Civ-like MMO

J

johntmax

Chieftain
Joined
Nov 16, 2004
Messages
15
Hello everybody. One day I was playing my Civ 4 game and I was thinking about how cool it'd be to make it an MMO (Massive Multiplayer Online). So, I decided to put my idea into action. I have begun writing down notes and organizing them into ideas of how one such game would work. While I was thinking I thought to post my ideas on here and ask the Civ fans what they think about it. I plan to continue posting in this forum for as long as I am working on this project. When I complete it, I plan to send it to Firaxis, and hopefully they will accept it. If they do not then I think that I might send it to other game companies and try to get them to help make my Civ-like MMO. So, since this being my first post and all let me just give you a quick overview of my idea and would you all please post your comments in here.

I plan to have a great MMO, one that requires players to work together and see the experience of taking a nomadic, neanderthal-like people, and eventually bring them to a superpower nation of the galaxy. Just imagine, 100s, 1,000s, even millions of players banded together, each playing as one serparte character, working together to form and construct their own civilization. Roles and Jobs might be assigned to them to help bring their nation to glory. I plan to let the people govern themselves, decide whether they want to elect one player as supreme ruler of their people, or they may contruct a democracy, one where everybody has a vote in what they want to do with their nation. Over time, the nations would discover new technologies, and with that be able to manipulate their world even more and win over the people of rival civilizations. Armies of players from all over the world could be formed to fight for what they believe in. Wonders could be built in their towns and cities they the nations have erected over time to show that they are superior. Let the people chose whether they want to have a system of currency, or to be a people of traders. And perhaps one day, when they have reached a point in their technological path, they could built space ships, colonize new planets (ones that might even have other nations made of players), spread their nation to not be limited to just one planet. In my vision, almost everything is possible.
 
That sounds pretty cool. I know nothing about programming. But I would participate in a game like that.
 
How would you simulate the population growth of an empire if players are going to be playing as individual persons? The civilization's population size would depend on how many people actually play the game rather than what they've accomplished in the game.


Why would anyone want to be a farmer when they could be a soldier or politician? In any real life simulated economy, you would have to have more people with boring mundane jobs than exciting ones. But in a video game, no one is realistically going to want to be stuck in a boring job.
 
Maybe each player would be a chieftan, or leader of his/her family. The rest of the tribe or family would consist of ai characters.

That way you could delegate the boring jobs to ai characters.

Much like other RPG games that take place in fantasy worlds, where the non-ai players are much stronger than the ai ones.
 
Yes, I have thought about the more boring jobs and how people would not like doing them. I solved this with making NPC characters to do the more menial jobs. I have not yet figured out who exactly would pick how many npcs for which jobs. I suspect the ruler of the people would, but in a true democracy, that's the challenge, maybe a voting building could be used to say the amount of NPCs need to do these jobs.

Poplulation growth would be based on amount of vacant houses have been built, and possibly the amount of food the city has.

As for what happens when you get to the end, I'm sure that there will be points in the game where one civilization rules the whole area, planet, or possibly galaxy, but I know that people are corrupt, and other's will not agree to some things that the leaders may do, and will cause chaos and rebellions. These would disemble the establishments of the previous empire and thereby, start a new.
 
I once had an idea kind of like this, and I think your idea is very good. One issue I could not figure out though is how to represent death and time. I was thinking for time that the people would not be given hours or minutes, or anything like that, but the community instead would have to come up with their own way to measure time. I think that to make inventions, people could use a very complicated drawing program thing in-game and if the correct resources were around, they could start building these things. Yea, your idea rules, and I'd love to add ideas of my own if I can think of them.
 
Great minds....

After 2012 (the Mayan prophesy for the end of the World), I thought of making a game not unsimilar to Civ where you have to choose a place of relative safety, build a base there, people it, equip it and then await the disaster.

After that the game is similar to yours - except this was supposed to be single player. Starting techs depend upon which specialists are saved and which books are taken. Choosing stuff that's too avanced would hamper you as you don't need to know about rocketry is you have no source of energy etc. The point was it's the player's choice. It was actually meant to be an educational game to an extent.

Too bad that we're unlikely to get to 2012 at this rate......
 
The problem with a game like what has been described here is that it requires the players to engage in a high level of cooperation--and when it comes to online games, it's pretty much become evident that expecting almost any level of cooperation between the average players is hoping for too much. Even clans in simple games like Soldat (where you're typically dealing with games of capture the flag) are often short-lived because people don't care about working with others to achieve some vague, long-term goal--they wanna blow everything up and say "haha pwned noob!1!one!!"
They don't want to do things the way they already have to in real life; they want to be in full control when they play a game, online or not.

It takes a group composed of a rare breed of gamer to successfully pull off anything that requires teamwork; and last I checked, they weren't a demographic large enough to make any kind of product for.



Instead, I imagine a Civ-based MMO would be something more like a big galaxy where each player would be able to design their own race (much like how you might design your character in any MMORPG), and then start out with a homeworld from which they would send out ships to colonize nearby star systems, eventually building up an interstellar empire... And of course, they'd run into other players' "space civs" along the way.
Designing and coding such a game would drive anyone insane before long.
 
i think it would work out with tonnes of players building thier own, countries up, in teh same world.thsi would make things more realistic becaus ethere would be no "aiming for victory" play
 
As an avid MMORPG player and a strategy gamer from the beginning of time, I've spent more mental energy on this subject than I'd care to admit.

Fundamentally, though, the problem is one of losing and winning. Players bail out of online games of Civ IV as soon as they know that their chances of winning have slipped; now take the duration of a virual world and imagine the consquences of losing. Months of time and efforts, gone. As soon as things started going south, you'd find players leaving in droves.

One particularly player versus player-oriented game, Shadowbane, tried something in a similar vein in terms of player-oriented politics; all of the cities and nations around the world were all player-built and player-controlled, with factions forming, particular areas and their resources controlled, etc. Wars could break out; cities could be seiged and burned to the ground. After spending 3 or 4 months doing nothing but working on developing these cities, a pretty common phenomenon was the players who lost their cities quitting.

So, the problem the MMO/Civ hybridizing developer will have to overcome, that no ready solutions seem available for is: how do balance a game so that winning and losing are important enough to be compelling reasons to play the game, but not so important that you would want to quit when your team lost?
 
almost sounds like that game coming out by will wright (sims creator) called spore.. You start out as a one-celled organism and slowly evolve into a space civilization. Depending on what you do.. sounds fun.
 
I'm quite sure a game like Ferion (my sig) is quite close to the principle. Principle, I say, not the gameplay. You start on a planet, and then go conquering other ones. But the thing I really thing would be good for the MOOCiv are the arenas. Every now and then you could start a game, gather 10, 100 or 1000 players and play. Of course, there must be a scoring system that will encourage playing as long into the game as possible, something like the ones who survives the longest gets more points.
 
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