I've been playing this game with a couple of friends, and some things struck us weird on the multiplayer part.
so ill talk about some strange mechanics i found holding us back, and ways to get around them.
1. In multiplayer, every player gets thesame amount of actions, so the number of actions per faction increases.
However, the amount of recources do not.
I like my games to be without any backuptown hacks (aka. building a empty town of blue behind red, so red can expand backwards)
Since this makes it both less "On Edge" (if the first town falls, u still have 5 towns behind it) And you spend an amazing amount of actions trying to build tiles into empty space.
However, we are kind of forced to have these "recource" towns becouse the amount of actions u get per turn with more people becomes insanely large compared to the recources u earn.
This effectively makes multiplayer a race between who puts down an action first (not to mention lame stuff with the undo command)
and putting towns "out of action" (behind others, producing nothing but recources). Just becouse u need the recources.
2. The second problem that pops up is the map size, people like making a "barracs" much more then they like putting a empty plain down.
The latter is required to fill up the map and make units not get stuck behind each other. In single player this is not much of a problem i guess.
But in multiplayer it just feels like the more players u have, the increasingly more actions u have to spend in order to keep up with the growth of ur city.
This is becouse the amount of actions available multiplies with the amount of players playing the game. (thus more players == faster growth)
Ideas:
1. For problem 1, i was thinking of maybe implementing more of a raid based economy.
In idea, it would make razing towns an Influx of recources. as the faction that destroys them gets recources from the destroyed building.
Thus, it both increases the amount of action (razing more towns) without inducing the problem of stalling ur economy so hard u cant rebuild, or build at all.
It would also mean that if a faction gets his towns "sniped" while still having a large army, the destruction this still existing army will couse will support the rebuilding of ur sniped production.
Also, since it is the faction that destroys it who gets the recources. It makes the game swing out of balance much quicker (wich i think would be a good thing). As the winning side will not only have more towns. but also more recources.
This would also make "Nomad" games possible, where u build a large amount of towns, and many of them getting destroyed, Effectively shifting the battlefield many times untill the end.
2. For problem 2, i couldnt rlly thing of any elegant fix, other then making the random appearance of new terrain dependent on how many players are playing.
This would make the map much larger, much faster with many players. Therefore enabling everyone to spend their points on expansion rather then filling up the world.
Effectively creating multiple fronts or massive armys fast. But since u have more actions with more players, it should also be easyer to balance those armys against each other.
I'm not sure if the 2 problems mentioned above are intended to be that way or just an oddity in multiplayer.
But it would be awesome if the question of "okay guys, who's going to spend their actions on building a row of planes over here" become history. And be more like "who's going to use their actions to restore balance (with power for instance), and who's going to build more barracks.
And the question "why is this town over here not producing anything but wood and stone" become smtin else then "else only 1 of us gets to build smtin and the others will not have any recources to do anything".
It could also be that we play the game in an unintended fashion. since we dont use mythological units for anything else then restoring battle in the middle of the battlefield. We simply like watching those humans duke it out with massive armys much more then some mythological stuff:P.
Idea 1 might actually induce a secondary result, wherein building siege would be more stimulated on the losing side, since they will become a large income of recources.
thus, building towns close together and producing siege, would actually give 1 side an advantage over the other, since u just build both a income of recources AND a military unit.
Thisll fill the map with more siege if things get hairy (wich i also figured would be a good thing:P)
I hope these points will be of help.
and that the post is not too long for anyone to read it:P (just noticed its pretty huge:P)
