Thoughts on multiplayer campaigns

Ok! As you have probably gathered I am really bored at the minute as my son has nicked my copy of MTW2. So, I was having a personal brainstorming session over lunch about possible ‘perfect’ solutions to the lack of multiplayer options in the TW series.

The hotseat mod looked promising until it became apparent that the AI was going to interfere in your defensive battles. So, I began thinking about what sort of solution I think would deliver the most ‘bang for the buck’ in terms of an official solution.

As I see it the basic problem is the smooth transition from campaign mode to battle mode and back again. This was the point at which both Lords of the Realm and 1813 managed to trip over their own tails by adopting a pointless real-time campaign system and then trying, and failing miserably, to stop the clock for a battle and restart it after the battle was over.

The TW series actually has one advantage in that so far CA have not fallen into the trap of switching to a real-time campaign engine. So, TW games actually have a natural break point at the end of each turn when battles are resolved. What is missing is the system for managing the transfer of data from the campaign engine to the battle engine and back again.

However, anyone who has played Thunder At Sea will know that a solution to this problem also exists. For those who haven’t, played Thunder At Sea (TAS) it is a campaign management program for use with the naval battle program Fighting Steel (FS).

What TAS does is handle all the campaign movement of the opposing fleets and then when a conflict occurs it simply generates an FS scenario file so that the players can fight the naval battle using the FS battle engine. Having fought the battle the TAS system simply uploads the battle result file and modifies its own database to reflect the result. It even freezes the movement of the opposing fleets on the campaign map to account for the time the battle took to fight.

Adopting that approach for a TW game would not be too difficult. Presumably the current game engine must use a data file to transfer data from the campaign engine to the battle engine and there is already a system that allows customised armies to be set-up and fought. What is missing of course is the ability to manage the interaction.

For a multiplayer game the campaign engine would need to generate the battle data file and then ask whether the players want to fight the battle. If either or both players decide to fight the battle rather than auto-resolve then the campaign engine would have to freeze that players next turn until it had been provided with the battle result file.

So, taking and extreme situation where every faction was played by a human player. This would result in one round of play generating a number of battle data files for unresolved battles. The players would then need to negotiate mutually acceptable times to play out these battles using the on-line battle system, and having done so, would register the result files back with the campaign engine.

Once all the battles files had been registered then the campaign engine would release the game for the next turn. There would have to be some security arrangement where battle results were filed and then validated by both players to ensure that cheating was avoided, and so way of overriding the lock and auto-resolving battles if for some reason the players found they could not fight them after all, but that would not be too difficult.

The big advantage I can see to this approach are that multiple battles can be resolved simultaneously thus cutting down upon the idle time of other players. The other interesting possibilities are that the system could easily be used for team play, or even as a tabletop campaign manager.

For team play it would be quite plausible to have players roleplaying various generals and only fighting those battles where there general was in command, or for a player to get his friends to command his armies in battle. Likewise, if the battle file could be printed and the battle result file edited there would be nothing to stop the battle being fought out as a table top wargame or with a different game engine and the results fed back into the ongoing campaign.

The other interesting thing is that just as Fighting Steel and Thunder at Sea are two completely separate games, there is no need for the TW Campaign and Battle engine to be part of a single program they could in theory be sold separately and updated independently with only the battle file interface needing to be standardised.

That means that PBEM play using auto-resolve would work without the need to buy the battle engine, whilst those who just want to play multiplayer battles could just buy the battle engine and not the campaign manager. Perhaps the later could even hire their services to the former as mercenary generals accepting the challenge of fighting a battle based upon someone elses flawed campaign strategy, whilst leaving the campaign player chewing his nails wondering what is going to happen to his carefully crafted army.

I find, the problem with the single player campaign is, you get so powerful when you have 20+ regions and all your enemies have like 5-6 each it becomes easy and boring, as no single AI faction emerges as a rival, they are all weak in relation to you. I would just like a multiplayer campaign that is played like HoMaM or Deadlock, except all battles are auto resolved. It would just be like the hotseat mode they are implementing in the exp. except it would be played online, you take your turn, then someone else takes theres. You could even put a time limit on turns so that people dont take too long. The idea of actually playing thet battles wouldnt appeal to many people as it would take so long for each turn as the battles would have to be resolved, and since not many people would be interested, it will never get dev support.

Well from personal experience any attempt to play the MTW2 campaign on-line in real-time mode is doomed to failure. When you might have a dozen people involved and a game which is going to take in excess of a 24 hours of game play to complete its just not practical.

So, in my opinion the way forward has to be PBEM. Let each player make their move in turn and pass the PBEM baton to the next. To make that easier would merely involve a system which allowed players email addresses to be logged with the game, so that as each player pressed the end turn button the game automatically posted the PBEM file to the next player in sequence, as well as generating any battle data files needed for the battle engine.

Now that multi-player is all the rage, especially with the success of World of Warcraft and others, i feel CA have to look at a Multi-player strategic game.

PBEM is a good idea, so a game could be played over a day or a few weeks.

I hope the next TW game could be developed like WOW, totally 3D and real time. This would be the best answer to multiplayer large military games.

Maybe WOW might add a military component so players can be rulers of settlements and have their own armies? .. interesting.


R

Dynatsy warriors style with a RTS compnent would ownzorzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Here I posted an idea about a MMOTW game:

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showt...ighlight=MMOTW

Also Ive got the idea of a simple real time 2d webbased multiplayer historical battles "generator" that has people log in and interact on the map of Europe and each time there is a conflict the game generates a historical battle that the involved parties fight online on teh TW battle engine...