The more multi-player games I complete, the more I wish this game had a couple extra social capabilities, such as:
Multi-player Rematch. You can already “rematch” single-player AI if you don’t want to change any match settings, but you can’t rematch human players in MP.
The ability to add current or recent opponents to your friends list. Unless you know the the other person’s in-game player code, you can’t add them as a friend; and the game doesn’t share your opponent’s player codes (which in itself is understandable, games like Hearthstone don’t share that either until after they’re added to your friends list).
As lower priority, but something I’ve wished I’d had when playing vs someone in real-time (meaning, you know they’re at the other end because you’re both blowing through turns pretty quick), is a sort of emote or communication system I can use to wish them a “good game” or “nice move” etc.
Now, if I’ve learned anything from every other multi-player game I’ve ever played in my life, it’s that the more social features a game adds, the more tools are put into the hands of trolls and “BMers.” But Due to the nature of this game, and the type of player I’d expect to meet in this environment, I’m not sure how much of a concern that might be here, overall.
Someone above already requested device linking, so I won’t bother bringing that up here, but it’s another quality of life thing that, while nice to have, doesn’t make or break this particular game for me. And that’s really what all this social stuff boils down to for me as well, just quality of life features that would be nice to have, but aren’t actively crippling the game in their absence. I’m still having a ball, and getting just a little better at it every day.
Don’t lose hope: join the wonderful world of Twilight Struggle, where we chat, add friends and the worst players will be merely grumpy or early-quitters!
Yea, I haven’t played that. I come from a world of 6 billion Hearthstone hours played, where a simple “Hello” or “Well Played” delivered at just the right moment can induce a catastrophic stroke.
Yeah, when I started this project, the network model I decided on had a very hard line between ‘online or offline’, like many games. If I were to do it again I would make it so you were effectively always connected (if your device itself was online) so you could jump between single/multiplayer at will.
Rematch/post game friend adding just barely didn’t make the cut for this patch. Will prob be in the patch after.
This is enormous fun now that I’m over the learning curve, and the three levels of AI are great (haven’t tried MP). The middle AI is perfect for advanced beginners who know the rules but haven’t grasped good strategies, like me. I lost the majority of games against the middle AI, but the scores are generally close and when I win it feels like a great accomplishment. It also motivates me to keep playing, since I want to get to the point where this AI is not a challenge, and I move on to hard AI.
In short, having three levels of AI makes this game really shine.
I have the board game, along with Roll For the Galaxy - but my wife is anti-playing competitive games right now and she’s the only one I have to play games with. So, getting this on the phone may be a good thing for me. I’m not real good at it as I’ve only played the board game about 3 times.
Controlling the interface is fine on phone, but I do find the iconography to be a little too small for my tastes. The cards in the game seem to be a direct 1:1 translation from the physical game, so just imagine one of those cards scaled down to the size of your fingertip. I can double-click to zoom in on any visible card in the game (whether I have it in play in play, it’s in my hand, or it’s on the enemy’s board), but otherwise it’s sometimes hard to distinguish certain iconography for certain cards at a glance.
And due to the nature of the physical game’s chosen font (which seems preserved for this release), I also find the card-names to be completely unreadable on my phone unless I’ve zoomed into a card by double-clicking it. But card names aren’t that important unless you’re either trying to avoid playing duplicate cards (which the card art helps distinguish more at a glance anyway), or you’ve got a certain Development or two that require certain specific cards be in play for extra VP.
Overall, the game is fully functional on my phone, I just find it a little more finicky, in that I find myself double-clicking cards more often to zoom in on couple of them. But this is something players have to do in other card games as well, so it’s not unique to RFTG.
I’m still playing this daily on my tablet, and I’ll readily pick up that Steam version; so this is good news.
Unlike my tablet though, I’m not interested in asynchronous multiplayer in the Steam version, so I’m kinda hoping there’s an option to filter out games whose players are expecting to play that way for new matches. I’d rather start and finish the game in one sitting on my PC since I don’t use it as often as my tablet now days.
Bought this a couple of weeks ago, and have reached the point where I can play it on the phone without breaking out the reading glasses (but I did previously play hundreds of matches on the Keldon server).
This might be what finally gets me on slack. Uh - how does I do that?
One thing I do not understand at all are Takeovers. In my last game, I was trying specifically to take over Rebel worlds. My opponent had a juice target, I had quite a lot of military power (+6 against his +2), and I had some improvement that seemed to allow me execute take overs. According to the rules, during the settle phase, I should have had the option to “pass to take over”.
Nope, it stayed at “pass” the whole game.
Also, I mentionned this before, but if there is no in-game reference (and there should be one, really), is there at least an online source to study the cards? I feel like I am half blindfold, not knowing in what numbers what cards come, and what potential interactions they may have.
