Ideas for Co OP

[Genrazian]

I was thinking how could you introduce Co-op features into Last Federation in its current iteration. What would the benefits/downsides to be. Would havign 2 players messing around or more building and such be a bad thing. Would you make playments in 'turns' How would you balance it vs people during the game researching and out using there ship laying down the law.

I would imagine it would be neat for cooperative players coming in the middle of am ission or joining them in attackign or defending something. The idea of one focussing on researching and the other expanding on conquest is something that I find interesting and would like to see in the future.

What I propose is that the game is at a constant time flow, with the option of time boosting with the agreement of both players. Now how would that work during combat. Well I guess it would be at the same constant pace. Though I would imagine it would need ot have a short time period for combat for players to take turns like 5 or so seconds for a player to wrap up what they want or do nothing if there are multiple players on the board.

I think if anything its a lost opportunity but, one that can potentially work and think beneficial if people are interested in!

[Lord Fiddlemeister]

I don't think adding multiplayer adds anything to this game. It is about you and your story of creating the federation. I love coop in games but I think it'd be wasted on this game

[Genrazian]

I think thats a matter of opinion. I think it would be nice to create a federation with a friend or of coarse face a friend manipulating the races to there liking.

[topper]

Chris said this way back during the early developement:

In terms of multiplayer, this is something that I really do want to do, and I have some ideas on how to do it.  But it's a big enough task and would require expansion of game mechanics that it would probably need to be an expansion-pack feature.  The general idea is to make it basically kind of like Bughouse Chess, where technically you are playing two different games (each your own solar system), but you are also able to pass things across.  Though more freely than in bughouse.

Basically you would each be playing your own solar system in single player, but with a network connection between them for as long as you feel like, and the ability to pass some things back and forth across that connection and thus interact and collaborate.  That's an odd sort of multiplayer, so we likely would not even call it that.  Most likely we'd say "ability to connect single player worlds and use one solar system to help another!"  Or something along those lines.

[Conductorbosh]

Something like Chris's statement would be fine, but nobody wants that for a long timE. Arcen won't worry about anything like multiplayer (Which is not needed anyway in my opinion) until the base game is solid as a rock.

As far as full-on two players running around the same system multiplayer? I vote a hearty, resounding NNOOOO

[lifehole]

Co-Op isn't really needed IMO. It'd be interesting, especially in-combat coop, but the solar view has too much time dilation going on to really matter. You'd need to completely re-structure a lot of the game for it to work with two players.

[Genrazian]

What would need to be changed? Its only a matter of how turns work really.

[NickAragua]

Shogun 2 had a feature where you could queue up to drop in as the AI into other players' battles. Of course, a lot of the fun of Last Federation is that the battles are pretty fast paced, and humans are really not very fast at all.

I have no idea how I would work coop into this at the strategic layer, as it really appears to have been designed from the ground up to be single player. I do love me some coop, but that needs to be worked in right at the start of a project.

[topper]

What would need to be changed? Its only a matter of how turns work really.

I'm afraid that most of the game in true Co-op would be: one player playing, the other player watching. One player doing a bunch of battles, and the other is on a dispatch for months. The first player is taking a lot of real time, while the second player is just waiting around. If both players are forced to do the same thing at the same time, it is not really multiplayer.

It would be like an extreme version of playing Civ5 with simultaneous turns. Where one person has a huge army to move, and the other person just needs to click next turn and then wait.

= not very fun most of the time.

I would be fine with seeing multiplayer someday, but something closer to what Chris suggested instead of a real co-op.

[Genrazian]

That would depend wouldnt it. I mean you could do multiple combats or both the players helping one another in combat. Or of coarse dropping in and out of combat and making use of the withdraw feature if of coarse you get destroyed.

[Elijah]

I guess multiplayer would be actually nice. If they implement it, why not! I'd like to play this game together with a friend of mine.

[Zeyi]

What would need to be changed? Its only a matter of how turns work really.

I take it you don't realise how monumental  a task that would be? The way turns and time pass in a game are core, you can't just change them willy-nilly without affecting everything else.

Coop is a nice idea but don't pretend it'd be easy to implement.

[casualsax]

If I was going to implement co-op, I would make it play-by-email style, like frozen synapse.  You would get a message that it was your turn, and you would perform actions until you were out of time.  Then you would close that game and do something else until you checked the next day, when it would be your turn again.

[GC13]

I can see that getting really annoying, because you'd always know how long the other person was on dispatch for, and would therefore be limited to however many actions you could do before his time runs out, plus one action. And even then, keeping the solar system in sync would be difficult.

Unless you mean to go a month at a time, which just wouldn't be worth the effort.

[Genrazian]

Well I was thinking mission time would still be ongoing as it would be in 'solar map' mode. Though it would be nice to have a feature to help recruit aid from a allying force to join a player