Ophiuchus wrote:What I would like about the non-blocking ready system: it would allow for faster pace games and it may lead to less frustration.
I myself am still pretty convinced that without the ability to 'unready' themselves, or at least have a guaranteed extra amount of time from a countdown, players will have a bigger incentive to extra-sure they have done everything before they 'ready' themselves, and that the game would actually progress more quickly if they have the 'unready' option.
This scenario you paint where players would pick a handful of really important orders to submit, and even though they have a bunch of other stuff they know they'd prefer to do that turn they would still hit the turn advance button and just try to squeeze in whatever portion of that extra stuff they happened to be able to do before everyone else did the same, seems unrealistic. If people know they want to do something, then they'd generally want to make sure they'd done it before they ended their turn.
In my opinion, the more significant opportunity to speed up the game is to cut out the period of time where people have finished everything they can think of, but they still sit there looking everything over, hemming and hawing, unwilling to say "OK my turn is definitely over" until they are really convinced they are not forgetting something.
Whereas on the other hand people are more comfortable relinquishing their turn quickly if it is a relaxed environment where they know that even after passing the turn to the next guy they could still think a bit and say "oh wait I forgot to do X, please let me do that", and that situation is more akin to being able to go back to 'unready'.
With a timer and warning, there is no risk of infinite turns. It wouldn't even necessarily have to be a fixed timer-- it could be that once all but one player are ready that a short countdown starts (and there could be a longer timer that applies if multiple players are not ready).
It could be that the timer is the real key, so long as the player would get a countdown timer before the turn ended, then for my concerns that would be close enough to what I was proposing for the unready status; I just strongly think you need to avoid a situation where the turn ends abruptly without warning while a player is trying to submit a last-second order.
If I provided any code, scripts or other content here, it's released under GPL 2.0 and CC-BY-SA 3.0