Dawn of Civ - Multiplayer?

[Julius Americus]

Hey Board,

I asked Leoreth how I could do hotseat with my buddy on the latest SVN version and he recommended I use this workaround:

"Quote:
Originally Posted by Leoreth View Post
Alright, sorry, some people are already familiar with cheat mode so I didn't know how much detail was required.

In your Beyond the Sword folder, open _Civ4Config and search for "CheatCode", then change it to "CheatCode = chipotle".

This enables a couple of cheats in the game. I actually messed up before, pressing Ctrl+Z reveals the entire map. But if you press Alt+Z, you'll take control of the civ directly after you in the turn order. This way, you can cycle through all civs in the game.

It's not the most comfortable way to change players for hotseat but it works."

My buddy and I gave this a shot, and we ran into a problem:

He played Moors and I played France. We switched "control" to France, and did the alt-z cycle to each control france and Moor's turn. The problem was that any units the player not hitting "enter" for that turn did not move themselves would end up being moved by the computer. The computer also would change civics for the technically uncontrolled civ.

Does anyone have any ideas on how this could be fixed? I'm not much on coding, and couldn't think of any logical ways of playing that would solve the problem.

Thanks in advance!

 

[trevor]

It's a problem with crossing the "International Turn Line"™. When pressing Alt+Z or Shift+Alt+Z (to go backwards) a player can inadvertently end the turn by cycling to a player that's already pressed the red button (who knew the AI had an enter key?).

Is there a way to flip control without short changing the turns of the very important civs between the Moors (player 21?) & France (player 24)?

 

[Leoreth]

That's one problem, but not the only problem.

The difference between this cheat and hotseat is that in a two-player hotseat, two civs are clearly labeled as human, and the AI won't make decisions for them when the other is currently controlled. With the cheat you only change who is human and who is AI, the problem is that this leaves the other "human" civ at the whims of the AI when the other is being controlled. At least to the extent that the AI can still influence decisions there.

Unfortunately I couldn't come up with a quick solution that is less work than just enabling proper hotseat. I mean, I haven't looked into what steps would be required for that, but it is assumed in many places that the currently active player is the only human player in the game. Some game mechanics could be scrapped for hotseat like RFC MP does (like congresses, where this would just be a headache to write right), but it also affects spawns and flips and stability, and that's kind of the core of RFC.

 

[Julius Americus]

Yeah, I remember the Rhyes MP was really stripped down and kind of lame but I don't have a good grasp of the underlying mechanics behind why that's the case.

At any rate I would really appreciate it if anyone who has any good ideas for making hot seat workable would share them. This mod would be too cool multiplayer!

 

[arythm1a]

I can only speak for me, but any sort of hotseat would be greatly appreciated. So just enabling hotseat, whilst keeping congress optional would be awesome. It might not be perfectly balanced, but beggars cant be choosers, right?