The Multiplayer Expansion idea box

How can GalCiv2 get a multiplayer that plays smooth....

from GalCiv2 Forums
I created this thread to make people share their ideas on how to implement multiplayer in galciv2. Now, we're already told that the "plumbing" is there, it's just a matter of using it.

What changes in the galciv-structure needs to be changed to allow for an enjoyable galciv-experience with your friends?
What features should be changed/stay as they are in a simultaneous or turn based game?
How can this gamed be multiplayed in an evening, without giving up too much of the original features?
10,489 views 16 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
for example:

Only custom ships in turn based games, and then only customizing while it's not your turn.
Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
My suggestion is similar to what the above poster said: Don't allow jewelry to be used in the multiplayer ship creation. If you already have custom ships designed with jewelry, you can use those, and even upgrade them with new weapons and components; but don't let someone attach additional jewelry to a ship in MP.

Other than that, allow the player to change all of their non-ship-movement options when it is not their turn. The options that were changed would take place when their turn came up. (Don't do it instantly, because then espionage might get a little screwed up.)
Galactic Civilizations III
Reply #3 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
If any kind of multiplayer is added, it should be like what Civ4 had. My brothers and I only played the multiplayer of Civ4... it just worked well(atleast with the 3 of us). If you haven't played Civ4, it had it where all the human players made their moves at the same time, and then the computers would make theres.

This way, no ones ever really sitting around doing nothing. The only problem really is that if im attacking another human, and he tells his ship to attack first... what happens? In Civ4, my brothers and I ussually teamed up against the computer. I don't remmber having any problems, so maybe there was a system running behind the scenes.


As for ship building... putting extras and things on ships should have to be done outside of multiplayer. Maybe have a setting you check when you go to save a ship, something like "Save as multiplayer ship". Once checked, it would save the ship without all the technology dependent parts(engines, weapons, that stuff). That way, assumeing you are using the same type of ship design(Alterain, Torian, Drengin...) you could have custom ships ready without making everyone wait around.


Other than that, only thing I can think of now is the diplomacy ability. Whats the point of having twice the diplomacy of a human player, if he will always be able to not accept the deal? Then again, it can't be unbalanced, making a low diplomacy player a slave to the high diplomacy...

Perhaps, the higher your diplomacy... I don't know, I'm sure someone will think of something
Reply #4 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I would suggest NO custom ships in multi-player games. Use predesigned ships. It'd speed things up a lot AND it'd force Stardock t omake better core ships.

I don't know why you'd bother with MP anway. The other guy will probably d/c by the first year anyway.
Reply #5 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I don't know why you'd bother with MP anway. The other guy will probably d/c by the first year anyway.


Only if you play someone you don't know. I learned in C&C Red Alert, that it isn't worth it to play against strangers, because they usually suck anyway. I would only play a strategy game against a friend. They are too involved to play against strangers who may not be very mature, or good.
Reply #6 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I don't know why you'd bother with MP anway. The other guy will probably d/c by the first year anyway.


Play it at LANs, with small groups of friends.

Or just play it over the internet, with friends and forum buddies that you know are good for a serious game.
Reply #7 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Won't let me edit my post... comes up with an error...

I wanted to add that being able to save and continue later would be good to. Even if a human player had to be taken over by an AI, or a diffrent human took over for one of them... having to play an entire game straight through would take forever
Reply #8 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Custom ship building is a really big part of the game (at least for me). If custom ship building (jewelry, etc) were to be removed from Multiplayer I would suggest that it should be an option you can turn on and off at game start. There are plenty of other ways to limit time consuming turn sequences - like the standard turn timers. If someone wants to take their turn customizing their ship and there is a turn timer set in the game, then it's their choice on how to use their available time.

Resok
Reply #10 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I like the idea of being able to do colony management on someone elses turn, but having it take effect on your turn. That, combined with a reasonable turn-timer and the removal of jewelry for the ship designer would probably work out well.

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Another completely different method would be modeled after my all time favorite game, TradeWars 2002. (Which I'm going to keep mentioning until someone else notices.. )

This would entail simultaneous playing with turns being a fixed time period, like say, 5 minutes. This should give enough time to manage your colonies, research etc., while still keeping the game moving along somewhat quickly. Of course the micromanagers would have to plan ahead carefully.

Ship movement would be handled by restricting the real-time movement speed. For instance, a speed 5 ship moving to the same spot as a speed 2 ship would get there twice as fast in real time. Think of it as kind of an internal "count" before each space is moved. A speed 2 ship may take 10 seconds between moves where a speed 5 ship would take 4 seconds. And of course a speed 2 ship could only take two moves. This would maintain the turn-based aspect of movement while allowing simulatneous movement.

Just some random ideas. Honestly, I probably would never play this game multiplayer as it would be far too slow. I don't know enough people with the patience to play Risk with me, much less a game this complex.
Reply #11 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
A thing like the random events should be kept. They don't take long to execute and they add a lot of flavor to the game
Reply #12 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Here are the issues I can see offhand that would need to be dealt with in making GalCiv multiplayer:

1. Diplomacy - how do you handle Human-Human diplomacy? Bear in mind that the AI has to be coded to be able to do whatever you allow humans to do.
Possibilities:
1. put an AI in charge of defensive negotiation. Allow player to designate 'high-value' and 'don't trade' items or types (e.g. influence items/techs/mining/starbases).
2. allow only 1 request of each player per turn, and turn off feedback about good/bad trades (or use a primitive AI rating feedback that doesn't relate to each AIs actual feelings). Request is accepted/rejected at recipients turn.
3. in a LAN game, you could possibly just give the recipient yes/no at each stage, and provide that feedback to the computer.
4. disable all trading - only allow gifts (and possibly demands). delay transfer until beginning of other players turn.
5. Allow offer/counteroffer (I won't trade xeno ethics, but will you take Impulse drive insead?) and code the AI to do the same.
Be aware that many of the multiplayer options won't work well with some of these (only 1, 2 and 4 work well with PBEM, 3, 4 and 5 might work reasonably well with hotseat play.). 1 will work well in all situations, but plays differently than single-player.
Of these choices, I like 2 combined with 5 (1 request/player/turn with counteroffers allowed - all results at other players turn). This makes diplomacy slower, like it often is in real life.


