Wolff
6381
It may depend on if you are the declarer or declaree. I for one hope those liberal city states aren’t supporting your wars of aggression.
Somehow I feel that playing multiplayer Civ is like playing Dominions, only slower. That scares me a little. Still, can’t hurt to try.
Ohhh, it’s turned based so it’d be perfect for that. I’ll install it tonight!
Otagan
6385
Simultaneous turns will go a long way toward mitigating that. Even back in Civ 4, a full game was an afternoon (4-5 hours) with five players. Can’t imagine 5 is any worse than that.
Does the patch implement simultaneous turns, or has it been that way all along?
Blips
6387
Not sure, I’ve never had a chance to play multiplayer yet.
Sepiche
6388
I might be mixing up my Civs, but I’m pretty sure it’s been simultaneous all along.
Otagan
6389
Civ V has always had simultaneous turns as far as I’m aware. The netcode has always been the questionable part and I can’t vouch for that one way or the other.
Civ V has fully simultaneous turns. It’s actually pretty good with handling that, and dealing with multi-human teams: it shows who on your team has yet to end their turn; lets you jump back into a city and make a change if you need to even after you’ve ended your turn, if your teammates are still futzing around, etc.
The problem, as always, comes down to the AI. Since the AI is so poor overall, if you’re playing with humans on your team, you want to make big opposing teams of AI civs to make it interesting at all. This is exacerbated by the fact that large multiplayer games can get really slow each turn even in the early game, as the number of units and cities that have to be handled each turn increases.
I haven’t tried multiplayer with this latest patch, so hopefully the speed improvements in the patch will help in that regard, as it really just needs to be a little faster to work well on a Standard sized map. When it doesn’t bog down too much, it is a lot of fun with 3+ humans working together against teams of 4+ AI civs.
Miramon
6391
It really annoys me that the turns are so damn slow. There’s just not enough complexity to the model and especially to the tactical game to cost that many cycles, especially considering how abysmal the AI is.
Consider the vastly superior (but still not that great) AI of SMAC running with about the same number of units and number of world spaces on an antique machine with 1% of the computing power in about the same amount of time.
Sure, SMAC didn’t have hexes with stacking limitations, but there have been plenty of wargames since the early 90s with those features, so that can’t reasonably be the problem. Really the turns should be instantaneous except for animation time, which is obviously optional. But they just go on forever after the first couple thousand years or so.
I bet a substantial percentage of the time taken by a typical single-player game is just waiting for the AI turns to finish. I wonder what number that actually is. 50%? More?
Spock
6392
Hmm, I’m playing on a Huge map with about a dozen civs and I have almost no wait at all as of about 1300 A.D. Maybe it will get worse as my game progresses? Or maybe the new patch optimized things somewhat?
Playing a MP game in real time can be a challenge, more so as the number of human players increases. Unlike the Pitboss mode in Civ IV (which has been promised for Civ V since the game was released, but still hasn’t been released 2 years later), all players need to be connected to the game at the same time, since real-time MP is played via simultaneous turns. Unless all players have many hours to spare for a single sitting to complete the game, the game will be played over multiple sessions. As an FYI, Windows and OS X users can play in the same game without issue.
GMR removes the need for all players to be online at the same time by manipulating the game’s Hot Seat mode to create an asynchronous online MP experience. Save game file manipulation is automated under Windows via the GMR desktop client, while OS X users need to manually download and upload the save game file via the GMR website.
Civ V’s net code is solid. In my experience, games are only ever interrupted when Steam’s network goes down.
That’s why many prefer to play without AI players, if teams aren’t enabled. But, again, the issue with that is it’s harder to coordinate a game as the number of human players increases. That’s why many of us who play MP prefer playing via GMR, knowing full well it will take many, many months to complete a GMR game.
Also, one of the drawbacks to Internet mode (as it’s called in the game’s menu) is when human players are at war with each other. Since orders are executed simultaneously, players who are more skilled at quickly moving their units into and out of combat have an advantage. Turning off MP animations is mandatory, which sucks for aerial combat, since you have no idea from which city the fighter/bomber that just attacked is based.
KevinC
6394
This is the first time I have heard of Civ5’s netcode as being described as anything but awful. Until G&K they couldn’t even get animations working due to the netcode and playing MP with 3+ players was a chancy/frustrating affair at best, especially over the internet, due to the frequent and consistent OOS issues. It didn’t help that their network engineer was pulled off the project to work on the Civ facebook game.
Did G&K make significant improvements in this regard, I take it?
Janster
6395
Their turn-based real time combat system sucks on so many levels, it should be a plotting system instead, so that you can plot moves and watch them unfold at turn…
Instead of this clickfest :(
I’ve played both 3-player pre-G&K and 2-player post-G&K, yet never had an issue. Not sure if that helps!
The latest patch has certainly decreased the wait turn time in the late game. Plus, it’s just fun to see exactly which part of the AI is going, while you do wait.
Regarding multiplayer, the networking side is far more solid than it used to be, at least on local net games. There’s no way to fix the real-time design under the current system, when it comes to human vs. human multiplayer; that does just turn into an annoying clickfest. For human teams vs. AI teams it works well, since it speeds up the entire process. If the AI ever reaches moderate levels of non-stupidity, it could be quite a fun multiplayer game! As it is right now, just turning on Raging Barbarians tends to make the first half of a big multiplayer team game more interesting and dangerous than anything involving the AI civs.
Based on what I’ve seen in games started before the patch and read from other players on the 2K Games forum, Great Generals (and Great Admirals, as reported by others) no longer provide a bonus. Hope they fix this ASAP.
Mysterio, just wanted to say thank you for your post a few days ago that explained GMR and such.
Spock
6400
When the “Fall” patch arrived, I patched and fired up the game, figuring I’d try a few turns just to see how things look. I was still playing Civ six hours later, by which time it was about a quarter to three. :)
