TruePurple,
I don't mean to be rude, but I don't think you're getting this bit correctly- it was always designed as a stand-alone, single player game. You can't just make
a game multi-player, and Brad made it clear from the beginning that it was not an option, and was not even worth considering..

Thats a shame, Sounds like a game that would be great for multiplayer. So why is it something not even worth considering?

If GalCiv were real time (and I'd love to make a real time version) that was somewhat simpler, we'd concsider it but there just isn't enough of a market for turn based multiplayer games to make it worth the resources required to do it well.

MOO 3, for instance, is multiplayer. Stop by gamespy.com and check ut how many people are playing it multiplayer right now. I was there on Friday evening. 1 person was on the channel, 0 games. And the Gamespy system is built into it.

Some people would make use of it, no doubt about it, but when you have finite resources, those resources have to go towards things that benefit the most people. I love multiplayer games, but turn based ones are really not very enjoyable for most people (myself included).

~SDC~

Turn based itself isn't good for multiplayer? You mean because of the time it takes for everyone to take there turns?

Like I suggested, we could allow players to make changes while waiting for there turn. Movement of ships and such because it means conflict can be planned out but not executed. So when your turn comes around you can hit a button and said ships would travel there assigned path.

TruePurple, you really don't seem to get what people are telling you. For every person who is willing to coordinate as much as 40-60 joint hours spent on one game, there's another couple of hundred who wouldn't bother unless you put a gun to their head first.

If I want multiplayer there are FPS games, there are RTS games, there MMORPG games, there are fun beer and pretzel games like Diablo, there are TBS games like Laser Squad Nemesis, and so on. There is no game genre poorer designed for multiplayer than 4X TBS and no amount game design is ever going to get around that. It appeals to people who like to sit around and study the whole map, then consult a tech tree, then go to the bathroom while they carefully consider whether to offer an alliance to some civ or attack them.

If I had the time and interest to play a game this detailed multiplayer, I'd be down at my local gameshops playing RPGs. It's precisely because I no longer have the time to devote to those sort of endeavors that I appreciate a game like GalCiv which is ready to play when I can/want, and is ready to stop when I have to/want.

Out of all back-of-the-box the features a game designer can spend time and money on for a 4X TBS game, multiplayer has got to be the least profitable.

Whats RTS and TBS stand for?

As far as the rest...I understand what your saying.

I know for example with Hereos of might and magic 3. A turn based game. There were rooms of people who played each other on a regular bases. Even finished games sometimes. With a small map and allowing people to set up there turn while waiting It shouldn't require that much time playing.

But I suppose your trying to say that a really fun game would be big and to really have fun its nice to think about turns and stratagy in your own time. Of course to really talk about this we'd need information like how much resources it might take to add such a option.

Real Time Strategy and Turn Based Strategy.

~SDC~

people arent playing moo3 online because moo3 sucks this game would be great multiplayer

The premise (people aren't playing MoO3 because MoO3 sucks) does not match the actuality (people are playing MoO3, and many don't think it sucks).

But don't let me stand in the way of a perfectly essentialist partisanship.

~SDC~

Posted by TruePurple:
> There were rooms of people who played each other on a
> regular bases.

And I have killed entire weekends playing SMAC on a LAN, that still doesn't mean that the amount of time spent on multiplayer 4X TBS games by me, one of those few who actually has played them, amounts to more than maybe 0.2% of my gameplay (and it's probably much lower).

> Of course to really talk about this we'd need
> information like how much resources it might take to
> add such a option.

The resources needed are fairly well known. Just for starters, you have to add in something that has absolutely nothing to do with the SP game: network code and game synchronization - hardly trivial and a potential nightmare for a game like this. I mean, consider the way the AI works, the host computer would have to be constantly polling the client games for updated positions of *everything*, then the various game threads would have to be running on this virtual game while the guy playing his game on the host machine wonders why his machine is behaving like a 286.

People who think adding multiplayer to *any* game is a "simple" option know absolutely nothing about writing code beyond maybe a Hello World program. It is a complete change in the way the the game processes user input, updates the game world, etc. Just the notion of a host game and client games is a total rewrite of major portions of the game engine.

So, Brad would need to, at the minimum, write a whole new mirror game for the AI to work on, and then write from scratch client AI routines that would take their orders from the host master AIs. The alternative would be some sort of distributed AI which would be a total rewrite of the way it works.
The game engine guys would need to add in all the network and synching elements to have everyone able to interact with "one" game and see its effects. But, before any of this could take place, the entire dev team would have to sit down again just to figure out exactly how the surface mechanics of multiplayer would work.

Beyond the fact that the skeleton of the game engine would be in place and the base game mechanics are already designed and tested, for a game never intended to have multiplayer, it's probably close to entire development cycle to "simply" add it in.

Alright, Didn't realize there was that much to it. But a hot seat option to the game wouldn't be hard to implement though right?

