Each strategic turn is 30 days. So you process 1 turn, 30 days have elapsed. When you have no interactions between players, running 10 or 12 turns in a row is easy enough. It's when you run a ship through that system that is occupied by the Great Space Larva Empire that you need to backtrack and figure out when your ship went through, what they had to detect, etc.

I will retreat to probe if Astra Imperia can be setup in a way that makes plug-in multiplayer possible, and if I think I have something, I will post.
May take a while and not work at all. Need some practice with generation and such before I can learn how to streamline it.

I'm not sure how much experience you have with Starfire or F&E or the like. Astra Imperia is a multiplayer game at its core. Setups can either be 1) each player does their own grunt work, 2) 1 home system is generated (and duplicates "generated" for all players), or 3) a SM does all the work.

Variations on the MP aspects could be done also; each player heads a government agency, fleet, corporation, etc. Teams of players in place of a single player in normal generation.

Hmmm... this probably needs to end up in the book someplace...

you just need more coffee

(about as helpful as I get)

this topic needs to be wrapped in a mystery

Oh no, mine is actually written with a C, but the extra explanation would have ruined the joke chance and hindered the writing inertia.

For community games, even though I probably maybe just joined one in futile hopes, they die out so quick because on their dependence on the weakest least responsive link.
My theory is that if you could create a game that runs on itself, and only takes influential, but not motoring input from participants, it would be able to run forever fine.(or at least until an eventual host loses interest himself) A game where people just voted on what was happening would maybe work. That can go in many forms.
God-Voters, who decide everything like if there should be an alien incursion or not, or a certain leader should die or not.
Faction Voters who get restricted to making decisions from inside gameplay perspective of a certain faction, like setting industry, science, military deployment; but still kind of in overseer mode.(can be all in the same faction)
Or RP Voters, who just incorporate certain characters of a faction, and have influence based on that.(could be the most problematic as then maybe a state-leader or frontline Admiral could become inactive again eventually. Can be fixed with NPC "councils" and officer staff though) I find this most interesting, because players get power depending on how far their characters have "infiltrated" the game infrastructure, which generates emotional entanglement, but there will still also be an ambient NPC-legion power that could do it by itself.
The important thing about all these is that stuff happens anyways, and the best the participants can do is bend the tide, so the game may face downtimes of less participation, or even changing faces of players without ever breaking up.(....unless the lazy host does o,,o)

I think in Astra Imperia's case, it is especially difficult to do this though, as the game mostly thrives with multi-faction, which implies at least two players cooperating for a game. But maybe even that could be run by a gamemaster in 'kind of' neutral mode. I am lacking practical experience to judge this though. The bookkeeping could be just too much burden maybe.

...Someone should make a 4x game that runs literally by a computer by itself by logging what had happened over some days time, and only rarely stopping at critical moments. Then people can come together to splice in their input and some orders in some way. 4x and multiplayer don't seem to work in general, but with such a setup there could maybe be cooperation.

I think the bookkeeping would definitely be an issue,  until Erik finishes AI Aide,  I know what Starfire Assistant did for the survivability of Starfire games, so I imagine this would be the same,  Sematary's community game seems to have done the best with lasting,  but I think we ended up with at least one non-responsive player (and Erik tends to get even more heavily bombarded with rules questions and ideas during one of those games...)

Astra is pretty heavy on the bookkeeping in general,  I've been working on my initial setup for my Unification game for must be close to three years now (though it actually started in Starfire and migrated to AI,  and then I keep asking questions which evolve into rule rewrites and new rules sections, so I have a moving target as well!  hell so far I've 90% finished the first of my 10 factions,  and fully generated the Sol system only out as far as Saturn (I haven't worked out minerals, atmosphere, gravity etc, further out than there yet)

At least you spell your name correctly

Oh no, mine is actually written with a C, but the extra explanation would have ruined the joke chance and hindered the writing inertia.

For community games, even though I probably maybe just joined one in futile hopes, they die out so quick because on their dependence on the weakest least responsive link.
My theory is that if you could create a game that runs on itself, and only takes influential, but not motoring input from participants, it would be able to run forever fine.(or at least until an eventual host loses interest himself) A game where people just voted on what was happening would maybe work. That can go in many forms.
God-Voters, who decide everything like if there should be an alien incursion or not, or a certain leader should die or not.
Faction Voters who get restricted to making decisions from inside gameplay perspective of a certain faction, like setting industry, science, military deployment; but still kind of in overseer mode.(can be all in the same faction)
Or RP Voters, who just incorporate certain characters of a faction, and have influence based on that.(could be the most problematic as then maybe a state-leader or frontline Admiral could become inactive again eventually. Can be fixed with NPC "councils" and officer staff though) I find this most interesting, because players get power depending on how far their characters have "infiltrated" the game infrastructure, which generates emotional entanglement, but there will still also be an ambient NPC-legion power that could do it by itself.
The important thing about all these is that stuff happens anyways, and the best the participants can do is bend the tide, so the game may face downtimes of less participation, or even changing faces of players without ever breaking up.(....unless the lazy host does o,,o)

I think in Astra Imperia's case, it is especially difficult to do this though, as the game mostly thrives with multi-faction, which implies at least two players cooperating for a game. But maybe even that could be run by a gamemaster in 'kind of' neutral mode. I am lacking practical experience to judge this though. The bookkeeping could be just too much burden maybe.

...Someone should make a 4x game that runs literally by a computer by itself by logging what had happened over some days time, and only rarely stopping at critical moments. Then people can come together to splice in their input and some orders in some way. 4x and multiplayer don't seem to work in general, but with such a setup there could maybe be cooperation.