Want an easy way to play Civ V online? Say hello to Giant Multiplayer Robot! (GMR)

Hey SevenSpirits!

So yeah, we want to have save file rollback, since we keep the files a couple rounds back. Once we have a voting system in place, players will be able to vote to rollback a game. For now, if you have any issues, just let us know which game it is and we can roll it back a turn or two.

There is also a known issue with trying to leave a game when you're the last player. We'll get it fixed before too long hopefully. Sorry for the trouble. Thanks for testing it out and giving us feedback though!
 
I've never really used the hotseat function in Civ V. How does hotseat, and by extension this app, handle diplomacy between two human players? Like, do I send a trade proposal and they get a notification next turn?
 
This looks like a really sweet service. Thank you so much for making it and good luck. :)

Some friends and I just started a game, and the feature we could really use right now is easy recovery from user error. ;) A player in this game saved the game mid-turn. GMR robot naturally killed Civ V and (with the player's misguided blessings) sent this save on to the next player.

Now those two players are rather confused and don't know what to do. Granted, this was a stupid mistake, and GMR doesn't need to be able to stop every stupid user decision, but I think a good feature to roll back to a previous turn so we can recover (easily) would be quite useful. In addition to the case of someone accidentally submitting the wrong save, it would be useful if e.g. we encounter a game-ending bug that we need to go back a few turns to avoid, or one of the players accidentally breaks an out-of-game rule we had agreed upon so we wish to have them play their turn over, etc.

Thank you for the great feedback! I've manually reverted the last turn that was submitted for the game in question, so the mistaken player should be able to take their turn again and hopefully submit it correctly :)

I definitely agree with your enhancement idea! We've talked about implementing a way for players to revert back a turn for cases like this and the others you mentioned. However we haven't quite figured out how best to implement it. It seems that we would need to limit this functionality somehow so that people won't abuse it. Perhaps we could have it so only the game's host could revert a turn, or that in order to revert the majority of players in the game need to vote to revert it. I've added it to our task board, if you have any additional ideas or feedback on this we'd love to hear it!


A related feature I'd personally appreciate would be archiving of incoming save game files, and not just outgoing ones.


In this particular case I'm thinking the workaround is for player a to load the archived save which was unwittingly sent to player b, end turn, save on the interturn and send that save to player b by email. Then player b can load the emailed save, play it, and end turn and we are back on track. That should work, yes?

Yes, that sounds like an effective workaround! I've added that to our task board as well and will try to get it in as soon as possible. By the way, many of you probably don't know this but you can up-vote tasks on our Trello board and even leave comments giving us feedback and ideas as to what we should work on. That would be really instrumental in helping us prioritize features and enhancements for GMR!


Again, thank you for all your feedback! I hope you don't run into any more problems, but if you do just let me know! :)
 
I've never really used the hotseat function in Civ V. How does hotseat, and by extension this app, handle diplomacy between two human players? Like, do I send a trade proposal and they get a notification next turn?

Yes that's exactly right, the other player would get a notification on their next turn that a deal was proposed, which they can either accept, refuse, or send a counter-offer. Everything in hotseat mode, and thus GMR, is completely turn-based. :)
 
I support regressing turns in case of error only at the host's discretion. Of course, a good host would always check with any involved or affected players before making the decision. :)
 
Another way to conduct diplomacy in a game like this is via a forum thread following the game, or via email, chat, etc. It's all part of the fun.
 
Request: for an active game, a highlight on the player whose turn it is currently.
 
In both the app and the website, it's the leftmost player avatar.

Ah, cheers, I didn't realise.

...I seem to be full of suggestions this morning... :shake:

How about a time limit for player turns, set by the host? And along with that, would it be possible for a player who didn't play their turn in time to have an AI do it for them, for that turn only?
 
Ah, cheers, I didn't realise.

...I seem to be full of suggestions this morning... :shake:

How about a time limit for player turns, set by the host? And along with that, would it be possible for a player who didn't play their turn in time to have an AI do it for them, for that turn only?

Yes a turn-limit is a great idea and something that we've thought of before. I've added it to our task list. Thanks for the feedback, keep it coming! :)
 
Thanks for your help. :)

Minor bug on your website - trying to set a password with just digits causes it to hang. I'm not sure if Civ V allows such passwords (it seems to, but when the turn got back to me I was passwordless again) and it's really not important but I thought you should know.
 
Thanks for your help. :)

Minor bug on your website - trying to set a password with just digits causes it to hang. I'm not sure if Civ V allows such passwords (it seems to, but when the turn got back to me I was passwordless again) and it's really not important but I thought you should know.

Great catch! I've fixed it on the website to now handle all numerical passwords. Let me know if you have any more problems with it. :)
 
Ha, I just came here to note that I had just successfully surrendered as the last human player in the game. So many fixes! Awesome work, keep it up.
 
Hey Onan, it looks like you inadvertently helped us find a bug in GMR! It turns out our code for modifying/verifying save files completely breaks down and actually corrupts the save file when someone has a '@' in their game password, which you did :)

That character is a special delimiter character Firaxis uses in CiV save files to denote sections of the file. I'm looking into a code fix now and will probably just black-list that character. In the meantime I changed your game password to not include it so you'll want to review it.

Thanks for helping us test the service! This is what a beta is all about! :)
 
Just don't go playing any of my turns in our game! :p
 
Just don't go playing any of my turns in our game! :p

lol, I wouldn't do that :)

I fixed the issue on our website, you may now use '@' in your game password to your heart's content and it won't break anything! Again, thanks for participating in GMR and helping us test it :)
 
I've just implemented turn reverting on the website! If you're the host of a game you now have an option to revert the game to the previous turn. This will allow the last player to redo their turn and submit it.

This is only available to the host of the game, which makes them the responsible/accountable person. I can imagine situations where a host might abuse this new found power, but I think in general that won't be the case. :)

Good luck and happy civving! :)
 
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