Multiplayer Discussion

Hey All!

Making a thread to post aggregate MP feedback & discussion, please share your thoughts!

MP is coming along OK.  I was disappointed with the playability of MP in GC3 and was pleased to hear that it would be implemented sooner and a more core dev goal for GC4.  Since covid I've been doing a LOT more MP games generally and MP is now a much greater 'must have' for me than in the past.  So this is to say that I want to see MP be everything that it can be, and I'm happy the team is working on this.

My thoughts thus far:

1. First of all, MP is FUN!!!  GC4 is a great game to dink around playing with a friend.  Much like a long tabletop board game would be.
2. Stability is an issue.  I posted quite a few debug.err's on the discord siterep81 thread.  The stability is bad enough that we can't really get out of the early game.  Clearly there are some issues that need addressing.
3. Game modes:  Schism mentioned that Derek could answer for the various game modes being implemented.  While the 3 so far seem fun, and like game modes that are just dandy and all; they seem like offshoots of a core MP game type that is not available.  It's like visiting a bunch of suburbs without a city in the middle.
   1. MP NEEDS a default 'Free For All' game mode, which is just like the single-player experience but with more than one player.
   2. Multi-headed Juggernaut may I suggest this as an additional game mode (this name seems cool but I just made it up, it could be called anything really)?  Way back in the day there was a Magic the Gathering group game mode called "double headed ogre" where a team of two players would share resources between them and compete against other teams of two players.  I think something similar for GC4 would be a ton of fun.  You could select teams of 2, 3, 4, etc players that would compete against other same-sized teams.  Depending upon how much effort anyone wants to put into this game type there could be several unique possibilities with this format (but wouldn't need to be, just sharing vision and being on the same team would be great too!).
      
      1. Resource Sharing.  Resources could be shared to varying degrees.  A straightforward way of doing this would be to allow for resource pooling.  Either automatically or allowing there to be a 'pool' that a player can throw their resources into that's available to everyone on their team.  The code for something like this would probably be similar to the bazaar.
      2. Share vision automatically.  duh
      3. Share techs automatically. duh also. (maybe just implement a UI that says what team-members are researching so you don't automatically double-up).  A bad researching race could even just not research at all and feed their points to another player.
      4. Diplomacy.  Allow one team-member to be good at diplomacy and speak/negotiate on behalf of the others
      5. Proxy Wars?  Maybe the entire team wouldn't need to go to war with an entire other team, just single members.
      6. etc. There are some cool possibilities here.  It would definitely be fun to see which amalgams of races tend to be strongest.
4. My lovely friend Seilore suggested in the siterep81 discord thread that for human MP team games not accidentally doubling up on tech research and auto-trading it would be a nice feature.  I agree.
5. The single player game allows for faction customization (ie moving the 'points around' between the various attributes).  This should also be available for MP (along with custom races).  It's unclear to me whether this just isn't in /yet/ or isn't intended to be at all.  But this all should be available.
6. Oh yes.  In the MP menu you cannot see what special abilities races have.  You should be able to see these..
7. Spawning, changing ownership, giving, etc ships causes a LOT of desyncing..

I'll edit-in further thoughts as time goes on maybe.  But wanted to get a MP thread up.  It's fun so far, stability is a serious issue though.  Glad to see it in the beta!!

cheers

-tid242