"Multiplayer" Single Player: Is it possible?

[MiniKiller]

With this game being so moddable is it possible? More than one player in single player mode.

Such as Risk where you can have more than one player on the board (offline)

[Oaty]

I see it easily being done with maybe a few modifications and heres my ideas.

1 simpler tech tree, make it a game where you can only train 5 types units so the building requirements would'nt be high.

2 dissect the map to limit the factions and playing area such as northern italy and North where it would be a face off between the Gauls the Julii Germans and Brits any other area. Or a map of Southern italy including Spain Carthage, Numidians and the Scippii. And on that map factions such as Gauls with Numantia would be rebel and so would the greeks in Syracuse. Maybe even a slightly fictitous map would be better so it would be balance but yet small for a decent multiplayer game.

3 Time limit on building phase. then a time limit on army movement, and both sides can move armies at the same time but move much slower your moving armies you can try to intercept another army or if the player sees an oncoming army can try to advance to meet them or fall back to get out of harms way and group up reenforcements. Of course the big differenc would need to be that you can change an armies movement direction, so that it is not set on 1 path once you chose the path.

4 when engagements occur if the odds are greater than 4 to 1 (minus forts and cities) the battle is an automatic win (minus cavalry maybe who should retreat to the nearest army/city/fort). So that way a town watch scout does'nt impede an oncoming army but at least gives you fair warning. This will allow an army to keep moving during the movement phase. For forts if the odds are 4 to 1 it's an automatic win but thats along the lines you had siege equipment or waited a turn to build battering rams. Also when a fort was taken on the movement phase due to having siege equipment and the odds were 4 to 1 or greater the army should still be able to move but with reduce movement points. This would counter the spamming of forts.

5 battle phase if its 1 on 1 no big deal. Also autoresolve is there if that's how it was decided to be played. but if theres 3 or more 1 battle per turn per player and now lets say Carthage was moving on Numidia and Scippii was moving on Carthage. Whoevers army met first for a battle gets the battle for the battle phase. So lets say Carthage ran into the Numidians and 2 seconds later Scippii met up with a Carthage army. The Carthage/numidia battle would be fought during that turn but the Scippii battle would have to wait until the next battle turn but would have first priority. This gives players the fair chance to fight there own battles and not worry about the comp controlling them. But if on a battle turn scippii engage Carthage and Spain and Numidia have a battle then both could be fought because none of the players are tied to 2 battles. Another simple solution would be to allow only 1 enemy at a time.

time limit on battle maps would be 10 mins, maybe cities would have to be autoresolved due to the time required. Now the time limit could be a bit of a bugger, simple olution the victor goes to the one with the better odds at the end and the losing army retreats to there nearest city. So if the odds were 5 to 4 going into the battle and when the timer was up the ratio became 1 to 1 the player that brought the odds to his favour is the victor. if the odds were still 5 to 4 in the end then it's a draw and both armies retreat back to there nearest fortification or to there ships

6 chat it could be open chat or they could make it a bit challenging. you can only talk to another player if you have a diplomat next to 1 of there towns.


Well it can be done but would require a decent amount of work would maybe hopefully be in the expansion pack. but basically my feeling is they would have to dumb down the campaign map with a simpler tech tree so it can be a shorter game and 1 that hopefully can be accomplished within a few hours.

[sapi]

NO WAY

What you're suggesting would ruin what RTW is meant to be - the time limits are bad enough as it is and players can find time to play - just save the game and play later. The only good suggestion is 3, but just add a turn time limit.

[Ulstan]

I would dearly love to see it. Basically we only really need two things

(a) A way to convert campaign map info into battle map info.

(b) A way to easily modify campaign map info to take into account battles results.

At least in MTW (and I assume in rtw) You could use the console commands to switch from one faction to another.

You could start up a campaign as normal, and just have each person play out their turn, using the console to switch factions as needed.

If your factions wound up fighting, you could fight a custom battle based on the info from the campaign map (thats where what we need (a) comes in)

Then you just need a result to put those changes back into the campaign map (b).

[hotingzilla]

Give it an option to save the game so that you can start up the game again later. This can allow longer campaigns.

Just like Championship Manager.

[Nerouin]

CA responded to those wishing for a multiplayer campaign awhile ago, saying that a true multiplayer campaign would take years to develop.

[MiniKiller]

But couldnt we set it up like risk where u hit end turn and when it gets to the others player faction instead of showing the moves he chooses em?

[Merlin271]

I can't think of a programming reason why it wouldn't be possible to do, there's already Risk & Championship Manager which are able to support such a feature without difficulty, Civilization III can also do it, it should be easy to implement.

[Duronal]

Merlin - How does the CivIII multiplayer actually work?

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

The biggest problem with an online version would be lag and timing, I'd figure.

Offline... Take a while to figure out how to do it, then just a hassle of sharing the necessary game files.

I guess it would be nice, if gameplay was not sacrificed to do it.

[Colt374]

I assume that CA's problem with making a multiplayer campaign is that trying to get it to work AND be playable over a network or the 'net would be very difficult. One example of an issue is, if two players are involved in a long battle, what do the other players do while waiting? Also because battles don't just happen at the end of the turn like in MTW, you'd spend a lot of time waiting for each player to complete their turn if your not involved in any of their battles. And so on and so on...

However, that being said, I believe making the campaign into a Hot-seat multiplayer game would EASILY be possible. Remember the old days when home PC's generally couldn't connect together, and if you wanted to play mutliplayer you everyone had to be sitting around the one PC to do so? Well that should be EASILY possible to do on RTW, (hell, we could do it on a Commodore 64, so why not?).

I wouldn't be suprised if the only reason offline multi-player campaigns hasn't been done yet is that everyone will scream blue-murder over the fact that you can only play multiplayer campaigns in hot-seat mode. Most people won't appreciate the difficulties involved with making an online multiplayer campaign, and so will expect CA to be able to produce both online and offline multiplayer campaigns at the same time. Then they'll whinge because they can't get both.

Colt.

[HicRic]

Thinking about it, the RTW engine would never work for an "MP" SP game. Think about the way in which the armies move around the map; if everyone moved at the same time it'd mean being interrupted in the middle of whatever you were doing elsewhere in the map to go fight a battle somewhere. If people took it in turns to move their armies then the last player in the turn would have an advantage of seeing where everyone had moved, and knowing these armies could not move again this turn, and the first player would get the advantage of striking first, etc.

The other option, to move your armies and once everyone ends turn, they all move, would be a disaster! You'd tell your army to go move there to attack someone, but when you got there they would have gone! You'd end up playing games of cat and mouse across the map.

If it was STW or MTW, I could see an MP game working, but I don't think it'll happen with RTW.

Colt374, with regards to a hot-seat game: how dull would that be? You couldn't play out any of the battles, which is the best part of the game!

Not to mention the whole fighting battles thing (like someone mentioned) would lead to people sitting around waiting for battles to be resolved.