How Sid Meier failed to deliver on multiplayer (and our solution)

[Kerey]

I'm not sure Sid Meier will ever read this, but just in case, I want to say that we are huge fans of Civ and Alpha Centauri. We respect Sid as a game designer. We really do. However, the series has consistently failed to deliver a compelling multiplayer experience.

There are a multitude of fundamental design problems that work great for single player, but fall completely on their face in multiplayer. Take Civ IV. The main problem that manifests itself from the design decisions is that the early game is boring. Really boring. OK, so you've got a couple units to move around, that's pretty cool. Oh wait, you just built a city so there goes one unit, and now it's going to take a bunch of turns to create another. No worries, I can still scout around, I guess that's almost fun when there's nobody around me. And I can just plow through these earlier turns really quickly like I would in single player, right? Oh wait, negative on that.

I guess I'm not the only one this occurred to, because Civ 5 switched completely to simultaneous turns, which had been tried in IV too. Great idea, wrong execution. The design yields precisely the attributes of an RTS that I find undesirable in a 4X game. I am now forced to move my pieces as quickly as possible to gain the upper hand vs. having the time to ponder that I desire. Honestly it feels like a lazy design decision to me, though this is an outsider's perspective, and maybe it is the least not-fun approach out of a hundred that they tried.

OK, that's a bit harsh, but it's been the honest experience of my friends and I. By the time you get to the good bits in the first model you're already bored, and I've clearly pointed out shortcomings with the second approach. Now, it's not my personality to be content with "this sucks." I decided to put my money (and boatloads of time) where my mouth is and do something about it. I've got all the pieces I need to fix the problem: I code and made free games as a hobby in high school that people other than my mom seemed to like, I've got a buddy who does art, and another smart guy with solid game design ideas and the ability to quickly pick up coding. And so one year ago Riveting Games was born.

We're an indie studio, so naturally we can't be everything to everybody, but I think we're onto something that will make some players happy. Early experiments have shown that our approach works. What is it? You take the orders and figure out what happens simultaneously later. This simple approach still allows the player to think about their turn, and they don't need to wait for N other players to play out their turns in order.

I would love to hear what fellow Civ fans think about this and answer any questions.
-Kerey

 

[GoodGame]

hmmmm I think Sid Meier isn't a principle game designer any more. It is all individual project teams working on products bearing the Sid Meier name.

I'd say you are wrong about early-game Civ4 being boring. There is quite a lot of strategy in early game, and in the few multiplayer games I played it is possible to pull off a successful low level unit rush using the fog of war in multiplayer. If anything, Civ4 has many different strategies based on civ, the civ's special units, and general unit types (archer rush, horseman rush, slavery/chopping rush strategies) etc...There's a lot of nuance in early game Civ4 besides the question of 'what's the optimal beginning unit build order".

That said, I do agree with your main idea. There are definitely tons of games in which a great single player idea makes a horrible transistion to multiplayer, and vice versa. The best designs are play tested before they get too far.

Really that's a major game design standard---play-testing at least in controlled 'alpha' groups to test the game concept before it progresses too long in development, to be sure its not on bad footing.

 

[coanda]

Yeah, Civ MP doesn't really work unless you get a group willing to impose some house rules on movement. The Diplomacy model, like you discuss, is the right solution. It also actually adds quite a bit of depth to your thinking, because you don't know what exactly the situation will be when your move is executed - so you have to make your moves allowing for all the possible moves your opponent might have made.

 

[Kerey]

Yeah, I realize he's got a larger role, and lead designer for individual titles is delegated to others since Bryan Reynolds of Civ II fame, but he still yields influence and provides a consulting role to the lead designers of Firaxis games. You can learn a bit how Firaxis works here in this really good article about the XCOM remake here.

I'm curious why you say "few multiplayer games I've played" and then go on to defend it. Not trying to be antagonistic, but it's telling. I don't discount the fact that there is still good strategy to be discovered and enjoyed. I am mostly focusing on the part where I lose interest before I really even get into the game due to pacing that is not problematic in the single player gameplay. We can do better.

 

[Kerey]

@coanda Awesome, I'm glad you picked up on the Diplomacy influence to our decision (though it was actually subliminal at the time and I had a pseudo-rediscovery of the mechanic as I had forgotten about it )

We've paid homage to Diplomacy in a design writeup I did here.

 

[Maniacal]

Who cares about MP? I'd rather they focus less on maknig the game gamey and "meta" for MP "balance" and more on a polished experience of actually leading a civilization, which the civ games haven't been doing for well for a long time.

 

[Kerey]

@Maniacal - I don't think we're entirely in disagreement, though I would argue that multiplayer 4x can be fun if done right. What is not worthwhile, and I think we're on the same page here, is that if you can't do multiplayer right, don't do it at all. That's expensive dev time that can go into making making single player that much better.

