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The PBEM no file save feature is great for short scenarios. My problem is that there often aren't enough small scenarios that I want to play, and, more to the point, I'm a sucker for big scenarios.
I came face to face with this issue during an e-mail game of France 1914. Wonderful game, but if you're interested in, for example, the battle of the Marne, you're going to be looking at some pretty big battles (so big that the designer split it into five pieces, but that's another story).
If you've got to make a couple of hundred little decisions just to get out a turn, if you can't pause somewhere along the way it's a real pain. And even if you do pause you'd better have a system that you stick to for moving your pieces, because forgetting to move a whole division can be really easy, even if you're careful about clicking on the next unmoved unit button. You forget to order artillery bombardments, or, even worse, forget that you've ordered one and end up trashing your own people. Friendly fire isn't.
Anyway, I remember getting a very cold reception at a gaming club when I suggested that what needed to be added to the program was a third saving option. Instead of no file save, the game should save at the latest point you played to, and there would/could be no going back. This would allow you to play a full-sized scenario of the battle of the Marne while preparing a dinner party for eight with lots of interruptions. All you would have to do is exit, and the game would save to wherever you had gotten to. That way there would be no point in replaying a turn for better results because you wouldn't be able to do it without actively making a back-up, and that would be overt cheating. And I imagine that this would help team play if you had to save a file before passing it to the next command.
This is the kind of thing that would require a series of e-mails to John Tiller from lots of different people to get him at all interested in writing the code for it.
Another thing along those lines that I've always fantasized about is having fog-of-war in force not according to your side in a battle, but according to who's in your command. The idea is that you would be limited to seeing only what your own command could see, and if the adjacent commander was getting overrun, you probably wouldn't know about it unless he remembered to tell you. And at that point you're one step away from needing rules for ADC's. It might get to be even more fun if the only hexes visible to skirmishers and out of command officers were the ones immediately adjacent to them, and if the dreaded AI were to automatically take over any force that missed its command die roll. Or something like that.
The engine that we've got is pretty good at representing what is going on tactically, but needs a bit of reworking (marching columns?) to make it work at the operational level. But what a series of games this would be if those changes were made (but they won't).
On a less pessimistic note, Tiller seems to like to expand features from one series to another, when time and inclination permit. Wouldn't it be nice to have a variation on the ACW unified melee phase in the Napoleonic games. Think of all the house rules that would go out the window!
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