Hotseat Mode

[Didz]

whats this hotseat? is it a mod? can you really play onlne campaigns... hmm this makes m2tw a lot more interesting.

Yes...At the moment it is possible to change a setting in the preference file which will effectively unlock any and all the factions so that you can play them yourself.

Its then possible for several players to choose to take the role of different factions and play against each other.

The only shortcoming at present is that this mode does not allow a player to command his own troops in defensive battles, and so most people using 'hotseat' mode have adopted a rule that all battles no matter who starts them will be resolved using the Auto button.

So, basically we're sort of halfway there as far as multiplayer gaming is concerned. What is lacking is a link between the campaign map and the multi-player battle system so that players can command their own armies. Something like the 'Thunder-at-Sea' system for Fighting Steel would probably be the best option. TAS just saves all the battle information to a file which can then be loaded into the battle engine so that the battle can be fought, and then saves the battle results into a file which is uploaded back into the main campaign engine afterwards.

[DisruptorX]

Its rather amusing to label turn based games as dinosaurs, when all real time strategy games, with very, very few exceptions (total war, which is a hybrid, and Black and White come to mind) are all ripoffs of 15 year old games like Dune II.

Seriously, Starcraft was fun back in 1998, but those types of games get boring fast, and have to be played multiplayer to be fun.

[The Stranger]

and you are trying to say?

[DisruptorX]

and you are trying to say?

Just responding the conversation at the top of the page.

Command and Conquer clones aren't the strategy genre.

[Heinrich VI]

i have experimented with the hotseat option a bit but like many others i miss the battles too much. a simple interface to play the campaign and the battles over lan would be perfect imo.

since "official" hotseat support was omitted from the 1.2 patch and moved to kingdoms i have high hopes for a tw multiplayer campaign premier. the only crucial aspect this otherwise outstanding series always lact. in fact my very first post at the .com and .org forums was about the possibility of multiplayer mp in future tw titles (and a little rant about the lack of it in mtw :P ).

any news about this part of the upcoming kingdoms expansion? anyone? lusted ;-) ?

[Swoosh So]

I have plans for a kingdoms hotseat campaign that includes the online battles

Info can be found here :

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showt...60#post1642860

Going to get it running within a week or so of kingdoms being released, and will accept signups from long term community or long term members of the org.

[Heinrich VI]

woohoo!

i never knew you could play the campaign in mp AND fight the battles online with rtw. i tried the mp campaign script myd released for rtw 1.2 but it was autocalculate only.

your short mp aars sound very promising. this is exactly the kind of tw gaming i was hoping for! finally the series will show its true potential. im so tired of creaming the puny ai over and over again. looking forward to my first crushing defeat - havent played online tw since mtw:vi.

[Swoosh So]

Well there is some work involved, i cant simply take the exact battle on the camp map and transfer it online (we asked ca for battle output files to do this but so far zippo) Basically what we do is take the units from the campaign battle and put the exact units into an online battle, To transfer the results back to the campaign map we would look at the casualty page and calculate what units were left, then simply disband those units from the armies on the campaign map or use the kill_character command if a general died.

This system is fairly easy - say you had 300 archers in the battle and the unit sizes were 60, you lost 160 archers in the battle leaving 140, thats 2 full units left 2x60 leaving 20 over - we used a system that you lose the unit carried over if the strength is below 50% so the 20 left over is not 50% of 60 so you would have 2 units of archers left.

Its important of course that the campaign moves with full strength units only, and unless we mod the campaign (which is easy) we would not have mercenaries. Also its better if theres no ai factions or rebels as this will cause units to be understrength from time to time, again its easy to remove rebels from a campaign or you can simply make a rule that understrength units cannot be used untill theyre reinforced.

Basically we had to adhere to around 15 rules to get a perfect campaign running (or as perfect as we could get it) and both those aar's were written in 1 night so you can see the process moves fairly fast even when back in that day we had to use halt_ai commands and control faction blah to switch factions, the new hotseat mode will remove these tasks and automate them so it should be alot faster with just the casualties being admin duty.

All you need really is a strong rule set that takes into account the problems, i have one which ill publish when kingdoms comes out (ill need to modify it a little) but of course its possible for people to make their own rulesets for their own campaigns.

We went for a simple functional ruleset that involved as little admin as possible and it seemed to flow really well, of course if you wanted a more in depth campaign you could make a larger and more complex ruleset.

The positive thing is everything runs ingame with the exception of battle casualties.