Have you tried conducting warfare with multiple players? The game jumps from unit to unit in what seems like a random fashion. You can be attacked from every front while scrambling to find out where and how - all the while the game is prompting you for what to build and what to do with your settlers etc.
The player who gets to move the most important unit first, is the player who wins the battles. So, it becomes a race to click vital units - and you just have to deal with not reacting in time in every other matter.
It’s completely unworkable. Maybe with 2 players - it CAN work, but not with 6+.
Of course, we play simultaneous turns - because waiting for each other in an IGOUGO way is impractical with that many players.
Civ 5 would be 10X better if they allowed true “armies” - sort of like they did in Call to Power. It makes a hell of a lot more sense to have 5-10 core armies with a collection of mixed warfare units, so you didn’t have to micromange movement of dozens of single units. Another thing they could learn from Call to Power is to have a shared resources pool - from which you could construct roads and buildings, instead of cluttering the map with individual settlers and engineers. It’s archaic design that I personally despise - but that’s about the only thing I don’t like about Civ.
Sword of the Stars, with expansions, has plenty to do outside warfare. It’s not as fiddly as Civ4 (build a library on every planet!) but that’s good for MP.
I agree it’s good for the flow, but unfortunately - we don’t appreciate the streamlining of our favorite features.
In much the same way, most of us prefer MoO2 to MoO by a very large margin.
In that case, AI War might be the suggestion you didn’t realise you wanted. It’s a RTS game, co-op only and doesn’t have much more in the way of empire building or research than your typical RTS. Even so, it is a genuine Grand Strategy game in the sense that pretty much everything ties into how you want to go about conquering the universe, and on any reasonable difficulty level you really do need to have an overall plan for how and when to do what.
It fast became our go-to lazy Sunday game, because it’s conceptually as simple as StarCraft, approaches Dom3-levels of playing pieces with resulting counters & counter-counters & counter-counter-counters and whatnot, and requires the same degree of careful, cunning planning that you know from games like EU3.
It’s dead easy to pick up, the difficulty scales (very gradually) to what I think is beyond the humanly possible, and while conceptually simple there’s sooo much stuff in it you’ll never run out of crazy & cool strategies to try. Perhaps most important of all, when un-nerfed the AI is clever about using the playing pieces in a way that is eerily human.
Anyways - Sounds like fun! If everyone has Iphones, there’s actually the Moo2 game for Iphone, whose name escapes me for the moment, but I think it should work VERY well in these conditions. Basically, as I understand it, its Moo2 but made specifically for Multiplayer and thus perfectly tailored for medium length games.
Hehe, I’m aware of that one. I have an iPod Touch - but a couple of the others are hardcore Apple haters (and I don’t really blame them) - so that’s probably not going to happen :)
It’s interesting that you already love Sins of a Solar Empire but find Sword of the Stars is too streamlined with too much emphasis on warfare. If you are looking for multiplayer MoO2 or Civ then I guess you will be disappointed that you can’t spend 15 minutes optimising your build queues and tweaking your worker ratios. But you already ruled out the Civ games because the micromanagement makes the game painfully slow late game or when wars are happening.
Perhaps you should get your friends to think of SotS as SoaSE but with much greater depth of empire building. As the phrase goes, you can’t have your cake and eat it, so, while it might be more streamlined, I’d say that SotS is good for multiplayer for exactly the reasons MoO2 and Civ are not.
Having said that, if what you really want is multiplayer Civilization then why not have a look at FreeCiv? It’s designed to be played multiplayer so it may or may not be less laborious that the other versions.
Another thing that springs to mind as a multiplayer strategy game is Star Ruler. Like AI War, this is on my back-list so I don’t have any opinions on it.
Disconnected: what is a good way to get into AI War? It is something that I think I should enjoy, but after playing the tutorial a couple of times it just hasn’t grabbed me. Could you recommend a good map settings to ease me into a first game? Something interesting to offer a good challenge without it becoming too epic.
The problem with Civ 5 in multiplayer, isn’t so much that it “bogs” down because of micromanagment - but it becomes unworkable because of the ridiculous simul-turn “race” to click units in the correct order, so as to not lose vital fights.
MoO2 would be great in multiplayer, if it was stable and workable with modern operating systems - which it isn’t. It also has an INCREDIBLY slow start - which is hard to overcome in a LAN environment. But once it gets going, it would be a pretty close match to the ideal game.
While I agree that SotSE isn’t focused on the same things as Civ 5 - it’s also a real-time game which lends itself better to a less “strategic” flow. But it’s not that I don’t want to try SotS - it’s just that I can’t “make” the others like it.
I’ve tried playing it myself (I got the first version without expansions) - and I just couldn’t get into it. I don’t know what it is about the game, but there’s just nothing in it that immediately appeals to me. I think the odd interface and slider-approach to planetary managment have something to do with it. I tend to prefer really tangible stuff - like moving around actual “workers” from job to job, and seeing actual buildings being built and so on. SimTex handled that really well in MoO2.
