Initial Multiplayer Observations / Questions

[Zeyurn]

I got my standard AI War group (me, my wife, and our mutual friend) to play this from the start with zero knowledge of what we were doing today in multiplayer.

I realize things aren't actually meant to be balanced around multiplayer so I'm going to mostly avoid game balance and just go with 'Things that seemed odd'.

1)  Undoing is really unintuitive in multiplayer.  It undoes the last action regardless of who did it, and gives absolutely no warning that this is what's going on.  More than once I'm trying to place a line of plains and my wife is trying to undo something she did and it keeps unplacing my plains with no warning and we both end up very confused.  I'd suggest that undos only affect your own moves, and that the squares/moves each player has done be outlined in a personal color / somehow more visible.  It's easy to ask if you're all in the same room 'Hey, so whatcha doin?' but probably a lot harder on the intarwebs.

2)  We couldn't figure out how to attack gods at all.  We tried the direct commandments, we tried just spawning critters all around them and forcing them to where they had to attack, but Pan and Ellr stubbornly refused to be attacked by anything.

3)  Units spaz out occasionally and run back and forth accomplishing nothing (even without the Human Vanity woe where this is clearly intended), or run back to towns with no enemies/purpose I can tell.  Maybe this is intended all the time because you can't control them and so them acting like they are utter morons on occasion is to be expected, so I didn't consider this a huge deal.

4)  Units get stuck behind each other _all the time_.  Greek Trojan Horses seem almost useless, I can't get them to attack anything because your melee units will run up and stop them from getting anywhere.  I can see why this happens for most melee, but the Trojan Horses maybe should be able to move through other units if they can reach a building that turn.

5)  Did edicts go away entirely?  From some of my pre-reading I had expected to be told some more things to do.

6)  Town names and bandit keep names are different for everyone in multiplayer, although you may have ninja fixed this while we were playing it still seemed that new towns and keeps kept showing up different for everyone.  (To clarify, all towns that existed when we reconnected to each other in multiplayer synched back up, but any new towns after that point were all differently named)

All that said, we had a lot of fun and enjoyed it greatly as we puttered around on easy trying to figure out what the heck we were doing, thanks for another fun game to play

[Misery]

To answer some of this here, related to specific points:

#2: The commandment action is currently glitched.  It doesnt do anything.  I've submitted that one to the devs already, and it's likely to be fixed very quickly after Memorial Day is over.

#4: Yup, that happens.  I dont think that units should ever be able to just bypass units from the other side (this could make things get really stupid really fast), BUT, I do think that they SHOULD be able to move through allied units.   As for the Trojan Horse,  I think it's kinda designed to be not as easy to work with as other siege units;  it can, after all, take down even a full health tower or bandit keep in a single hit.   

#5:  Yes, edicts are out.  They werent really adding enough to the game, and were replaced with the Woes system (which adds quite alot to it).  So instead of "here's an arbitrary condition for the game as a whole"  it's "this horrible thing is going to happen soon.  Find a way to survive it and try to regain balance", and you have the freedom to approach the situation however you like with the tools available.

[Zeyurn]

Agreed, I wouldn't want units to be able to pass through enemy units, but since I can't tell my buildings NOT to make Trojan Horses it's kind of irritating that they largely don't do much.  I'd rather have them only half kill fortresses if it meant I could get them to actually get to one.

Thanks for the info on everything else.

Oh I thought of a #7

7)  Are resource drops really meant to act like impassable barriers to all units?  Our first Norse infantry guy got to the Greek 2nd city we'd built and he refused to do anything because we'd unknowingly blocked it off with the resource drops.

[brammel]

Hi, I'm new to this forum, so I'm not rlly sure if this is the right spot to post this into, but it seemed simular to what i saw here:

Theres another interaction with the "undo" action on the token "Eldhrimnir"(the thing that makes all units that die respawn).
I noticed that undoing the placement of a unit (in my case a troll), would make it respawn somewhere. (as long as Eldhrimnir is on the board)

I'm not sure if this is intended, but this effectively gives me unlimited mythological units at no cost (as long as i dont care where they get placed).

I like the Snowballing nature of this game, whereas combining elements gets out of control really fast.
however, undo feels like it should change the game back to before the action, rather then be an ingame mechanic that can be (ab)used.