Well, adding hotseat wouldn't be as problematic as any sort of simultaneous networked MP, but you'd still have to address the issues of adding in the ability for a human to control each of the other factions, redo the way turns are processed, add in the ability for human to human diplomacy, rebalance all the AIs for taking human-human collusion in trading and military actions into account, and so on.

And you would do all of this so that 0.5% of your audience would talk their roommates into playing through a handful of games before they went back to playing SP.

To have any sort of multiplayer that works right, you have to design the game from the ground up to have it. Adding in multiplayer, even "just" hotseat, is the equivalent of deciding that you want to convert your Volkswaken Beetle into a Volkswagen Passat - they're both just cars, and Volkswagens at that, right?

Go take a few years of computer science, write a couple of ten thousand lines of code to do something so trivial it would have been almost easier to do it by hand, and then decide completely after the fact that you want to change the whole way it works. Then you can talk about how doable "just" adding in multiplayer is.

There won't be Multiplayer. We need no Multiplayer. The game is fine the way it is. PERIOD

~SDC~

Actually, there's a ton of turn-based multiplayer games. Even better, anybody can play them, no fancy graphics cards, no memory or processer issues... not even connection problems. And they've been around a long time.

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Chess, checkers, Monopoly, Clue, Life, backgammond, bridge, poker...

The only trick is getting the other players in the same room at once.


~SDC~

Youa dd multiplayer to this and you ruin everything good about it. Let's face it people, this game is so good because, 1) the company actually cares to make a good game and keep supporting it and two, THERE IS NO MULTIPLAYER! To have multiplayer means the developers have to spend at least half of their time dealing with that and guess what always gives when developers run out of time???? The A.I. It's always the most complicated and time consuming thing to write. And if you got multiplayer, you got a crappy A.I and a IMO a bad game every time.

What is multiplayer?

~SDC~

The system Stars! used is the only way to go for multiplayer 4x games (simutaneous turns.) This wouldn't work for GalCiv as it is, so I'm quite happy without it.

But what about play-by-email? That worked with some titles....

~SDC~

I would like a multiplayer option because I have 2 PCs in a LAN at home and would like to play with my boys.

"But what about play-by-email? That worked with some titles...."

Stars! was/is PBEM.

Personally I'd just be happy with a hotseat option.

Oh, and I agree that the major factor working against MOO3, re: finding a MP game, is NOT the genre. It's the fact that the game isn't very good yet.

My pondering for the day:
Why is it that when I can remember Brad stating very clearly a year ago (or maybe even longer) that there would be NO multiplayer ever for the game, do people who apparently consider it an important game feature then buy the game?

Moreso, when the company CEO & lead designer for the game says that he never had any intention of putting MP into it and never will, do people make statements like "I'd just be happy with a hotseat option"?

If you want multiplayer, go buy games that have multiplayer, how hard of a concept is that for people to understand? Moreso, games not designed for multiplayer, cannot just have hotseat, or PBEM, or whatever "simple" version you want shoehorned onto it without major code revisions - major code revisions that will never recoup their costs to the developer.

It's like listening to little children who no matter how many times their parents tell them, "No", and no matter how patiently it is explained to them why the answer is "No", still keep asking for the same thing over and over again.

Personally, I'd go with Laser Squad Nemesis.

But is PBEM really truely multiplayer?

Monkey: Why are you so hyped? I am of the same opinion, but we can still discuss, can we? This is not the MOO3 forum!

~SDC~

"Monkey: Why are you so hyped?"

Because for some reason I am unable to ignore these threads and I've seen the exact same set of threads for every single *dedicated* singleplayer game ever made in the past seven years. If there was something new to discuss, my grumpiness over the issue might be less, but there isn't. Whether or not MP should have been in this game initially is a potential subject for discussion, whether it should be added given both the logistics and the developer's intent is like holding a town meeting to petition the local council to change the color of the sky to mauve. It's the old "never try and teach a pig to sing" axiom, it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

I can think of *one* game that had MP added onto it as a result of the community's whining (System Shock 2). Not only was doing so for that game a financial loss, putting "geewhiz" features ahead of the bottom line in general drove the company into bankruptcy. Sure, everyone wants the perfect game, but there is no such thing. Every design choice has a tradeoff.

Brad very wisely chose to just say, "screw it" to multiplayer before the game was even officially announced. Doing so meant he didn't have spread thin resources over things that have nothing to do with the core game, and that situation hasn't changed now. GalCiv is now in the support phase of the software cycle and, if Stardock is like any other software company, the number of programmers dedicated to GalCiv versus another one of their many products in support and/or development is actually now much smaller than when it was in its development phase. The result: thin resources are probably even thinner - the last thing anyone should be clammering for is tacking on the equivalent of a mini-sequel when they haven't even finished polishing the base game nor added in many of the things it needs.