So with Ikariam, I noticed an interesting device used for browser games to limit gameplay. Typically with a browser game you want to solve the problem of people spending all their time on it vs. casual players. This is partially for balancing, but also for conserving bandwidth, I expect. The two solutions I've normally seen are some sort of "turn" concept, where turns are given out at a certain rate, or a simple time cutoff. You might only get an hour or two of login time per day. Or you run a game without PvP, buy big servers and not worry about it like Adventure Quest and its ilk.

Ikariam is the second so far of games I've seen where you're not limited by a number of actions, so much as most actions you choose have a cooldown timer in minutes or hours and there are only so many of these timers you can have going at once. This limits the amount of time you spend refreshing the page. At least until you're using the game as a pretty chat client and are spending an inordinate amount of time on in-game communication. I remember playing a browser based euro 4x space game with the same idea a few months ago called Ogame.

It's a pretty neat concept when well executed and balanced. I was wondering what people's thoughts are on the mechanic and what other games they've seen similar things in.