After having played a few days on Gamespy I have a few ideas on making the multiplayer part MUCH better, and I report some multiplayer bugs too. I opened the thread here cause mre people see it here.
So:
1. This feature is the most important: There should be an option to give the control over your civ temporary to the AI. You don't quit the game, the AI plays for you for a few minutes. It's very useful if you have something to do while playing, but only for a few minutes. After you are ready to play again you just take the control back from the AI. Because the game turns are often very fast, this would be an EXTREMELY useful feature.
2. In team games we actually see if the enemy team is pinging somewhere. It's good if your ping can be seen by everyone in other games, but if you are permanent allied with someone, then your pings should only be seen by him.
3. The game list in the lobby is jumping around, it's such an amateur mistake by Gamespy. Fix it plz! There should be a refresh button, and the gamelist shouldn't be refreshing all the time. If it's not fixed soon, it will be a bigger issue later, because when there are more games the list will move even faster, and it will be practically impossible to join a certain game.
4. In the lobby there should be a function to join a ceratin game by typing the game name.
5. There are problems if someone is joing a game in progress. WHY? Optimize the code, because these problems and waiting times are not necessary. I think joining is buggy: someone joined a game, he was in the game, could chat and manage his units, but the game still told that he was joining, and we couldnt play. When he quit and joined again the same problem occured. So we had to tell him to leave and we could continue playing.
6. In the game list in the lobby there should be MUCH more information about games. There should be columns like: how long ago the game started, the size of the map, the game speed(epic, normal, quick), the game turn time(none, snail, slow, medium, fast, blazing) and the year the game is in(1780AD for example)
7. When joining a game in progress and choosing an avaible civilization you should see the actual game scores, so you can choose the best civ avaible.
8. Passwording your CIV is useful if you leave the game for a few minutes, then later rejoin, and you don't want others to occupy it. So concerning this, I think passwording your civilization when you start the game is just not useful. You don't know if you will quit the game later, or you will want to rejoin. And if you password your civ, and you don't plan rejoining later, your CIV will be managed by the AI from then on. I think you should only be able to password you civ, when you are retiring from a game.
If you have ideas/opinions about my suggestions plz post them
. I really hope the first one will be implemented... I think the developers didn't think that multiplayer can be this good, and thought that it will be only some hardly useable, not really important element of the game, so they didn't work much on gameplay lobby. But eventually multiplayer became soo good, that it's the core compononet of the game now.
So:
1. This feature is the most important: There should be an option to give the control over your civ temporary to the AI. You don't quit the game, the AI plays for you for a few minutes. It's very useful if you have something to do while playing, but only for a few minutes. After you are ready to play again you just take the control back from the AI. Because the game turns are often very fast, this would be an EXTREMELY useful feature.
2. In team games we actually see if the enemy team is pinging somewhere. It's good if your ping can be seen by everyone in other games, but if you are permanent allied with someone, then your pings should only be seen by him.
3. The game list in the lobby is jumping around, it's such an amateur mistake by Gamespy. Fix it plz! There should be a refresh button, and the gamelist shouldn't be refreshing all the time. If it's not fixed soon, it will be a bigger issue later, because when there are more games the list will move even faster, and it will be practically impossible to join a certain game.
4. In the lobby there should be a function to join a ceratin game by typing the game name.
5. There are problems if someone is joing a game in progress. WHY? Optimize the code, because these problems and waiting times are not necessary. I think joining is buggy: someone joined a game, he was in the game, could chat and manage his units, but the game still told that he was joining, and we couldnt play. When he quit and joined again the same problem occured. So we had to tell him to leave and we could continue playing.
6. In the game list in the lobby there should be MUCH more information about games. There should be columns like: how long ago the game started, the size of the map, the game speed(epic, normal, quick), the game turn time(none, snail, slow, medium, fast, blazing) and the year the game is in(1780AD for example)
7. When joining a game in progress and choosing an avaible civilization you should see the actual game scores, so you can choose the best civ avaible.
8. Passwording your CIV is useful if you leave the game for a few minutes, then later rejoin, and you don't want others to occupy it. So concerning this, I think passwording your civilization when you start the game is just not useful. You don't know if you will quit the game later, or you will want to rejoin. And if you password your civ, and you don't plan rejoining later, your CIV will be managed by the AI from then on. I think you should only be able to password you civ, when you are retiring from a game.
If you have ideas/opinions about my suggestions plz post them
. I really hope the first one will be implemented... I think the developers didn't think that multiplayer can be this good, and thought that it will be only some hardly useable, not really important element of the game, so they didn't work much on gameplay lobby. But eventually multiplayer became soo good, that it's the core compononet of the game now.
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