So while you might not value our mission, I am a believer that others will. Indies can never make the game that everyone will want to play, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't make the game that some people want to play.

 

[Quintillus]

The Diplomacy model would solve the RTS problem (Diplomacy is pretty popular here, I was thinking of that while reading the first post, too). But IMO, it's only part of the multiplayer problem with Civ. More important to me is the fact that Civ is such a long game. And it's less fun when you play it on Quick or Blazing online, because that just isn't how it's meant to be played. Even then, it's rare for me to play a whole game - and picking up someone else's game is less fun than building it all myself. (To be fair, it's quite rare that I play Civ multiplayer these days - but that's a large part of why)

It can work more like a regular game when playing with a few friends where you meet regularly or semi-regularly online to play it, and can play on a normal speed. But by and large, I think the fact that Civ is a game normally played over several days at least is the #1 hazard to multiplayer. For me, I don't think Diplomacy-style turn resolution would be enough to overcome the pace of the game and turn me into a regular multiplayer Civ player.

Though I must say the idea of a PBEM-like game, but with, say, a day or two per turn for all players, is an intriguing idea, and would facilitate much large PBEM-style games. Though it does raise the question of what is done if one or more players drop out.

 

[Kerey]

Yep, we're experimenting with both PBEM pace and faster pace single-sessions. Our goal is a game that while it will never capture the full complexity of Civ and resulting game length, is still a compelling 4x game.

Ideally we could even do a hybrid of the two paces to allow for a grander experience over a week or a month, but I've got no revelations on how that might work yet. We've got to choose our battles too.

Drop outs are a huge problem in either scenario, but we were thinking team-based turn delegation might be an option. Not far enough in the dev cycle to see how that pans out though.

 

[Rub'Rum]

I kind of agree with Maniacal... An immersive single player experience is what a vast majority of civ players are looking for and Firaxis knows it. Thus, the amount of resources attributed to doing a decent multiplayer experience is proportional to the interest of the community. And that's pretty okay I think.

I enjoy some Civ in coop sometimes. Or roleplaying a bit. But people looking for competitive gameplay should probably look elsewhere, the industry is ripe with options. Maybe not in the 4X genre, but it's really weird for me that someone would look towards this genre for a competitive experience in the first place when the genre is about immersion mostly.

 

[Kerey]

I love the discussion we are getting here! This is part of why I got back into game development - so many awesome fans!

@Rub'Rum Sure, I'll buy that argument for the most part. I've got one minor adjustment I would make. I could buy that the vast majority of Civ players are looking for an immersive singleplayer experience from Civ. See the distinction? I've talked to a bunch of strategy game players in person, and either they are far more polite than I am and don't want to hurt my feelings when they see this project is something I'm passionate about, or there is actual demand for multiplayer 4x.

We are actually hoping for a mix of cooperative and competitive interactions between players. You are probably spot on that we will never achieve quite the grandness that a Civ game has, but we can come close enough that other elements of our gameplay make up for it. I especially have some hope for grand scale immersion in a PBEM-ish format.

Getting back to Civ (since this is a Civ forum, right?) - it seems that the initial simultaneous turn play in 5 should never have made it out of beta. They should have launched singleplayer only in my opinion until they could get it right. I've heard good things about the hybrid approach they recently added and I have not gotten a chance to play, but it still strikes me as having some shortcomings, such as if you are at war, you would still suffer from turn length escalation comparing early turns when you have few units and late turns when you have many. This is a solvable problem, but perhaps not within the rigid constraints of how players expect Civ to work. Sometimes you are limited by your own success.

 

[GoodGame]

Yeah, I realize he's got a larger role, and lead designer for individual titles is delegated to others since Bryan Reynolds of Civ II fame, but he still yields influence and provides a consulting role to the lead designers of Firaxis games. You can learn a bit how Firaxis works here in this really good article about the XCOM remake here.

I'm curious why you say "few multiplayer games I've played" and then go on to defend it. Not trying to be antagonistic, but it's telling. I don't discount the fact that there is still good strategy to be discovered and enjoyed. I am mostly focusing on the part where I lose interest before I really even get into the game due to pacing that is not problematic in the single player gameplay. We can do better.

Basically CIV4 multiplayer used Gamespy match-making, which everyone knows is/was a PoS. I don't own this for Steam, so no clue if this uses Valve servers to host.
I also think latency kept me from playing it much, but they did do patches with the PitBoss server thing.

And I found people tend to DC during a game which is a major reason to dislike multiplayer in a game that usually is long and one gets emotionally attached with. That is really not a fault of the game design, but the player base.It kind of steals the fun if you have a victory goal in mine, and people just DC to quit.

