How to play as a team vs AI?

[Kaiman]

So some friends of mine are wanting to get together and play as a team in some sort of epic nations of history type game and Civ 4 has been suggested. I've played it a couple of dozens times but always as the only human playing pure turn-based vs AI where I can just save and come back later.

If we all play online together with ourselves plus a bunch of AI, how does this work? Are we able to play with simultaneous turns for a while, and then have someone save the game, and come back to it later? Or does sim-turns mean you have to finish it all in one session, and so if we want to play it over multiple sessions we'd have to do asynchronously even if we're all online at once?

 

[Ramkhamhaeng]

Hello Kaiman,

it works as you expect: If you setup a multiplayer game with simultaneous turns you could play a few moves, save the game and load it later again.

One big problem exists: In Civ4 each player is not only connected with the host, but with each player online. So, if some players can not configure their internet connection in a proper way (e.g. NAT port forwarding of port 2056 not set / IPv6 only connection / ??? ), they will blocking each other out.

So, you ask your players about their internet access and try it out first if someone blocks.
See https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/gamespy-substitute-server-project.534629/#post-15754946
for information about the Zulans server which replaces the Gamespy server for multiplayer games without Steam.

 

[Kaiman]

Thanks for the info. Sounds like a non-starter for us unless you think there's a reasonable chance we all connect without having to adjust settings. I've wasted too many gaming hours of my life not gaming because of frustrating stuff like that. It's almost never as simple as the instructions make it sound, especially when you're having to talk multiple people through it and it only takes 1 thing to be slightly off for one person for it to screw everyone over....