Welcome to the multiplayer suggestion thread for Civ 3. Please post your suggestions on how you think multiplayer should be implemented in Civ 3. I am the thread manager. What this means is that I'm not going to be managing anything. Rather, my role will be to summarize your ideas into an appropriate form and to ask you questions in order to help you flesh out your ideas. I will not be posting that any idea sucks, even though it might (many of mine do).

Before posting, please review the multiplayer section on Apolyton's Civ 3 suggestions list ("The List") for general background. However, the discussion can go wherever you want it to, so don't be constrained by what has been summarized there. For example, technical issues have dominated the discussion there, but we all know there is much more to be said about multiplay that is not in the technical realm.

Just remember that you'll be playing this game hundreds of hours with/against your friends, so it is well worth your time to spend a couple of hours now in posting your ideas.

Enjoy!

UP this goes.

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While I like SMAC multiplayer, I've found a few problems with it...

It can get very slow...esp. when there are formers around, even with time controls.

And, I'd like the option to play with more than say, 8 people over the inet on an IP addy, except that it might slow it down even further, but hey...keep that option open, incase everybody gets ethernet, T1, or ASDL.

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Q Cubed
Renaissance Q • Q-of-all-trades
Thread Discussion Facilitator for Wonders

PBEM multiplayer should be integral to the game design. I find it quite disturbing that there is not a multiplayer thread in your wish list (though I note there is a well developed multiplayer thread in the Apolyton list).

The main things I would like to see in PBEM are:

1) Reduced (eliminated?) opportunities for cheating. Strong encryption would go a long way towards satisfying this goal. Server escrow of game files and passwords would also help.

2) The same level of feedback as other interfaces. Wonder movies, complete reporting on turn actions, see enemy units move, see all combats, etc. The feedback from the game should be as close as possible to the feedback you get when playing against the AI.

3) Simultaneous movement. There should be some mechanism for all players to take their turns and submit them to a server which adjudicates the turn when all orders received or by deadline. It should be relatively easy to design the precedence algorithms (what happens when two units try to enter the same square, etc.) by giving each unit a "speed" or something like that.

4) Conditional diplomacy. The ability to plan structured responses to diplomatic messages. For example, I offer to trade two technologies. The other player makes a counteroffer, which is immediately accepted based on secret parameters I sent along with my offer.

5) Support for human player diplomacy outside of the game engine. For example, two players negotiate a deal by email, both enter the final details into their turn submission, and the deal goes through when the turn is adjudicated.

I'm sure I'll think of more later, but this is a good start.

1) A solid PBEM implementation with all diplomatic possibilities. PBEM is actually one of the most wonderfull things about SMAC I think. Take it seriously - from what I have seen it is really widely used.

2) A possibility to turn off all random events. This is to eliminate any "multiple reloading" advantage. That would include completely fixed combat outcome - supply pod contents (or villages or whatever they may be in CIV).

Basically the idea is that for pbem to work there should be no difference what happens if you reload the same file and play it twice. I understand this is maybe not desireable for online or single games but for PBEM it is essential.

What bugged me most about PBEM in SMAC was that the whole game would stop for a couple of days while someone forgot to check their e-mail. What would be good is for a central server (perhaps managed by Firaxis?) where games could be registered. Players would all have the game e-mailed to them by the server at the start of a turn and they would send it back when they finished, within a time limit set by the game host.

If they exceeded the time limit the server would calculate the results of the turn using AI algorithms for absent players. This ensures the game proceeds at a steady pace and players would be more anxious to play their turn on-time to avoid the chance of the AI declaring war on everybody

They are absolute different.

The PBEM solution for SMAC is ok, I think, what makes problems IPs are.

Here (I have no idea whether this will be able) Faraxis should look how MS that solved for AoE. I've played it some times (had an 36k modem) online and it was fast and no problems with lags.

