What is your favorite way to play civ SP or MP? Why?

Here is my answer... I have been playing civ games since Civ II and I never played multi player. To me it has always been a traditionally Single player game. So I am understandably curious how many actually play SP compared to MP. Is this game all of the sudden heading towards being an MP game. It could be, although I hope it doesn't, because I feel the game should have both options that work properly. At this point MP remains broken and SP works but the AI and diplomacy among other things have been patched, but the problems remain. So this next patch will be addressing MP. Do you think they will be able to fix MP in one swoop when they were not able to fix SP in several tries? I would like to hear some viewpoints about your take on the matter. This should be an interesting discussion.

Partly for me too it's tradition - yes, Civ has always been a single-player game, and particularly in an era when every other strategy game out there is multiplayer by default (and is designed from the ground up to be a multiplayer game, in an a way no Civ game is) it's good to have a single-player game to return to.

Beyond that I've tried multiplayer in Civ IV and Civ V and it's distinctly lackluster - mostly my group tends to be nonaggressive and build towards science and culture victories. The thing is, diplomacy is an important part of standard Civ but the game is not set up to handle it in a multiplayer game. I don't mean there's anything that needs fixing in a patch; I mean that inherently, as a 'free for all' type game (i.e. with multiple players who each have their own interest in winning the game), no one has anything much to gain from diplomacy that will favour the other guy - and if you add some kind of team-play environment you can just arrange things through chat windows and only use diplomacy to set research agreements or exchange resources. This latter would be more interesting if Civ V resources were more varied in their trade benefits, or if there was a greater variety of strategic resources that were relevant at the same point in the game (trading horses for iron might happen, but who would trade horses for uranium?).

But then it becomes a pale shadow of RTS-style games that are inherently better-designed for this kind of team play. In fact I played an RTS recently, Sins of a Solar Empire, that made, in my estimation a somewhat ill-judged, attempt to add '4x' elements to an RTS game. The trouble is that, as an RTS, it defaults to a 1v1 mode in which diplomacy is pointless, and the diplomatic options that present themselves are, as in Civ, mostly things that can be better-handled through more standard team chat channels - in which case having a formal diplomacy component adds nothing to the game.

Single player only for me. Honestly I don't even know how online works. Do people play 1 on 1 with marathon speed or something? That's fine, but not for me. Civ is about long games, diplomacy and balancing out many Civs on a planet.

The best I have done towards MP was Civ net was it? the Civ1 scam to buy the entire game over to play it multiplayer haha... I will play hotseat games but that is because its turn based. I'd never play online as I'm not even willing to watch a click fest war take place. I'll keep my base internet connection and minimal computer settings and enjoy SP. It's slow enough with just me playing, I can't imagine waiting for more people that get enveloped like me in this series to get to my next turn! Luckily, much like some console games, I feel I get my money's worth out of the SP so if I don't take advantage of the MP I don't feel so bad.

SP, but only because of connection issues. My opinion is this game is probably better as a MP game. Although there is some role-play and puzzle-solving elements to SP, it's primarily a war game between you and most (sometimes all) of the AI. I can't imagine the amount of AI work necessary to make the AI a fun challenge with this design. With the 1UPT concept the AI is either a laugh or a freak show of bonuses you have to trick into submission. There, I said it

Single player. Civ for me is a turn based game. I have done occasional PBEM and turn based LAN with Civ 4. The LAN was family based and much easier to arrange, multi-task, and resume. I can't see how I could ever handle simultaneous turns in Civ 5.

I play both modes. I've been a total SP player from 1996 to 2006. When civ4 came out in 2005, i played 1 year SP then i tried MP for the first time. I felt in love with this mode. I've been raped in my first games solidly by competent players and i said to myself : That's the true game i searched...finally playing against tough competitors and with no bonuses and stupidities. I stopped playing SP until 2010 when civ5 appeared. I would not have played SP if there was no competitive modes like GOTM and HoF games. These competitions are PASSIVE. I also like to showcase some games in the S&T forums for fun.

You need to like competition. You need to think fast(if not PBEM or LAN) and act fast. Internet mp games are in ACTIVE mode. You play ''live'' against everyone else.

Don't ruin the game with random players. Join a league and play players with equal skills. Join www.civplayers.com you will not be deceived.

You don't like wars? Set games were warfare is banned and where the goal is to win peacefully. Manage many sessions with trusted players.

Diplomacy exists in mp games. Alliances can be made and friendship relations combined with trades and RAs as well. These games are the most fun games ever.

Get out of your cocoon and don't be the old man who doesn't care about trying new things in his life. The MP community is waiting for you!

Tabarnak said:

You don't like wars? Set games were warfare is banned and where the goal is to win peacefully. Manage many sessions with trusted players.

Diplomacy exists in mp games. Alliances can be made and friendship relations combined with trades and RAs as well. These games are the most fun games ever.

