About Civ 5 Multiplayer

[Unthoughtknown]

Hi Folks,

Not being a diehard Civ fan I soley came to this forum to ask for help. I was playing Civ 5 online with my brother in a coop fashion, featuring a couple of KIs. Unfortunately every game we started would start to lag like crazy after a while (described here (http://forums.2kgames.com/showthread.php?114674-Multiplayer-lag-issue&p=1461840#post1461840) or here (http://forums.2kgames.com/showthread.php?114668-Is-2min-lag-per-unit-normal)) rendering game unplayable.

Thanks to a sole forum member I learned quickly that this is basically the way "how it is". Meaning, you just cannot play Civ 5 in Multiplayer featuring KIs. Period. All she wrote. I'm not seeing myself spending countless hours without my brother or friends on a single player game, so Civ 5 is pretty much dead for me-but a couple of things make so curious that I just cannot toss the game away and move on.

First of all: Coming from Games like CoD, Gears of War, Starcraft, WoW or League of Legends I'm used to forums that are litteraly overflowing in threads like "x is bullsh** and y needs to fix this or the game is broken". 99,9% of those threads are obviously trash, containing no usefull information in any way, shape or form. Here however, where something actually is broken to an extend where a (for me) major part of the game is not playable I find nothing of the sort. Is Civilization so rooted in single player that people dont care about it? Lets not lie, Coop is a huge part in modern games. Many players pick up games for the sole purpose of coop. What is about Civ that angry people with pitchforks and torches dont burn this place down in furious agner?

Secondly: It is at utmost beyond me how such an issue isnt commentated by "officals". Its not in the FAQs, it doesnt show up on any to-do list, its just being ignored entirely. Picking up the game quite late after release its well possible that I just missed the discussion about it. But searching the forums does not yield anything that points towards this direction. Before I made any forum posts about the problem I contacted support. All they could come up with was an entirely useless inquiry for dx logs, wasting mine and their time. I mean what the hell? Cant they just say "well we screwed this one up, nothing you can do?"

Lastly: My last two gripes are just being amplified to infinity by the fact that this game has been out for so long. I'm asking myself how something like this can happen.

Im posting this not only because im curious and mindboggled about a game to an previously unknown extend. I'm also hoping to get at least any official answer about the subject. Also Im dreaming (in the sense of, yeah, I know its not going to become true) about a fix, because lets face it, this is Soooooo goooood. For like 4 hours. Yeah I know, many people are happy with it, enjoying the single player experience. But was exposed to multiplayer and coop for such a long time, I am simply NOT playing single player games anymore, unless its something really story-driven. This may sound odd to some of you, but rest assured, there are many more of my kind. Not here on Civ? I dunno. Maybe some of you can give me any insight, Id appreciate it.

[muddle77]

Your complaints will be disregarded. Clearly you have an agenda against 2K/Firaxis if you expect their game to function as advertised. Perhaps you're a mercenary saboteur in the employ of another gaming company. Or, like thousands of others who've taken the time to write heartfelt negative consumer reviews about Civ V on Amazon and all over the web, you're delusional and can't actually distinguish between things you like and don't like. Everyone loves everything about this game. It's one of the most played games on Steam, so you must be happy with it too. You will probably be mocked for being a troll until you give up and go away. After all, you're only a paying customer -- who cares what you think?

[muddle77]

Real answer -- they may or may not be working on a MP patch. There has been no official announcement about anything on these boards in weeks. So no one knows. Speculation was that they were trying to hire a MP programmer months ago. No one knows if they did. Most of the players who were furious or disappointed with the way this game was rolled out have simply moved on to other games and don't check in here anymore. Believe me, they were here complaining for months but little was promised or done about MP by 2K/Firaxis.

[inseeisyou]

This thread really takes me back to the early days of the board. Interesting to see a new user come along at this point with the same baffled questions and confusion. I could spent the time to craft yet another long winded assault on the evils of the way the developers and publishers have managed this game but suffice to say they have won the war with silence. Previously minimal community response has dwindled to nothing and most users have simply given up. At this point all you can really hope to do is possibly catch the attention of a forum moderator or fan boy who will point to Civ 5 Steam stats as an explanation of why you are wrong (because as you pointed out the majority are on single player).