IP at SMAC always are sloooooow and and a lot of lags, if not an extreme fast system hosts and all have cable modem. (I've never seen an SAMC IP game running with more than 5 humans stabile - turned based, and never a sim one with more than 3) (having now ISDN)

(1) More stability! No more Messages from the Underworld! It's aggravating that I see this happen both during Internet and local IPX games.

(2) Support IP masquerading and/or Network Address Translation so I don't need two IP addresses at home to have my wife play at the same time over the Internet. :-) Plenty of tech notes about how-to abound on the 'Net, I could assist if needed.

(3) Do a more thorough job eliminating unnecessary pauses. For example, take the Messages phase. Each message is sent individually, and the appropriate player has to respond to each message in turn before upkeep moves on, and you can't chat during that process. One example of a better way would be to transmit all messages to all players at once, then wait for acknowledgments from all players which allowing chat and showing who has acknowledged.

(4) More thorough debugging of network states. For example, plenty of times we have had games get totally confused about who was hailing whom, sometimes no one would be able to hail even though everyone could chat.

(5) More thorough debugging of concurrency. For example, if you are on the bases screen and an delection is proposed, sometimes the election will get stuck: you can't vote or cancel, no one else can get off the screen because you haven't responded, you can't chat to figure out what's wrong, and you can't even save the game to restart from there.

(6) More information about network latency and bandwidth. Think Battle.net's ping meters at least.

(7) Consistent diplomacy options: for example, where is the cede-me-a-base option? The coordinate-battle-plan option?

(8) Auto-updating like Starcraft from Battle.net, if you have an Internet connection, in case of version mismatches. And don't let the updater assume the game is in C:\Program Files\Firaxis Games\...

(9) Less lag. Does Alpha Centauri really transmit that much more data than something like Starcraft?

First of all, GET A COPY OF STARCRAFT AND QUAKE AND PLAY IT ONLINE!! It's terrible to know that only one guy (shroomus), posted about Starcraft. I'll explain why.

I saw a very interesting opinion from Kris Huysmans, which I'll copy below:
1.3) Critical mass at official matching sites. Allow for play at all of the multiplayer hangouts, such as the Zone, rather than solely at official sites, such as AlphaHQ.

I'll use another comparison, the Battle.net service. I played on both (b.net and zone) and I'll definately say that Battle.net beats the Zone by far. If you take a look there, there are thousands of users (much more than Zone) and only two games are playable (Diablo and Starcraft). The reasons of its success is the way it's organized. First of all, it's easier to find the multiplayer option (for Battle.net) in Starcaft (sc) than it is on AoE. When you open sc you get a screen displaying the icons of Single Player, Multiplayer, Options and Exit. I've seen AoK now copied it. But returning to sc, it's there, it's easy to find, you don't have to open your browser, if it's needed to connect it will, if it's needed to get a patch it will get it for you.

One other reason that sc is so good for multiplayer is that it's actually only nice if you play it multiplayer. There's a campaign with a nice story, but it's pretty boring and the games against the AI are pretty poor, so what you've got to do is connect to your ISP and start playing.

Finding player on sc is very easy. Battle.net not only has thousands of users, as it's split on channels, where it's easy to chat and there are channels for each country. Everytime I log there and get to my Brazil channel (btw, Brazil was a very small market for sc) and find more people there than I can find in the whole world to play SMAC.

Again about shroomus post. He talks about the speed of a sc multiplayer game. That's something really good on it. It works pretty well on low connections if the number of players is small (2 is excellent, 3 is nice, 4 is still playable).

One option in sc that is pretty good on low connections is the way it adapts to the speed. In the game you can select how fast the packets are sent to the players. For example, in a fast game, sc will send the info to other players 0.5 seconds after the order was given. On the slowest, it'll send 1.5 seconds after. You can really notice the delay of your units, as well as how the speed improves.

My opinion: I would want to promote at least a couple of different alternatives, so that there is some incentive to improve. I suppose it's a fine line to walk. Hopefully, there aren't so many alternatives that none of the alternatives offer a critical mass.