2. Relations - how do you tell how a human player feels about another human player - (i.e. when do you show '-military might' on a human player)

3. Turn timing - how do you specify turn time limits and what do you do when a player times out?
Possibilities:
AI takes over if the player times out.
Player does nothing if time out.
Only what has already been done takes place at the time out limit.

4. what about a player leaving/losing communications entirely?
Possibilities:
Each turn, just do as above.
After N lost turns, AI takes over civilization.


5. Bad starts - what do you do if one or more human players has a really bad start? This only matters if everyone wants to have a decent chance.
Possibilities:
Allow each human player to swap with an AI once within the first X turns.
Allow player to surrender to an AI and recieve a new start (similar to a new minor race appearing).
Allow each human player to generate another starting position X times at the very beginning of the game.
Generate the starting positions, show stars and generic influence areas, and allow each human player in sequence to select one of the starting positions. Allow each player to regenerate the map once.
Reply #13 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
allow people to create ship design before the game for all ship sizes so during the game you always only add weapons/engines and defences
Reply #14 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
In my experience, turn based stratedgy games take FOREVER to play. My suggestion is a little diffrent:

Make it email based. You make your move, take as much time as you like, design custom ships, basically play the game as you normally would. When you hit the turn button your information about what you did during your turn will be sent to the host computer. Both players can play their turns simultaneously and once both turns are submitted then the game willl advance.

Once its time for a new turn both players will be alerted via email with an up date to their save game. The players load the new save game and continue and the cycle repeats!

This way there is no worry about timing out, not perfecting your ships offense/deffense, or being rushed in colony development! Ofcourse these games would take a while, but that would allow players to fine tune their stratedgy!
Reply #15 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Well these are just some ideas I have. Nothing more nothing less.

Why not simply do things in pseudo real-time?
Bascially, time passes in ticks. A turn passes in say 2-15 minutes, which is agreed upon by the players when creating the game at the begining. Or as a default setting you could limit the time of ticks by the galaxy map size everyone chose to play on. A few minutes for smaller maps, up to 15 minutes for really large ones.
This way you can start your research for example, knowing that turns will tick on and techs will be discovered as time passes, then you can just pick the next one.
With time ticking by, say you've got 5 turns to go to get Trade and you agreed to have a time factor of 5 minutes=a turn? Well then, during that 25 minutes you can play around with the ship designer, any number of colonies, several diplomatic meetings, move several ships there full allotment of movement, etc.

What about early game? When it wouldn't take 5 minutes to do a turn? Yes that could be a problem.
Perhaps in the early game, turns will tick by at an accelerated rate. So, provide an option when the players are creating the game for accelerated turns, time ticks by in only 1-2 minutes for the first 20 turns or so.
Going further with this you could provide an in game option to accelerate the game by asking all players to vote on decreasing or increasing the passage of time. If the players agree to discuss it the game pauses while they determine the new time quantinty of each tick.
Everyone would have to agree on this, hopefully preventing allied players from monopolizing the passage of time for their needs. If no one can agree nothing changes and you can't ask for a vote on this again for the next 20 (or perhaps more) turns let's say. I think of it like the UFP meetings, where you must vote on something or nothing happens, so if you vote "no" then the vote is over and can't come up again for 20 turns. If something happens here though and the last person doesn't vote, what then? Well then I think everyone should be able to cancel the vote, and again this causes the option to be unavailable for a set amount of turns. At this point I would expect the other players that didn't like the outcome would perhaps handle the "no-voter" by their own desires, heh heh.

Dimplomacy: In a 2 player game with any number of AI, just pause the game during the diplomacy screen when it is between the human players.
You don't really need to take long during diplomacy with the AI players either, so those could remain real-time.
If you took say 5 minutes (and your game turn ticks are set to 5 minutes) in diplomacy with an AI race well perhaps you really did spend a whole game week hammering out that deal with the AI.
With multiple human players (more than 2), dimplomacy could be done real-time. This would give any other human players a chance to do something to disrupt the negotiations also, a whole new aspect could be added to the game by this.

Ship combat: In a 2 player game, you could pause the game again when it is between the 2 human player fleets.
Against the AI and when there are multiple players I think it would be better to prevent the tactical simulator from automatically coming up, but allowing it to record a demo of the battle that could be watched at some other time if you so chose (maybe during a long turn that you don't need to do anything). Perhaps you could even pass the demo on to other players in the dimplomacy screen, maybe to show your fleet superiority to them as bargaining leverage, or share the tactical demo with someone so they can see what they might be up against.
Reply #16 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Almost forgot.

Colony pop-ups: How can you handle this? Well I think it can stay the same, the GNN window just pops up to tell you what's been done at your colonies and you can go to that colony if you wish. Sometimes I have checked each colony in the list regardless of the build cue, and that can take a while. Lately though I just look for colonies doing nothing and work on starting a new que or change the ship building que to something else or nothing. You get the icons on the right-side already so you can always reference those ship and colony builds within a certain time frame already.