Multiplayer

[dnazcul]

I play BtS regularly with a group of friends and the games range from 3 to 6 humans with many AI. Some of us are on a LAN while others are in other cities. Some of us have PCs and others have Macs. We have all purchased Civ4 and all of its expansions. We STILL ... after five years since the original version ... have OOS errors when the games get large (out of sync errors for the uninitiated).

I beg the developers to give us a solid foundation of networking and multiplayer code to build on. I have no doubt that this is a complicated issue, but give me "stable and easily mod-able" over "flashy and new feature-rich" any day.

/begging

[Joseph Moskie]

I know that writing network code and syncing up multiple players with complex data structures is difficult, but I'm really hoping the Firaxis devs can write some really solid network code this time around.

Civilization III did not have multiplayer out of the box, and it was added to a preexisting single player game. It was understandably rough, but PBEM worked well enough.

Civilization 4 had multiplayer out of the box, but there were a lot of "out of synch" errors early on. They're still fairly "regular" in the MP games I've been playing in, but they can usually be resolved with a logout / login.

It's definitely been trending upwards, and Pitboss is amazing.

I have high hopes for the netcode in Civ V.

[themdg]

This would be nice. Since PBEM was mentioned...does anyone happen to know if Civ V will support it?

Civ IV does ok...though the SMTP settings are nearly worthless. We wrote a little website to track the games (open to the public...pm me if you're interested.)

Some in-game emailing options that work would be awesome in V. Or even in-game uploading options. Send the file to an FTP or something.

[Mawson]

... Since PBEM was mentioned......
Some in-game emailing options that work would be awesome in V. Or even in-game uploading options. Send the file to an FTP or something.

Sorry to res a week old thread, but I was looking for info on PBEM and hoping for something like this ^^ So, um +1?

[Altius]

i also find cannot change the AI difficulty a problem in a multiplayer mode... hope they can fix it... we sometimes want a better AI for multiplayer mode

[Procylon]

Multiplayer is really the future of gaming, so I would hope that the devs would see value in making the backbone quite solid.

An open beta period for multiplayer testing would wonderful.

[Gunslinger79]

Yes, I sure hope they do an open beta testing so I can play the game before this fall. I also agree online multiplayer is where it's at. If they screw that up again, they are going to end this franchise with a flop. There is no replay value in kicking AI butt for four years. The only thing that makes a game fun after the first 40 hours is online multiplayer. I know I will not buy anymore 2K or Firaxis games if I get civ 5 this fall and go to join a multiplayer lobby and it sucks again like GameSpy. It would be nice to avoid patches and crap by doing an open beta test and working all that out.