[pontrjagin]

Just visited these these forums after maybe five months. To tell the truth, I forgot about this game. I had high hopes for it, but the MP is unplayable. Been that way since it came out. It's a shame really.

Might as well ask, where is Pitboss??

[Olek]

I check in here once in a blue moon now, I got sick of the mods and fanboys telling me the game was fine, last official word I heard on Multiplayer was.


Originally Posted by Dev Team

Greetings from the Civ V team! Another couple of months have passed, and the team has been busy continuing to refine and improve the game based on your feedback. Aside from the already-announced additions of Hot-Seat and Replays, an entire balance pass has been integrated into the game. New features, gameplay systems, and Diplomacy modifiers have all been added. AI refinements continue as well, and the AI is now better than ever at challenging the player. As we move into summer, we’ll continue to bring new and exciting additions to Civ V, including improvements to Multiplayer, and other core areas of the game. Your continued engagement and feedback is what drives the team to keep working, and to make Civ V everything that our fans expect, and for that, we thank you.

All we have had since this post is a hotfix.

[JBConquests]

We try and play team bassed coop against the AI's and somebody gets disconnected every 10 turns or so. I really hope they have a patch coming.

[CanuckSoldier]

We try and play team bassed coop against the AI's and somebody gets disconnected every 10 turns or so. I really hope they have a patch coming.

Right now playing with AI is going to be a recipe for disaster, the AI code is not multithreaded so as the game goes on, and more and more AI civs are doing more stuff and organizing military campaigns, anyone with an average computer is going to time out and be dropped from the game at the end turn. This is why most successful MP games are played without any AI civs or CS, and we generally keep the games to 4-6 players, and map sizes not to large for the number of players.

We have had one small MP patch, so I certainly hope we are due for a larger one.

CS

[JBConquests]

We used to play MP with AI's and didn't have the disconnecting issues so some recent change must have made this worse?

I don't have time for online MP against humans anymore. My son and I do coop against AI because we can play for 1/2 - 1 hour at a time and stop when we want. I'm guessing most online opponents wouldn't have the patience for that...

[Bloody Rose]

We used to play MP with AI's and didn't have the disconnecting issues so some recent change must have made this worse?

I don't have time for online MP against humans anymore. My son and I do coop against AI because we can play for 1/2 - 1 hour at a time and stop when we want. I'm guessing most online opponents wouldn't have the patience for that...
I don't think that any updates are to blame here. Every game is different so you just might have been lucky to have less issues in the past. I haven't noticed any difference since playing the game on the release day up until now. If you look at the other threads here you will see a lot of confirmations of that. CanuckSoldier is right about AI being one of the causes of crashes and freezes.

[logiapower]

THIS IS 2013! FIX THIS LOUSY MULTIPLAYER EXPERIENCE OR REFUND ALL YOUR CUSTOMERS.

/rage

[DiamonD]

I try to play MP by internet seven days.

No one game, is longer than 35 turns. Always disconnected, or GAME FREEZE at END of the turn. WTF ????
I pay a lot of money to play OFFICIAL CIV 5 in internet, but can't play because IT DOES'NT WORK NORMALLY !


Return my money! And i will load PIRATE civ 5, for playing, because OFFICIAL MP is not work.

Burn in HELL !

[Betaeter]

We play regularly and it is very playable and fun overall. However, the player with the worst connection/computer will slow the whole game down and Civ is suprisingly demanding for being a strategy game. This should not be necessary.

It also has plenty of issues with firewalls etc, though... takes quite a bit of debugging to get the game going smoothly.

[BigDaddymcfatsacks]

awww memories. Bought this when it first came out. MP was a joke. Waited and waited. MP remained broken. Check back every few months to see if its fixed. NOPE. Won't buy ☺☺☺☺ from these people ever again. You want mp go play 4 or 3. this one sucks

[MaGicBush]

wierd thing is me and friend purchased this a week ago and have not had one disconnect since we played and he has a satellite connection(sometimes worse than 56k). Yet our problem with multiplayer comes down to not being able to make the game private. Others still join after the game is private, and we had someone join in 200 turns in. It is very annoying having to wait for them to load in then leave, and then restart our last save.