Hybrid Multiplayer

ajar1189 said:

^^Well said Delnar. Those are basically all the points that I wanted to make (and more). One more thing that I wanted to add was that gaining ruins early can really help you snowball from the onset of the match (I'm specifically thinking getting an early tech such as writing or pottery or even archer/animal husbandry). I know alot of people say GL is overrated, but played properly it can really snowball you way ahead (babylon-esque science bonus). Another example is getting a population ruin over someone else and being able to build a settler significantly earlier and consequently being able to settle the better land earlier. These small bonuses early on can make a significant impact down the road.

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I agree that GL is a generally overrated wonder and too many people attempt to rush it in most MP games however it can definitely be very strong. Mainly in the case that your capital has ample production to get GL out prior to turn 25 and acquire philosophy. This ample production can then be used to build a super early NC which will snowball you.

Only if your production is quite good though. Otherwise you run the risk of losing GL which is devastating. Also, if you don't have good production the NC will take a very long time to make which can set you back for quite a while.

If your production isn't high, don't even bother. It's just not worth it.

Delnar_Ersike said:

No special launcher is needed, just a special way to package the mod. Currently, multiplayer mods work by disguising themselves as official DLC, so players enable or disable the mod by enabling or disabling it in the DLC menu.

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I'm definitely no expert at mods in Civ V but in order to use them in multiplayer a friend told me to download this. Is there an easier way to handle that?

Delnar_Ersike said:

The gain for the resolving of pantheon, religion, and ideology ties would probably improve the players' mental state more than it would improve the game (the threat of being same-turned on pantheon or religion can be as big of a detriment as an actual same-turning), but it's still something.

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I guess this is just something that's never really bothered me as much as it bothers you. Annoying when it happens, perhaps even really important when it happens, but pretty rare in the first place. Not going to turn down a good solution if one arises, but I don't think it's worth it to go from Hybrid to Sequential for this reason alone...especially in a smaller game. Maybe if it was an 8+ person game or something, possibly even 6+.

Delnar_Ersike said:

You can get enough faith from meeting a religious CS first or from faith ruins to nab first pantheon, but not second pantheon.

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Right, stupid quick speed problems. This doesn't happen on Standard or slower. Should get less faith on quick to avoid this, but I guess it is what it is.

Delnar_Ersike said:

Oxford into Radio begs to differ: in 6-player games on Quick, I've seen plenty of cases where two people got their ideologies on the same turn (roughly one case every 4-5 games). It's definitely not common, but I wouldn't call it rare either.

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So out of like 5 possible ties per game and thus 20-25 possible ties total, it happens one time. I'd say a 4-5% chance of happening per game is rare.

Delnar_Ersike said:

Stealing a population ruins from under another player's scout saves you about 10 turns of growth.

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No, it doesn't, especially not on quick speed.

Delnar_Ersike said:

Stealing a tech ruins from under another player's scout can save you about 12 turns of science.

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No, it doesn't, unless it's a tech you were actually waiting on. Early game you're often waiting around on buildings or even obtaining workers to do stuff with techs.

Delnar_Ersike said:

Stealing a culture ruins from under another player's scout usually means having a roughly 12 turn lead on culture that they will have to make up with wonders.

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No, it's not actually 12 turns, not later on. Let's even say they unlock Tradition with that and get 36 culture more. That's the gap -- not 12 full turns of culture.

Delnar_Ersike said:

Stealing a faith ruins usually means you get first or second pantheon instantly while the other player does not.

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Can't even get a faith ruin until turn 20, plus you might not find one, plus you have religious CSes, plus people going for faith will be close to pantheons anyway.

Delnar_Ersike said:

If you're still not convinced, consider meeting a CS on the same turn as same-turning a ruins: the player who clicks first gets the bigger bonus, which can mean the difference between first pantheon without shrines and second pantheon with shrines for religious CS.

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Which is a problem with quick speed in the first place.

As much as I am still a fan of sequential turns simply because it's faster, I did play a hybrid teamer game a while ago. It was nice playing a teamer game and not being so overly concerned about fast clicking. But at the same time, I still feel that if it had been sequential it would have resulted in the same outcome.

I wouldn't be against playing another hybrid teamer, but I don't think I would play a full ffa. If you had some crazy 4 way war going on, then you'd have to wait 3 turn timers for your turn. One annoying thing about hybrid though is that you cant look at demo graphs or anything while waiting on the other guy. It'd be better if they just froze up units while waiting on the other guy. It's not like microing your city will change anything while the other guy does his move.

With that said hybrid, if changed, could potentially be pretty awesome in the future.

THANK YOU Tasonne and LordBalkoth. It's amazing how people defend simultaneous turns as anything other than a necessity to speed the game along.

To be fair it's only really bad because of Civ5's architecture and how ranged units are ridiculous, even with sequential turns

The particular implementation of Hybrid turns in Civ5 has problems, but those are largely due to Civ5's coding being flawed. (On a side note, Civ 5 still has crashes due to its architecture, which is incredibly annoying in MP games - losing several games because the interface locks up. That sucks and makes a frustrating experience even more frustrating, even if I'm willing to put up with how ridiculous combat is.)

A better implementation would be to shift the game (in MP and SP) to a different implementation of simultaneous turns - that is, every unit, city, etc. is issued orders, and movement / combat only occurs at the end of each turn with all units moving in "real time". It would be sort of like MoO's implementation of turns. Doing that would require the core game to be different though, and it is a change that might be off-putting to series veterans.

