything ASAP, and that's obviously not fun. Especially when you're in a sinking ship not even able to use all your stars in a single turn.
LASTLY,
When others resign from the game they are left with a bot. Once again, I understand this, but what I don't understand is why on MY turn MY time runs while the bots do their plays? How does that work? I already have how much less time than my opponent, and in reality its 8 seconds or more taken away from my timer because I have to watch the bots play out if they're there. It is SO frustrating. I have no freaking time to begin with and I have to sit there and just watch my clock run while theres no time to start. It might not seem that significant, but let me tell you when you had a time difference as big as mine it is.
Overall, I love this game. My brothers and I play and we enjoy it so very much. What I don't love is that this penalty inherently screws you for the entire game. The penalty rules state that once you get a strike, your timer turns yellow. This CANNOT last the entire game, I wrote this because I hope the games creators will fix this. I might as well be removed from the game if I miss a turn if thats the case, but thats ridiculous. The penalty should GO AWAY after you consistently play a certain number of turns. Thats what I assumed would happen, but it never did. And I will not even MENTION the time deficit of missing two terms. Beyond impossible, but please, the creators of Polytopia, fix this.
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