Man… so a large-scale strategy game that is not (all) about war…? Sounds like turn-based is pretty much out. Really you’re pushing against two major trends: the bigger you get, the slower you get, and the less about combat you get, the slower you get.
Think about Anno 2070…?
If warfare is OK, Supreme Commander 2 is a crazy-fun LAN strategy game.
If you have 7 players and can manage the logistics of communication, Diplomacy is hilarious fun. It’s actually a bit easier to play via computer even without any programs other than IM/email than it is “in real life,” even with the board and pieces. Most net games I’ve seen just use MS paint to color in a map and counters.
If you are willing to entertain odd suggestions. Have you tried Imperialism2? I’ve heard of folks running it over tcp/ip, although to be honest I don’t know how much work it is. Works fine on a LAN and supports 6 players. It’s got best of show pedigree when it comes to gameplay. Like most 4X multiplayer games you need to be able to recognize when the game is really over pretty quickly or you end up in a grand slogging match, but it seems to fit your bill.
Empire of the Fading Suns is so far as I know, one of the deepest 4x games with a with a depth in diplomatic interaction that is still unbeat. If anyone can name a more modern 4x game that equals EotFS in diplomatic and strategic depth I’d buy it in a heart beat!
I don’t get why Europa Universalis 3 should not be on the table, it’s not that hard, and great fun for many players, I’ve done a 7 player of those games, it was awesome.
Emperor of The Fading Suns is a great suggestion, but I’m guessing tough to impossible to find at a reasonable price. I also seem to recall that it has little lasting power as a MP game, because of some pretty severe strategy pitfalls/exploits or shoddy balancing, if you prefer.
In the match setup screen, set the AI level to 8, don’t touch AI progress, and disable everything else. Pick a galaxy type that gives most systems 3 wormholes, and spawn 60 planets.
When you start the game, do it in the understanding that everything you do - including doing nothing at all - will provoke some degree of reaction from the AIs.
Your first priority should be securing your starting position. How you do this - stationary or roaming defences or securing access - is unimportant, just make sure you don’t underestimate how hard the AI will hit you. Look to the top right for an indication.
Your second priority is to scout out as much of the galaxy as fast as you can, with an eye to the resources and special features of each one. Understand that the AI only partially relies on those things, so you can only limit its access to the various things, not deny it access entirely. You, on the other hand, rely entirely on what’s available in the galaxy. Further make sure you understand how AI progress works. When you feel you have a handle on those things, use the notation tool on the galaxy map to map out your over-all strategy of conquest.
You’ll most likely not be able to scout the entire galaxy right off, so you will be operating with imperfect information. But you should have a good idea how much AI progress you’ll be able to handle if and when you hold specific systems, based on your access to resources and ship designs. This in turn should tell you when you need to take the various systems.
And of course, it should be obvious to you before you even start the game, that simply taking the galaxy a system at a time is not a viable option. At default AI progress, 60 planets and AI level 8 you should expect to be able to take somewhere between a quarter and half the systems in the galaxy. The fewer you take the shorter, potentially easier, and definitely riskier the match will be.
Once you have some idea what your over-all plan is, you need to start thinking about what ships you need, and when and where you’ll need them. This should inform your research strategy and how you time it, which in turn will inform your infrastructure building and raiding strategy. Keep in mind here that raiding is an important tool. Raiding is never as good as outright conquest, but it can gain you some of the same benefits while provoking far less severe reactions from the AI.
After a couple of matches like this - don’t expect to win them - you’ll have some idea of the basic counters and synergies, as well as the kind of AI difficulty you think you can handle. Which means it’s a good time to start enabling some of the things you disabled.
60-80 systems is the easiest and fastest galaxy size. Both more and fewer systems significantly increases difficulty and prolong match play time.
AI level 8+ is almost certainly unbeatable for your first several matches, but assuming you can survive at least for a little while it’s a great teacher. Because at that level the AI has complete awareness of the game mechanics, and so will be doing a pretty fantastic job of showing you how to use the playing pieces. It’s so good it not only can and will use total cheese tactics if you’ve left yourself vulnerable to one, it understands and thus can show you how to counter many such stunts.
The rest of the game options you should read up on before playing with them. Some don’t expand very much on the core game, but some really-really do, and not necessarily in ways you want. And while shaved down AI War isn’t a terribly complex game, it is still StarCraft times two at its simplest, and every option complicates it further. Some very-very much so. Options range from - off the top of my head - a single new type of attack, to over a hundred ship types, to several new factions, to an actual campaign. Ticking everything = bad mess.
But… I’m guessing the best way to get into AI War is to advertise for a training match at Arcen’s forums. Disclaimer: I’ve never played with any of the native Arcenites, but a friend does (or at least used to) and claims that while they may be slightly too hairy, sometimes even a little bit scary, the rumours of their grognardian & n00b-eating ways are vastly exaggerated.
I ended up getting CoE3 yesterday - and I like it so far. It’s not exactly attractive - but it’s not that bad.
Seems slightly simplistic (ducks) - but I really like the difference between the classes. Now it’s just the simple matter of convincing 5-6 dudes that it’s worth their time and money ;)
