How do energy and research work in multiplayer?

[LintMan]

In a multiplayer game, can each player do their own full 2000 research on each planet, or must they share that 2000?

Similarly, can each player build reactors on the same planet without them interfering, or does only the first get the full benefit?

When an ARS is captured, does each player get a bonus ship (and if so is it the same one for all?), or only the player to actually capture the ARS?

Also, what happens if one player loses his home planet - the team can still keep playing?  What about the player who lost their home?

Thanks!

[x4000]

In a multiplayer game, can each player do their own full 2000 research on each planet, or must they share that 2000?

Similarly, can each player build reactors on the same planet without them interfering, or does only the first get the full benefit?

Yes, and yes.  It's all per-player, the way you would want.

When an ARS is captured, does each player get a bonus ship (and if so is it the same one for all?), or only the player to actually capture the ARS?

Everyone gets the bonus ship, and it's the same one for all.

Also, what happens if one player loses his home planet - the team can still keep playing?  What about the player who lost their home?

No one is ever "out" early, everyone keeps playing until the entire team loses their homes.  You only win or lose as a group, not individually.  In fact, if you lose your home station early, you actually get a "home core" that gives you even more resources than you had before you lost it.  Similar to how the AIs get a +100 AIP boost after the first of them dies, and neither of them are "out" early, either.  Everyone in the game is in there until the bitter end, humans and AIs both.

For more info on all the various differences with multiplayer: http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI_War_-_Multiplayer

[LintMan]

Thanks.  I had sorta guessed that's how it was, but wasn't sure.  I asked because while I don't do multiplayer, I really like the multiple-home single player start, with the bigger battles and extra techs.  This seems to behave like multiplayer in many ways (ie: same number of starting bonus ships, player gets unit cap limit same as combined multiplayers, player gets hit with same number/size of multiplayer waves I think), but in other ways it doesn't: (ie: energy production, loss of one homeworld loses game, etc).

My suggestion/request is to make them more similar, almost as if I had started a multiplayer game, but was able to control all the teams simultaneously:

- I'm presuming that a single player in a multi-home-planet start is identical in AI strength in terms of waves, CPA's, planet caps, etc - is that correct?  If it is, it seems only fair that the single player should have access to equivalent amounts of ALL resources.  Especially if the single player is on the hook to lose ALL home stations when any one of them is lost.

- With a two-home or three-home start you get nearly twice or triple the unit limits, but no extra energy "budget" to support those extra ships and turrets- you can still only build 1 each of the Mk 1-3 reactors in each system, whereas in a two or three player game, each player would be able to build a set of those before any inefficiency set in, effectively doubling or tripling their total energy budget compared to the single player with 2-3 home planets.  That's a big disadvantage to the SP with no offsetting advantage that I can see.  A SP 2-home game should allow the player to build 2 of each reactor at full efficiency, the next two at the first level of inefficiency, the next two at the second, etc., to match the multiplayer equivalent.  This is the thing I'd most like to see improved.

- Research is trickier to see what's equivalent... A multiplayer team gets 2000 per player per planet to spend on research, while a sp multi-home player only gets the 2000.  On the multiplayer team, the players will need to spend a lot of that extra research on the same techs (ie: turrets, Mk 2 bombers, etc), but it's not all duplication, some of that is spent on research the higher bonus ship marks.  And in MP, I'm guessing the team can somewhat "share" technologies: one player can get stuff like the transport or MRS techs and build/gift them for the other players.  With a SP multi-home game, you start with extra ship types, but no extra research to spend of them.  Perhaps something like a small % increase to planet knowledge (per extra starting home planet)?  Or an increase in the amount of knowledge given at game start?

- The starting metal/crystal resources for a SP multi-home start are the same as those for a single-planet start, while in multiplayer, each individual player gets that amount.  Yes, the single player has a better income, but he/she also has several homes to protect right from the start - why shouldn't they get the equivalent materials the multiplayers get?

- In multiplayer, each player has an individual 600000 metal/crystal cap and when one player exceeds the 600000 metal/crystal limits, the extra income flows to another player.  In SP multi-home, the player has just 600000 total limits, (and any extra is lost).  So the player has far less economic flexibility.  How about giving the same total resource caps that the multiplayer team would have?

