Have you seen this?

[vveedd]

It is related to my posts about reloading cheat. This is quote from World in Flames game forum and how they will solve this (game is not released yet):

One of the big differences between playing MWIF live over the Internet and playing by email, is rolling the dice. During an Internet game MWIF can roll the dice and show the results to everyone immediately. In a PBEM game that is not possible; so a solution was needed to prevent the players from repeatedly rolling the dice until a favorable result is achieved. To do that, MWIF includes eMWIF, a small program that runs separately from MWIF.

eMWIF exists for one purpose: to roll the dice and report the result to all the players in a game. eMWIF can be run on any host Internet server and Matrix Games will run a copy that is available to everyone. You can run eMWIF on some another system if you like. When you start a PBEM game, you ???register??™ it with a running copy eMWIF, identifying who is playing what countries.

As you play the game there will be times when you need a random number (e.g., rolling for weather). At that point MWIF will send a query to eMWIF over the Internet, asking for a random number. eMWIF will validate that the player is in the game and that he is scheduled for asking for a random number for the specific event. By this I mean that eMWIF will know where in the sequence of play the players are and who should be doing what next. Once the request is validated, eMWIF will roll the dice and send the results to all players. This means that players cannot cheat since the dice are only rolled once. Note that communication between MWIF and eMWIF is automated and requires no action by the player.

At the start of a PBEM game each player sets up an ???INI??™ file that lists all the players in the game with their email addresses. It also contains the Internet address of the copy of eMWIF that will be ???rolling the dice???. Once the scenario, optional rules, and sides have been decided by the players, MWIF registers the game with the eMWIF dice roller.

During a PBEM game, each player runs a copy of MWIF. Each copy sends emails to the other players in the game, as well as eMWIF. The emails are generated by MWIF when the player clicks on ???phase complete???. From the player??™s point of view this is identical to playing over the Internet or solitaire. The process for completing a phase will be the same.

Is it possible to do something similar in this game?

[IainMcNeil]

It seems over engineered. I think there are much simpler ways to deal with this.