I think part of the confusion, which would be more difficult to see since the time line no longer runs, is that all games start with a "thinking time," that is, an additional time you get to spend any time during the whole game. This is not the same as the time added for each individual turn.
I pretty much only play turn-based, but it's always been the same concept, except all the times are way longer. For instance, if it's a once per day game, I get 5 days of thinking time or start time or whatever you want to call it. I also get 24 hours for each turn. So my opponent takes a turn and now I get 24 hours added for my next turn. (i.e. 6 days total now) If I take it 20 hours later, I have 4 extra hours to spare. If I take it at 26 hours, I go over the turn by 2 hours. But since I started with 5 extra days, it's not a big deal to go over 2 hours on a single turn. If I'm taking a turn every 24 hours
on average, I'm constantly using my turn time, but it's always saying 5 days cause I started with that. (I sometimes see 4 or 6 days.) If someone doesn't take a turn, it will eventually cut into that, and they run over their total time.
At one time it showed a red bar across the top that was a timer for the current turn only, so you could see a visual of this. That bar is gone, which I dislike.
Convert that to a real-time game where start time is 5 minutes. You start the game with that - that's not a "per turn" time. I've played very little real-time games but they were usually around 20-30 seconds per turn, and yes it did adjust based on the time setting. If turn time was 30 seconds and you always average around that, you'll continually have something around that 5 minute start time.
