Ran out of time?

I thought I had 24 hours to take a turn. I hit start turn, then before I could place my reinforcements my coworkers came by and we went to lunch. I came back maybe an hour later and is says I "ran out of time".

How could I run out of time when I have 24 hours? When I come back it should pick up where I left off shouldn't it?

Game: Game 727726

When you start a turn, you have one hour to complete it.

Good to know. Why the limitation?

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I am afraid I do not have the answer to that. It has always been the way it is since I joined which by now is over five years ago. Happy to look into removing it if there is no good reason to keep it.

It's for the situation where a player finishes their turn and chooses not to fortify. Lots of players move on and forget to click end turn. The are used to not having to because their turn usually automatically ends after they fortify. Without the 1 hour limit the next player would have to wait for the full 24 hour clock to expire.

Ok...so then maybe it should be only applied in that situation and not when someone says start turn and then gets sidetracked for an hour? But ultimately the rules state that you have to take your turn in 24 hours. This to me seems to imply I have 24 hours and can spread things along that 24 hours. Now if my turn was started with 30 minutes left then by all means I think the hour should apply, and likely only apply when there is less than 1 hour left on the clock anyways.

When you come back to the site it always tells you how many turns you have. So it should still show a turn for "incomplete" items.

It does show a Turns (1) after you clicked start turn right?

It did. I clicked start turn, then left. When I came back from my lunch there was an error on the page so I refreshed. It told me that I missed my turn because I ran out of time. I would have expected that refreshing the page I could just place my troops and continue on.

Since the rewrite I believe the site now logs you off automatically if there is no mouse / keyboard action for x minutes.

Wouldn't this be an opportunity to allow the whole turn time remaining to take your turn, but once you start the turn, if there is no mouse / keyboard action for the set log-off time period, then the site logs you off and automatically ends your turn. (You still wouldn't be able to go off for lunch after starting your turn, but it would at least allow you to take as long as you like, so long as you are with your computer).

This would allow the player to take the whole of the remaining clock to think about their move, but not leave the computer unattended and so it will account for the guys that forgot to end their turn and went off to do something else.
However, I see pitfalls with... what if they didn't end their turn and are browsing the forum or staying on the site and playing other LT & Live games for many hours. Also there is the usual time-waster antics where this could be exploited like the Add Time button.

Perhaps there is a compromise somewhere in there?!

If you log in, you can check a checbox to "Remember me" - that will keep you logged in for 'forever' (a year or so).
(That is, unless you have a setting in your browser to automatically erase all cookies).