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It's less that they don't exist, it's more that there are games better-designed for multiplayer that do it better. Civilization is never going to be a terribly good wargame - and there are plenty of multiplayer wargames out there, so why play Civ that way?

In single-player, diplomacy is a defining feature of a Civ game as opposed to, say, an RTS. But in multiplayer all games allow diplomacy to much the same degree - you can make alliances and trade resources in Starcraft. Indeed, trading resources with teammates is more important in that game than in one where individual resource bonuses are less critical, as in Civ. You need minerals to build Starcraft units, or come to that ore and lumber to build settlements in Settlers of Catan - in Civ you're slightly disadvantaged if you don't have iron or horses, but you can still build plenty of things without either. I think you lose a lot of the character of Civ when diplomacy is reduced to something that can be handled through an IM chat window.

Tabarnak said:

I play both modes. I've been a total SP player from 1996 to 2006. When civ4 came out in 2005, i played 1 year SP then i tried MP for the first time. I felt in love with this mode. I've been raped in my first games solidly by competent players and i said to myself : That's the true game i searched...finally playing against tough competitors and with no bonuses and stupidities. I stopped playing SP until 2010 when civ5 appeared. I would not have played SP if there was no competitive modes like GOTM and HoF games. These competitions are PASSIVE. I also like to showcase some games in the S&T forums for fun.

You need to like competition. You need to think fast(if not PBEM or LAN) and act fast. Internet mp games are in ACTIVE mode. You play ''live'' against everyone else.

Don't ruin the game with random players. Join a league and play players with equal skills. Join www.civplayers.com you will not be deceived.

You don't like wars? Set games were warfare is banned and where the goal is to win peacefully. Manage many sessions with trusted players.

Diplomacy exists in mp games. Alliances can be made and friendship relations combined with trades and RAs as well. These games are the most fun games ever.

Get out of your cocoon and don't be the old man who doesn't care about trying new things in his life. The MP community is waiting for you!

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Are there any Let's Play multiplayer videos around? I'd like to see what goes on.

IanR1205 said:

Are there any Let's Play multiplayer videos around? I'd like to see what goes on.

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Thats an idea. I would love to see something like that to get a feel of how it is. In any case I am going to try after the new patch comes out.

I only play SP, but because in my situation MP is rather impractical: I don't have much time, and can very rarely play two hours in one sitting, and I don't have unlimited bandwidth. But I think that, if MP worked properly (which it seems it doesn't, judging from all the complaining about MP stability), Civ5 is a better MP game than SP, mainly because of warfare. Diplomacy is still kinda simple, but that will probably get "fixed" as they start releasing new features for the game (maybe next summer?).

I play both.
Mostly singleplayer, but 2 or 3 times a year my friends and I have a LAN (often a three-day weekend) where we play Civ. 60 hours of Civ with some sleep in between

But at home I just play singleplayer.

Lately, I've really started to like the scenarios packaged with the DLC. I'm starting to think that the business strategy was to sell a bare bones game engine with sandbox play and then develop interesting scenarios which use the game engine like an operating system.

Last night I finally beat the Viking Invasion of England scenario on Deity level. What a fun game that was.

Bring on more scenarios!

I play both. MP when I have a good block of time, SP when I have a little time here and there.

I like the DLC scenarios but many of them do not last long enough. I wish there was a way you could keep on playing, just one more turn does not work with them.

I play MP. Because the AI si simply not smart enough + I like playing 2vs2 using ts to communitcate since it ads something to the game that SP can t give.

Mesix said:

Lately, I've really started to like the scenarios packaged with the DLC. I'm starting to think that the business strategy was to sell a bare bones game engine with sandbox play and then develop interesting scenarios which use the game engine like an operating system.

Last night I finally beat the Viking Invasion of England scenario on Deity level. What a fun game that was.

Bring on more scenarios!

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I totally agree with you on this, scenarios are great fun, and I've beaten most on Deity (can't seem to do it with the Mongol one though)...

I, too, would like to see more scenarios!

I play(ed) both. Single player is okay. I like playing multiplayer with friends, but Civ5 is still far, far too slow to provide a good experience in our MP games. We recently shelved the game (again) after it became clear that we were spending more time waiting for the game to process turns than we were actually playing those turns.

I've been playing since Civ1 (which didn't have MP as I recall) and Civ2 didn't originally have MP, so I was never exposed to until Civ3 PtW and I wasn't really impressed as I used to like playing for the experience, the story, the building etc, rather than for a challenge, so I've never bothered with MP since.

I might give MP a go in Civ5 once everybody who likes MP reports it's working well, but I'm still quite content to play SP.

I have very limited time available for CiV. SO I am only able to play SP. Have played a few hotseat games, so as to teach my son (he's ten). Now he plays more than me. Wish I had more time.