A word on Multiplayer

from GalCiv3 Forums

After listening to your explorminate interview I thought I might just mention that I consider MP to be something I'll try after everything's all locked down far later in the game dev/evolution. 

It was a bit depressing to hear that it was ~30% of your dev budget and <0.5% of people have even ever clicked the MP button at all (I, for one, have not).  But I do feel like this may turn out to be a core feature later..  That being said, MP wasn't high up on my personal wish-list for GC3 way back when the features were being hammered out... but I AM looking fwd to doing it some day...

cheers,

7,468 views 4 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Hey, the AI on Normal or Gifted kicks my ass, why would I let a human do the same thing?

I would play MP at some point: I guess there'd have to be rules - ie planetary wheel for everybody, sensorships all 'round etc ie everyone takes advantage of min-maxing etc. Otherwise, it's a game where the one or two min-maxers streak ahead with their 73 Turn Ships/SensorShip that can see THE WHOLE GALAXY/50,000 weaponized (due to the 0% of hull they use Frogboy mentioned earlier today) ship etc and kill everybody and the other human players desperately avoid being killed (and fail fairly spectacularly!)

That's why I'm not using the wheel - I want to be as "dumb" as the AI is at using it otherwise, once you've kicked the AI on every level using the wheel knowing it's not been set up to use it properly I can see GalCiv3 being binned/greyed out in your Steam list/GOG list whatever...

 

Reply #2 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I have tried several times over the various releases and yet to have an MP game actually work for more than about 20 turns.  It's pretty frustrating, we have given up on it for a while.

The Political Machine 2024
Reply #3 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I cant even stay in a lobby for more than about 10 seconds before crashing out.

 

 

Reply #4 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

There was a lot of clamour for MP back in GC2. It was never going to be very popular, though. Very few recent 4Xes have a particularly active MP scene, and those that do tend to be mechanically very simple so that balance is easy to achieve and games can be fast-paced and short between very few players (which is why, since the general decline of PBEM, most MP-centric 4Xes are browser-based pay-to-win models). This is the exact opposite of GC3's strengths, which are the capacity to have huge rambling games over hundreds or thousands of turns with lots of complex mechanics.