Hotseat Mode

[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.

[Heinrich VI]

maybe the fully implemented hotseat mode in kingdoms will be a pleasant surprise. players vs ai battles were already possible (except for defense) if this is fixed the only thing needed would be proper player vs player battles. i can only speculate if these will be left to autocalc again or if ca added a lan/online option.

remote desktop services could even transfer the pbm style turns into a true mp campaign. and with added lan battles over hamachi...

[Swoosh So]

It was already confirmed in pc gamer the battles were auto calc, so it seems we would still need a system to transfer the battles, each battle you play single player surely has a text file to set it up, what we asked from ca was for this text file so we could play the battle online and the result another text file to transfer the results back into the campaign. These files already must be in use as in single player the battle is played and the results put back into the campaign all we needed was that the armies were controlled by players.

[Heinrich VI]

did the pc gamer article say anything about player vs ai defensive battles?

i heard about the log files and iirc mtw put out logfiles after the battles.
but since they have not given us the log files so far i doubt this will change in kingdoms. unfortunately.

can the multiplayer battle scenarios be edited or can you create your own? this might be better although possibly much more work. it would allow the use of mercs and understrength units. if there is a way to alter the unit strength on the campaign map (cheats?) to reflect the outcome of the battle better.

last problem might be the small variety of mp maps.

oh ig ca would just give us a lan campaign option. :/