I also came across most of the things the OP mentioned, would be awesome if all those things would be explained/fixed.
but thus far I'm rlly enjoying the game.

[Misery]

Hi, I'm new to this forum, so I'm not rlly sure if this is the right spot to post this into, but it seemed simular to what i saw here:

Theres another interaction with the "undo" action on the token "Eldhrimnir"(the thing that makes all units that die respawn).
I noticed that undoing the placement of a unit (in my case a troll), would make it respawn somewhere. (as long as Eldhrimnir is on the board)

I'm not sure if this is intended, but this effectively gives me unlimited mythological units at no cost (as long as i dont care where they get placed).

I like the Snowballing nature of this game, whereas combining elements gets out of control really fast.
however, undo feels like it should change the game back to before the action, rather then be an ingame mechanic that can be (ab)used.

I also came across most of the things the OP mentioned, would be awesome if all those things would be explained/fixed.
but thus far I'm rlly enjoying the game.

The Eldhrimner thing is a glitch, I'm sure.   The "undo" thing was only just added and likely isnt perfect yet; probably a few bugs with that currently.

Hopefully I'm not speaking out of turn here, but knowing the devs there's likely to be a patch of some sort on Tuesday or Wednesday that fixes many of these current bugs.

[x4000]

1)  Undoing is really unintuitive in multiplayer.  It undoes the last action regardless of who did it, and gives absolutely no warning that this is what's going on.  More than once I'm trying to place a line of plains and my wife is trying to undo something she did and it keeps unplacing my plains with no warning and we both end up very confused.  I'd suggest that undos only affect your own moves, and that the squares/moves each player has done be outlined in a personal color / somehow more visible.  It's easy to ask if you're all in the same room 'Hey, so whatcha doin?' but probably a lot harder on the intarwebs.

It's a tricky thing, and I had considered just disabling undo entirely in MP.  But bear in mind, this game is not stateless; things have to be undone in order or not at all.  If you place a tile and then I put a unit on it, you undoing the tile leads to... madness and game breakage.  If you place a tile at the edge of the map, and then I place a tile next to it, and then you undo your tile, then the game isn't broken but I now have some land floating out in space invalidly.  There's a variety of ways to abuse this.  If you place a tile, then I smite a tile, then you undo the tile you placed, that can also be really abused.  Etc.

But as a matter of clarity or otherwise mechanics in MP, that's something I'm definitely open to discussion of.

2)  We couldn't figure out how to attack gods at all.  We tried the direct commandments, we tried just spawning critters all around them and forcing them to where they had to attack, but Pan and Ellr stubbornly refused to be attacked by anything.

Yeah, sorry about that; known issue that crept in at the last second before release.  Will be fixed tomorrow when I'm back from the weekend.

3)  Units spaz out occasionally and run back and forth accomplishing nothing (even without the Human Vanity woe where this is clearly intended), or run back to towns with no enemies/purpose I can tell.  Maybe this is intended all the time because you can't control them and so them acting like they are utter morons on occasion is to be expected, so I didn't consider this a huge deal.

I think that this is some form of desync state in MP, not sure.  There is one desync that I just found and have fixed, but I've not seen any others.  I may need to build in some end-of-turn error checking if the issue persists into the next few versions.  Just let me know.

4)  Units get stuck behind each other _all the time_.  Greek Trojan Horses seem almost useless, I can't get them to attack anything because your melee units will run up and stop them from getting anywhere.  I can see why this happens for most melee, but the Trojan Horses maybe should be able to move through other units if they can reach a building that turn.

That's a good idea on the trojan horses.  In terms of general blockages, yeah; that's pretty well unavoidable because of how units move.  Units can't pass one another for a variety of reasons.  Lets call the attacker A, and the target T.
1) If there are three allied units between melee A and T, then if A runs up and attacks T, it would then retreat on top of the third allied unit, causing illegal stacking.
2) If there is one allied unit right in front of ranged A, and then some space beyond that, and then target T: when A moves on top of the allied unit A, it may come into range of T and thus ideally want to stop.  This would either cause illegal stacking, suboptimal behavior, or ranged units blocking melee units if only ranged units could move through other units.

And so on.  What I think I might do though... is make one stacking case legal: one allied unit and one non-siege unit.  I think that would solve the most frustrating problem at least.

5)  Did edicts go away entirely?  From some of my pre-reading I had expected to be told some more things to do.