 

[Kerey]

@GoodGame Ah, yes, Gamespy was a bit of an unfortunate decision they probably made to save time.

DCs are frustrating too. What do you think would be a good solution there? I think it will be difficult to eliminate them from a tech/player behavior standpoint, but what can game designers do to mitigate the tendency of DCs to ruin the fun of games? We're way too early in development to have any tested insights there, but I'm curious if you have any ideas that we can prototype later.

 

[coanda]

I don't think there is a good solution for DC'ing players. There's bad, and not-quite-as-bad. The reason you are playing a 4x grand strategy game with humans instead of against the AI is because humans are more interesting, allow more diplomacy, and are more intelligent. There's no easy way to recover if a big chunk of the assets on your map suddenly stop being controlled by their former human.

Just spitballing out a number of things you could try to do to limit the blowback...

-Delete stuff they owned, so remaining players can't take advantage of it.
-Split stuff they owned up amongst the remaining players.
-Put everything they owned under control of an AI player.
-Permit a new human to step in and fill the vacancy. Either via save and make new session with additional player, or done on-the-fly if you feel like showing off your networking.
-Temporarily 'freeze' the abandoned player's assets, so nobody else can attack them and they do nothing (or, alternatively, continue to develop slowly under control of an AI in a protected state).
-In team games, permit teammates to control the player who left as well.

And, of course, you could mix-and-match elements of different solutions (e.g. temporarily freeze, then put under control of an AI, while allowing new humans to take over).

 

[Kerey]

@coanda Awesome, those are all fantastic ideas to try out. I hope you don't mind if we steal them. Maybe we'll shoot you a beta copy or something as thanks when we're ready. No promises though, haha. We're still struggling with our funding situation presently.

I had given the most thought to the last idea myself, since we want a good mix of competitive and cooperative elements. Some sort of team delegation mechanism would do wonders I think.

 

[LDiCesare]

I think Civ4 early game is one of the funniest parts of the game, while late game tends to be boring because you wait for the ai to move or move all your tons of units around to mop up, so YMMV. I don't think Civ lends itself well to MP. The game is designed to provide long fun games for single player, and you can't have a long fun game for MP unless you go tot PBEM format, where civ woudl shine for being even slower/longer.
I love simultaneous turns, but agree that Civ 4 does it badly. I prefer a 'we go' system like Diplomacy as stated above, or Dominions or what we implemented in Clash of civilizations years ago.
Kerey, it's not clear what kind of simultaneous turns system you mean.

As for disconnected/disappearing players, game admins should have the option of turning them over to some new player or turning them ai. The latter is an issue because diplomacy tends to go out the window, but it allows to keep playing.

 

[Panzeh]

I definitely think there's room for a competitive, MP-focused 4x civ-esque game, but I kinda think that it would have to really pare down the match length to say two hours. Still think it's doable, but it would take a lot of very good design.

Honestly, most 4x games are designed with balance in the backseat, anyway, and multiplayer is just tacked on.

 

[TheLastOne36]

I enjoy some Civ in coop sometimes. Or roleplaying a bit. But people looking for competitive gameplay should probably look elsewhere, the industry is ripe with options. Maybe not in the 4X genre, but it's really weird for me that someone would look towards this genre for a competitive experience in the first place when the genre is about immersion mostly.

I disagree with this as a Teamer player on CIV4.

The teamwork, strategy, cooperation, planning are essential in Teamer games and at the end I believe delivers the 4X genre experience brilliantly in a competitive environment.

Though I understand that Teamer games aren't the main 'gamemode' played on the multiplayer and that maybe the 'normal' way of playing doesn't deliver the same essential elements of the 4X genre as singleplayer or Teamer games do. I wonder if that has something to do with the AI with AI Bonuses and whatnot being more competitive opponents to the player than most multiplayer opponents? I gladly admit that I in single-player do a complete 180 of my teamer game tendencies and focus on empire building and don't worry about 'winning' till late game. Maybe because asserting my dominance economically(be it production or research) and through expansion is a more competitive experience against higher difficulty AI than simply creating a stack and smashing them? While the opposite is true in multiplayer? Or maybe I am just rambling.

 

[Rub'Rum]

It's like the extremely niche way of playing an already rather niche game genre.

 

[Samthropus]

The teamwork, strategy, cooperation, planning are essential in Teamer games and at the end I believe delivers the 4X genre experience brilliantly in a competitive environment.

Hear, hear!

Your thoughts on the role of AI strategy shaping the common conception of 4X gameplay are really insightful, too! That's why I think there's still awesome huge opportunity left to expand the genre into a whole new direction, with whole new dynamics and experience, more complexity and variety, even more immersion than single player, especially if it ever expands into persistent world kind of settings (we're not doing that with our game, baby steps.)