Civ 5 Multiplayer Beta?

[Kixu]

It is severely lacking many features. I will just list them.

Start with hosting. You change a setting, it rehosts leaving all old players in old lobby.

When you start the game it spends a few minutes not loading. I check the cpu speed, it was idle. Many people think the game has stopped working here, and leave before game begins.

The game seems to "hang" if people drop before game starts.

If the AI takes over a player, the end of turn wait increases by 20 secs or so per AI. This alone makes multiplayer almost impossible once people have dropped.

People can't reconnect to games as far as I can tell?

You can't load games as far I can tell?

There is no display for games in progress.

There is no lobby chat.

There is no voting system. So you can't kick people while in game or have any functionality of any sort.

Okay so civilization 4 multiplayer worked. It was bad, it could be abused so easily, for example the voting system had no time set on it, so if someone was afk or simply wanted to troll other players they just didn't vote and it was game over.

I guess I'm mostly amazed that civ 4 wasn't even taken as something to either start with or expand on.

Essential features for multiplayer:

Lobby:
Knowing pings or countries for players. Reduces lag.
Changing host settings without rehosting. Yeah.
Lobby chat.
Display of games in progress, and there numbers so people can join running games.
A limit on players joining the game. Slots. You don't want 10 people joining on a small map..


In game:
Pings.
Voting system with features such as "kick, ban ip (for trolls)"
Net code needs to be reworked such that it doesn't pause on loading and AI dosen't add such rediculous time to end of turn wait.
Save and loading system.
Ability to move units after you have ended turn. Otherwise it benifits you to not end turn for as long as possible wasting everyones time.


All the things I have listed are very basic, and its really sad that they were not implemented upon release. I am sure there are many, many more changes needed but because it is so difficult to play without the current features, its hard to know.

Please feel free to add others to this thread! Really we need one thread with list of essential features for developers to implement.

[MadGelo]

dont forget simultaniuos turn for players that you cant turn off

[dvang]

My only experience is LAN mp, but ...

- I've been able to reconnect if I dropped, even as a host (host duties transfer to another player). However, it reloads the game for everyone when someone joins to how things were at the start of the turn.

- I've been able to load MP games. There's a thread with directions in it.

- LAN has lobby chat that works.

- LAN displays all games, whether they are in Lobby or in progress. I'm not sure it actually tells you which. It also shows the number of players and slots open.

Otherwise, a lot of your ideas are useful.

[Chinetter]

Beta is too kind; alpha would be more accurate.

The MP is really just an unplayable mess. And it's not likely to get better:
http://www.neoseeker.com/news/14323-...oses-20-staff/

So I'm busy retracting all the enthusiastic "you must get this game!!" advice that I'd offered to gaming friends pre-release. Which is really sad.

[Azoulix]

yeah usuly Civ games make you loose, your girlfriend, your wife, or your newly fiancé.
But this time if you did recommend that game at prerelease, well you lost your friends.

[MPE]

playing this game is like multiplayer from the early 90s...I can't believe I wasted 60$ on this crap.