It's amazing how people defend simultaneous turns as anything other than a necessity to speed the game along.

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for some things 1 reason/argument is enough.

I wonder how moddable hybrid multiplayer is? If parties not involved in the war could move simultaneously and those involved in the war could still do non-military actions (EG: Change what they're building, plan research, do diplomacy) while it's not their turn to move units, hybrid would be a lot more bearable.

Bonus points if you can code something for pantheon/religion/ideology/ruin coincidences, too.

I don't see the problem with waiting 2-5 minutes for someone to resolve their turn on hybrid. I go off and have a smoke, a drink, pet the dog, or whatever. Hybrid is useful for hurrying the early game.

I can tolerate a clickfest to found the first religion far more than a clickfest for military units. All of those things occur a limited number of times in a game, and aren't always guaranteed. Far worse is fighting a war with dozens of ranged units and having to deal with clickspam and stalling every single turn.

nimling said:

A better implementation would be to shift the game (in MP and SP) to a different implementation of simultaneous turns - that is, every unit, city, etc. is issued orders, and movement / combat only occurs at the end of each turn with all units moving in "real time". It would be sort of like MoO's implementation of turns. Doing that would require the core game to be different though, and it is a change that might be off-putting to series veterans.

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Simultaneous execution (as I call it, versus simultaneous turns) comes with a fair share of limitations. For starters, 1UPT would cause even more frustrations, since a single unit being blocked from moving out of its tile would cause a chain reaction among units who depend on the blocked unit leaving its tile. The attacker/defender dynamic would break down when two units can engage in combat by moving into the same, empty tile. The player would have even less room to make up for bad combat rolls than before. Moving and then attacking with a unit would be incredibly unreliable (you might end up not attacking anything, or attacking a unit you do not want to attack). Paradrops would be even harder to react to (they would be able to attack the same turn you would be able to attack them, since their attacks execute simultaneously with yours the turn after they paradrop). High movement speed units would be much weaker, since you wouldn't be able to attack units discovered by uncovering fog of war with a high movement speed unit (mainly affects naval combat). The list goes on. Implementing simultaneous execution really isn't a good idea with Civ5's combat structure (the entire unit system would need to be rethought from the ground up, so you'd ultimately be playing a different game).

Gort said:

I wonder how moddable hybrid multiplayer is? If parties not involved in the war could move simultaneously and those involved in the war could still do non-military actions (EG: Change what they're building, plan research, do diplomacy) while it's not their turn to move units, hybrid would be a lot more bearable.

Bonus points if you can code something for pantheon/religion/ideology/ruin coincidences, too.

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The first bit is not actually part of the hybrid mode code, that's part of the "waiting for other players' turns" code. You're unable to do those things in singleplayer while waiting for the AI to do its thing just in Hybrid mode multiplayer. It's definitely moddable, but requires a large framework as opposed to sets of tweaks here and there.
Interacting with the UI is one thing (eg. checking demos, supervising cities), but doing diplomacy is quite another, since diplomacy relies on offering stuff you currently have, and this can change during the course of another player's turn (eg. one of their units pillages your only horses tile). Research and production are carried out at the end of your turn, so while the game could be changed to let you be able to change these items during other players' turns, it would effectively just be letting you make your tech/production choices for the next turn.

The problem with the pantheon/ideology/religion bit is that they work via a trigger that occurs in the C++ code that launches a bit of Lua code that hooks back into the C++ code when finished: implementing changes to it would require modifying the notification-handling code, and based on my experiences trying to implement an AI that does multiplayer diplomacy through notifications, the notification-handling code can be a real pain to work with. Fixing ruins is nigh impossible, since it would require a first move "catcher": a "move listener" code would be implemented that would constantly check for moves made by other players before allowing your code to go through, and I suspect this would cause a lot of sync issues unless the engine were also changed.

A simple solution to 1UPT complications would be to do away with 1UPT.

Most likely, instead of direct "move to this tile" options, units would be given missions like "attack city x", "follow and attack unit y" - although movement by tile would still be possible, setting a unit to intercept an enemy unit, or respond to attacks, would be the norm, which gets around movement complications somewhat. This could lead to problems with rough terrain, but presumably the human player (and AI) are wary about following enemies into possible traps, and only pursue when traps are not possible, or the risk of traps is minimized.

With this in mind, it would be possible for instance to set a garrison army to intercept any army that it can beat, and paradrops into hostile territory would be met with resistance the turn they make the drop. That would make paradrops into strong defenses risky, but that is how it should be.

(I'm assuming of course that 1UPT is replaced with MUPT, so I'm thinking of stacks fighting stacks rather than units fighting units.)

If we're constrained by 1UPT... well, this is one of the many architectural flaws in Civ5 MP, especially with simultaneous turns. What makes simultaneous turns especially frustrating is ridiculous archer spam and frigate spam. Just making ranged units less annoying or eliminating them altogether would go a long way towards making 1UPT playable. (Vanilla had the right idea with naval combat for the most part, making sea units capture coastal cities was a terrible idea and takes any planning out of an amphibious assault. The only thing that needed fixed was that embarked units should be protected by ships, and embarked units should be about as fast as your best available warship rather than limited to speed 2-4.)

Bump.
Simultaneous turns is garbage, as is 1UPT.

Moderator Action: Bumping your own (semi-necro) posts is spam.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

I don't understand why the moderators here are so keen to defend bad game design. Simultaneous turns is unplayable and horrid. It's not something I play competitively, I play it for horsehockys and giggles.

Anyway people who want to play real civ should get together.