I suppose someone might say these changes would make things too easy.  Easier than they are now, perhaps, but what I'm asking for is basically just for what the players get in an equivalent multiplayer start on the same map with the same number of homes.  The AI difficulty is the same.  Is playing single player really that much of an advantage over having a team that it deserves all these disadvantages?  I'd have thought the opposite, if only for the fact that with a team, you have multiple people to manage the fleets, micromanage battles, build bases, etc.

[x4000]

Well, the answer to your questions are: it's like this because when we added home planet starts, people felt like they were too easy.  There was a huge amount of discussion about it, and the current mechanics were decided upon as being sufficiently different from solo or multiplayer in order to provide a different and more challenging mode.  Do note that this even works in multiplayer, where if you have two players each with three homes, or similar, that's also a different sort of game from having six players.  No intention of changing how multiple home planet starts work, as they are quite popular as they are and I think the outrage would be pretty fierce.

That said, what you are looking for was basically already in the game, but in a different fashion: if there had been players in a multiplayer game, you could then disable them to keep playing without them, while having the rest of the team control them.  What your request rather boils down to is the ability to do that without ever having had another person present, I think -- which I had thought might be possible, but which turned out not to be.  It was an easy tweak to allow for that, though, so...

Updates in 3.110:

-Simply using Manage Players to give a name to a Disabled player slot in a game now adds a new (but disabled) player to the game that can be controlled by the other human players.  The other methods for connecting new players who wish to "drop in" all still work as they previously did, but this allows for a group of players to add "allies" that are completely controlled by the rest of the team.




That should do it!  That is literally the multiplayer experience, in all senses, just with one player controlling multiple player civs.  The multi-planet starts is something else entirely, though you could start with (say) three planets for yourself, then add in two disabled players, then give them the home planets so that you have three separate players with three separate home planets.  Otherwise you wind up with just home cores for the extra players, but that is the same as if you were doing a late drop-in for an added player, and it's balanced well to be fun and functional for them, too.

Cheers!

[Kjara]

Hmm, isn't 3 people starting with 3 planets each 9 home planets?

[x4000]

I meant 3 players each with one home planet.  Versus 1 with 1 home planet and 2 with 0 home planets.

[LintMan]

Ah, I didn't realize this topic had already been heavily discussed (though I probably should have - the balance of everything else around here is  ).  I thought I was starting a new discussion rather than rehashing an old one.  Sorry!

I briefly tried the new disabled player mechanism and it's pretty cool, but I quickly realized that having to manage two or three separate sets of player resources/incomes and unit cap limits is a heck of a lot more micromanagement effort than having them combined into one larger pool.  Seems like it might become too much effort in a big 80-planet game.  Maybe I should try it in a smaller game.

Two things I noticed, though:
- The per-planet energy efficiency limits seem a bit wonky.  On one planet, both me (the orig player) and the extra player were able to build all three reactors without any inefficiencies.  On another planet, only I was able to build efiicient ones.  It seems possibly related to the order they are built in.
- I can drag-select a mix of mine and allied units, and try to put them in a control group, but the control groups don't include or remember the extra player's units.

Anyway, thanks for the answers and the new feature!

[x4000]

My pleasure on the new feature, etc.  And no worries -- the discussions were a long time ago, sometime like last August, so they are positively buried in terms of forum search, etc.

I agree that it's probably more micro than it's worth to play this way unless you're literally just using the secondary player(s) as placeholders for real players who are not present (the main intent of that).  I've played in that fashion a number of times, when one member of my group isn't around for whatever reason, so most of my testing of it is in that context.

Regarding your specific issues:
1. The per-planet energy thing really should not be an issue, it might be a visual thing, but it's almost certainly not actually running the wrong logic.  But if you can post a save or something in the bug reports forum, Keith could look at that soon.

2. Yes, the control groups are per-player, and unfortunately that's not likely to change based on the way ships are aggregated, etc.  I can't think of any way to do it that wouldn't be both major surgery for us as coders and a pain to people who are using this feature just for managing an absent player's empire while he's away (in that context, you really don't want his control groups and yours to be comingling).