The State of Multiplayer

Don't move this to the multiplayer section, this needs to be seen by as many people as possible.

I thought one of the main goal of Firaxis for Brave New World. was to improve multiplayer. While they did do some nice things by adding scaleable turn timers (so you have more time each turn as the eras progress) the multiplayer scene is downright atrocious and horrible.

Hybrid Turns - on any map other than Duel this setting is so buggy that it takes 5 minutes to get everyone's turn done. If it was quick at syncing it would actually be a plausible setting on small and standard maps to improve warfare.

Setting Up Games - I can't tell you how many times (especially with new players) people join games titled "BNW ALL DLC FFA" and proceed to stay in the lobby when they haven't even bought Brave New World. There needs to be an expansion level tag on the join game screen that prevents people from joining gamest they don't have the DLC for. Also make games able to have more characters in the description.

Ready Bug - To make matters worse, there is an annoying bug that keeps people from clicking "ready" status so the game can start, requiring them to leave the lobby and rejoin. Very time consuming, and if everyone leaves at the same time you have yourself an empty lobby again.

Pause bug - the game will sometimes freeze, sometimes because of what I'm guessing is high level processes when people leave or join the game, or sometimes because of lag spikes. It's just plain stupid, this doesn't happen in starcraft or any other game with multiplayer fuctionality.

Rejoining games - As of now you have to friend a person in your game so they can reinvite you. There needs to be an easier lobby chat, maybe associated with the steam client so that when people disconnect due to issues with the game there is some form of communication still present. Maybe add a log that lists your most recent MP games and the steam ID's of the people who were in it.

Continuing games - Only the host can save multiplayer games - which is just stupid. All players should have access to saves so that IF something is wrong with the game a reload can happen.

Multiplayer Community - There should be a reputation system added that gives you points based on how many games you've played to completion (or until you were one of the last 3 people in the game). This would hopefully weed out people who join games when they know they don't have the time, or people who ragequit only 30 minutes in because they got beat to a wonder and allow those serious about multiplayer to form communities.

I know this game is "single player first multi player second" but when the multiplayer experience is SO low that you can't reasonably expect to finish a game, THAT is evidence that the system needs changing. I've spent countless hours on multiplayer only to completely finish 2 games, a lot due to ragequits but also to random disconnects and forgetting to save games.

Some of my favorite memories were playing CIV: BtS on a LAN (yeah, I know it was sort of awful then, but it had almost no bugs when compared to the state of multiplayer now). I wish I could say I have great memories of CiV multiplayer, but they are ones full of frustration from stupid disconnections. There are so many advantages to multiplayer when compared to single player, but they are overshadowed by the plethora of bugs and glitches present in the game. If most of these problems are not fixed by the Fall patch I will be very disappointed in Firaxis.

I haven't tried MP in BNW just yet, but I will. But can I please add two very annoying gameplay mechanics:

1. In SP you have to meet everyone to know which Civs are in game. In MP you know who are in from turn 1, why! Part of the fun is finding the other Civs.

2. In MP the AI will never contact you. It has been mentioned before, but I find this very strange.

All-in-all its bizar that they specifically mentioned they did some work on MP. They even patched right before BNW came out, but all they did was put in new feautures instead of improving the existing ones.

You can put all the accessoires you want on a car, but if its engine is broke, it won't ride.

I know the OP tackles the technical issues, but I thought if we are complaning about MP, I'll put this in too.

I haven't played multiplayer outside of co-op, but I would like to point out that writing an OP highly negative of the multiplayer experience creates a very biased poll.

As for game saves, perhaps your experience is different, but I never host the game, yet I have periodic autosaves. I'm pretty sure you don't need to have the host to continue a game.

Although I don't play MP a lot, I enjoy playing Hotseat, and let me tell you there's still so many kinks they haven't fixed including

1. Lack of notifications, unless you roll over each time, you never find out about Pantheons being Founded, city allies being changed, people entering new eras etc.

2. Trading is still bugged, if Player 1 proposes a deal, NOBODY can make a deal until the Recieving Player responds to the deal.

3. If people play hotseat without swapping between pcs, music is never the same (which is quite a shame really) as it keeps changing to a new player.

4. Lack of diplomatic options between human players.. please, I just want to denounce people! hell, I can settle for no Leaderscreens bar oil portraits of leaders. Just so it isn't a boring tasteless turn.

5. Map seems to work weidrdly, it forces the pc to re-load the map each turn, which is actually performance reducing.

6. Maps larger than HUGE have this strange 1-2 lag before you can take your turn.

There's also a severe lack of alerts. It does not alert you to most of what you get from ruins. It does not make your workers stop working when there are barbarians nearby either, and that's a real pain.

I LOVE playing civ V multiplayer, it's a great game to play with friends. However civ V multiplayer is making it as difficult as possible for me to fully enjoy the experience.

The game has been out for over 3 years now, and we STILL have a broken mess without the joys and amenities afforded to single player. If they are going to include multiplayer features, they need to support them. End of. It is frankly unacceptable that they serve us an unfinished product like this and instead of working on fixing it, work on more content to earn more money. I appreciate it and enjoy more content, but it doesn't seem right.

