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View Full Version : Multiplayer campaign (advices and hopes for the mp campaign)



Swoosh So
04-27-2009, 01:15
I have wanted for a while now to make this thread giving my advice to creative assembly on some aspects of the multiplayer campaing, i have a somewhat good position to start having played full mulitplayer campaigns in totalwar before with the battles online and both players making movements on the campaign map.

1. First of all i would say that if you have 1v1 campaign with bordering nations and 1 of the players decides to be agressive then the average time we had of a campaign was around 6 hours, now this included manually counting casualties after each fight and using console commands to change turns on the campaign map, kill generals that died in battle etc, so infact our older campaigns in rome totalwar would be more time consuming.

2. One thing we were not expecting from the campaigns was that the would be so fast, unexpectedly the campaigns were usually ended with 1 player conceding defeat (surrendering), there came a point in each campaign where it was no longer possible for 1 player to recover and instead of mopping up every last unit or town one of us would just concede defeat this was not anticipated by myself or amp but just kinda happened when playing the campaigns.

3. One problem i noticed is that troop movements can be very far, id suggest moving a mp campaign to a shorter timespan per turn and reducing the distance an army can travel, theres a reason for this say you have 2 armies on the plains infront of a city an enemy army can march past quite some distance and attack a city or town (epsecially if they have siege equipment) without the armies that were origonally positioned inbetween having a chance to react because of the turn system.

4. I strongly encourage ca to leave as many features in as possible, do not worry about lengthy campaigns as i said the players themselves can decide on the length of campaigns with their own rulesets, and generally we found campaigns to last 6-8 hours with one player conceding defeat.

5. for faster resolution of campaigns ca or the players can set victory conditions like capturing the opponents capital and holding it for a set number or turns.

6. I would suggest there is a reasonable limit set on agents, like say 4 assasins at any one time, the reason for this should be obvious.


Ill give more thoughts as i have them, hope ca get a chance to read my thoughts on the campaign and hope that other members of the org are excited at the thought of mp campaigns as i am and post some nice ideas here

I can safely say that i did not really like the rome totalwar battle engine but when we did the multiplayer campaigns the game just took on a new life, was really great to play vs a human opponent where the movements on the campaign map dictated the battles online and the battles online effected the camp map. Judging by the reports on etw online 1v1 etc this game will surely be magnificent with the mp campaign, i really cant wait!