"Multiplayer" Single Player: Is it possible?

[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.