Improvements to multiplayer just cannot come fast enough. I don't even want it to be changed or modified for greater playability, i just want it to be fixed to the level that single player is at in terms of player aids and getting rid of bugs.

I mostly agree with you. Usually, I play with 1-2 friends in multiplayer. For these games, I would like it if the A.I. was a little more interactive (such as offering trades) in MP. I understand that the identical experience as in SP would be very/too disruptive to the game, but some things could be added such as a clear notification of what one has just received from ruins. Ideally a pre-game option with 1-X levels of "closeness" to SP would be good. (In the extreme case identical to the SP experience).
Also, it's often disturbing that A.I. players act alone when in teams. As an example, I had a game with 2v2v2v2 (My friend and I were in one team), where A.I. team mates were proposing to repeal each others recently passed proposals in the world congress (i.e. Theodora's Proposal to ban copper had been passed before when the Incan team mate proposed to unban copper in the next WC-session). Another example is making peace with a team. Often, one team member will agree to peace while the other won't.

tl, dr: Give the possibility to play MP with the SP experience (A.I., notifications); add better team A.I.

I avoid multiplayer in turn based games with total randoms. I mean what if I need to use the washroom? On the other hand none of my friends play Civ 5.

MattZed said:

I haven't played multiplayer outside of co-op, but I would like to point out that writing an OP highly negative of the multiplayer experience creates a very biased poll.

As for game saves, perhaps your experience is different, but I never host the game, yet I have periodic autosaves. I'm pretty sure you don't need to have the host to continue a game.

Click to expand...

The reason the critique is so negative is because MP needs drastic improvement.

Hmm...I guess maybe I didn't look hard enough for the autosaves.

acjvanv said:

I haven't tried MP in BNW just yet, but I will. But can I please add two very annoying gameplay mechanics:

1. In SP you have to meet everyone to know which Civs are in game. In MP you know who are in from turn 1, why! Part of the fun is finding the other Civs.

2. In MP the AI will never contact you. It has been mentioned before, but I find this very strange.

All-in-all its bizar that they specifically mentioned they did some work on MP. They even patched right before BNW came out, but all they did was put in new feautures instead of improving the existing ones.

You can put all the accessoires you want on a car, but if its engine is broke, it won't ride.

I know the OP tackles the technical issues, but I thought if we are complaning about MP, I'll put this in too.

Click to expand...

The thing is I can deal with the lack of interface, but if the system is poorly designed any additional improvements will be for naught. Thanks for replying to this thread.

True_Candyman said:

There's also a severe lack of alerts. It does not alert you to most of what you get from ruins. It does not make your workers stop working when there are barbarians nearby either, and that's a real pain.

I LOVE playing civ V multiplayer, it's a great game to play with friends. However civ V multiplayer is making it as difficult as possible for me to fully enjoy the experience.

The game has been out for over 3 years now, and we STILL have a broken mess without the joys and amenities afforded to single player. If they are going to include multiplayer features, they need to support them. End of. It is frankly unacceptable that they serve us an unfinished product like this and instead of working on fixing it, work on more content to earn more money. I appreciate it and enjoy more content, but it doesn't seem right.

Improvements to multiplayer just cannot come fast enough. I don't even want it to be changed or modified for greater playability, i just want it to be fixed to the level that single player is at in terms of player aids and getting rid of bugs.

Click to expand...

I only recently started playing MP (after BNW came out) so I missed some of the worst MP problems that seem to have been fixed. I'm pretty happy with it overall but there are a couple of issues:

As stated before, the issue of people not having some DLC's needs to be fixed.

Also, the AI does need to interact much more. I get it won't ever be on the level that SP has, but having essentially zero interaction with the AI (unless you start the interaction) is annoying. Plus, you're given no option to continue trade deals like you can in SP so every few turns you have to go and manually re-do them all. It's annoying.


I think the lag in hybrid turn games is just that - lag. There's not a lot I think can be done with that given how many people and AI's are trying to act at the same time. Particularly when at war the game slows down, but I'm not sure it's a problem that can be easily fixed and I think it's just an inherent issue with the system.

Everyone can save game.

So far, I haven't had too many issues with hot seat MP. I did notice that I fail to receive notifications when the the AI destroys my units (I would only find out once it was my turn and notice my unit was no longer where I let it... Very annoying). Also, I agree about the music-- it would be nice for it to not reset every turn, as it is a bit jarring now.

Public games always get a moderate to high risk to be disrupted somewhere from any bad human actions.

I find it good(my vote!) in term of stability and playing with friends(NQ, etc.) ensure reloads and most games completion.

You can always change auto save in the .ini file to 1 per turn

And hotseat games work like a charm.

Phoenix1595 said:

So far, I haven't had too many issues with hot seat MP. I did notice that I fail to receive notifications when the the AI destroys my units (I would only find out once it was my turn and notice my unit was no longer where I let it... Very annoying). Also, I agree about the music-- it would be nice for it to not reset every turn, as it is a bit jarring now.

Click to expand...

Hotseat is probably more stable, although I remember I think it was back in Vanilla, if you resurrect a player they will be by default an AI.. for some reason..

However, Hotseat is, liek I said, more stable, but it has it's flaws...