Yup, as Misery said.

6)  Town names and bandit keep names are different for everyone in multiplayer, although you may have ninja fixed this while we were playing it still seemed that new towns and keeps kept showing up different for everyone.  (To clarify, all towns that existed when we reconnected to each other in multiplayer synched back up, but any new towns after that point were all differently named)

I just fixed that, thanks.

All that said, we had a lot of fun and enjoyed it greatly as we puttered around on easy trying to figure out what the heck we were doing, thanks for another fun game to play

Awesome, glad to hear it!

[x4000]

Also: thanks brammel!

* Fixed an issue with the Undo feature where it would trigger Eldhrimnir, Odin, (theoretically) Tartarus Rising, and similar.

[Zeyurn]

1)  Undoing is really unintuitive in multiplayer.  It undoes the last action regardless of who did it, and gives absolutely no warning that this is what's going on.  More than once I'm trying to place a line of plains and my wife is trying to undo something she did and it keeps unplacing my plains with no warning and we both end up very confused.  I'd suggest that undos only affect your own moves, and that the squares/moves each player has done be outlined in a personal color / somehow more visible.  It's easy to ask if you're all in the same room 'Hey, so whatcha doin?' but probably a lot harder on the intarwebs.

It's a tricky thing, and I had considered just disabling undo entirely in MP.  But bear in mind, this game is not stateless; things have to be undone in order or not at all.  If you place a tile and then I put a unit on it, you undoing the tile leads to... madness and game breakage.  If you place a tile at the edge of the map, and then I place a tile next to it, and then you undo your tile, then the game isn't broken but I now have some land floating out in space invalidly.  There's a variety of ways to abuse this.  If you place a tile, then I smite a tile, then you undo the tile you placed, that can also be really abused.  Etc.

But as a matter of clarity or otherwise mechanics in MP, that's something I'm definitely open to discussion of.

Ah, you're right, I hadn't considered that fully.  In multiplayer I'd then suggest something like tracking who does what then if somebody pushes 'Undo', undoing up to the last thing that person did, and putting some big warning text up saying like 'Laelia has pushed Undo, your actions - Place plains, - Build Town Center have been undone!'  At the very least just the 'Laelia has pushed Undo, undoing - Place Plains' would at least let everyone understand what's going on.

Also since nobody remarked on it, I'll ask again, are resource drops supposed to block all units for their duration?  I noticed you took out mountains because of easy chokepointing in the patch notes and this seems very similar.

Thanks as always for the speedy replies, Chris

[brammel]

thx for fixing this undo bug fast:P made our tactics alot more viable:P

i have 2 more things to report though:
1. when playing with about 600 units on the map (around turn 40(dunno if that matters)) my friends tend to get fatal errors all the time, and get disconnected.
while not a direct issue, becouse they can just reconnect. its still kind of annoying having to reconnect almost every other turn.
this happens mostly when we combo our score up with eldhrimnir and yggdrasil (this blows up the map very fast:P)

2. this is a bug I'm quite sure, but it is best explained in the following scenario:
I'm red, and have a town center, 8 squares behind it i try to build a new one, but i cant since it needs to be 8 squares within a blue one.
then i become blue, place a town center around that area, and undo this action.
the next time i become red, i can place this town center even though  theres no blue town anywhere near it (the tooltip states its 16 tiles away from closest blue city, but i can still build it).

[vince0018]

Me and my friend were playing multiplayer last night and came up with a suggestion.

What if there was a mode added where each player controlled a different team; me controlling blue and my friend controlling red, for example, this would be very fun.

Of course the goal of the game would be the same, to keep the factions in balance and all that, so it's not a pvp session or anything like that.

The reason I'm mentioning this, is I found it fairly awkward trying to work together when we're both controlling both teams at once.
For example I was worried about screwing up my friends plans by placing something, and didn't quite feel like the towns were 'mine' like I do in singleplayer.
We were using mics too, FYI.

I just think it would be fun to coordinate between your partner while you each control a team, trying to keep them balanced while also dealing with woes and bandits.
I don't know if this type of game mode is even possible, but to me it seems like a natural fit, like a real cooperative mode.

Vince.

[solosol]

I've not tried MP yet, but having both modes (co-op vs World and PvP) sounds a lot of fun.
maybe each player should control the chosen faction only?