It's impossible to play w/ several players online, but what about LAN?

[Dhaeman]

Yeah there are plenty of disconnects with over 2 people in a game, but if I were to setup a LAN and everyone owned the game should we expect any issues? Are we basically able to play in offline mode?

As much of an afterthought as MP seems to have been I'm concerned a LAN experience will suck until a patch is released. Thanks to anyone to answers and has had some experience!

 

[wapamingo]

2 people on LAN no problem;

I had a good game of 4 people lobby game and it was fine (2+ hrs, had to go to bed)

 

[DEKeyz2Chaos]

I've had some issues saving/loading, especially in offline mode. I haven't been able to load anything but auto-saves in multiplayer mode.

On the LAN, sometimes we've had Civ 5 crash - some were due to my machine running out of memory and crashing, and some were due to one of our friend's keyboards turning off and causing Civ 5 to crash. Very little network instability once people are in the game.

When reloading from the autosave we've had some issues getting everyone to reconnect - especially with the people whose game crashed. It was most reliably solved by everyone restarting Civ 5, though it is quite annoying.

 

[CTH]

You can save by ctrl+S but you have to rename and move the save file to the autosave map

 

[Elt]

I can also confirm that a LAN game with only a few players works just fine. There are some occasional desync issues- if you're the host, keep an eye on the playerlist on the right- if one of your friends' names changes from the username to the country's actual leader (Catherine, Bismark, etc) then you've desync'd. Have that person leave and rejoin.

Possible desync fix, only partially tested- Make sure the one hosting the game doesn't hit 'next turn' until everyone else has done so. Also, make sure nobody is trying to do anything 'between' turns. Once they hit the next turn button to wait for you, don't touch anything until it's their turn again!

Maybe that'll work, maybe it won't. It seemed to help in my LAN game yesterday, but maybe I'm just superstitious.

 

[Nadrak]

we tried with my friend LAN game and it worked just fine without any crash..until around 1900AD...after that, every second or so turn - desync..rejoin..another 2-3turns..desync...it was really painful and after couple of reloadings we gave up...

 

[CanuckSoldier]

Sounds like some people have low end computers here. LAN should be free of any data traffic lag, as Steam is not even listing the game on their servers lists. So the only data is between players.

CS

 

[Maxor127]

I was playing a 2-player LAN game. It kind of worked fine for about a 100 or so turns, but now it won't stop disconnecting. The worst thing about disconnects is that when you're focused on the game, you might not notice someone was disconnected because all it does is add a little alert on the side with all of the other alerts, and then you and the person you're playing with could start playing their own separate games with AI and not realize anyone was disconnected. Yeah, it's great not having popups all the time, but something like that SHOULD have a popup.

 

[TreborLocke]

Sounds like some people have low end computers here. LAN should be free of any data traffic lag, as Steam is not even listing the game on their servers lists. So the only data is between players.

CS

There are a few issues actually. I played with 6 people FFA with city-states turned on in a LAN game. The game is actually confused when it does its autosave every turn. Quite often, when we returned to the game after grabbing a bite or something...the save would load up from our host...and NOTHING is where it should be.

It looks like the game is trying to save 'every move' with the amount of data. In reality, I think the game is trying to verify information with all of the other computers and if just one of them is a dual core...it slows everything down (as the quad core is used for multiple AI's working in tandem as a single unit) as it has to use the processing of ALL of the computers to come up with its moves.

It has to take into account multiple players as opposed to AI's. It is taking longer and you can see poor code written all over the AI design when it comes to multiplayer. Even with no AI influencing the game (no barbs, AI civs, City States) the program seems to be going through the motions as if it still had them. It's just not as much calculating.

 

[TreborLocke]

I would like to add that the computers used in that 5 player lan had these processors. (5 Quad Core Computers, 1 Six Core Computer...all computers running with top of the line graphics cards with updated drivers with at least 1GB DDR5 for the weakest computer in the group being a laptop.)

There is a design flaw and it does need to be taken care of if multiplayer isn't going to have these issues.

 

[skrewler]

It looks like the game is trying to save 'every move' with the amount of data. In reality, I think the game is trying to verify information with all of the other computers and if just one of them is a dual core...it slows everything down (as the quad core is used for multiple AI's working in tandem as a single unit) as it has to use the processing of ALL of the computers to come up with its moves.

It has to take into account multiple players as opposed to AI's. It is taking longer and you can see poor code written all over the AI design when it comes to multiplayer. Even with no AI influencing the game (no barbs, AI civs, City States) the program seems to be going through the motions as if it still had them. It's just not as much calculating.

Seriously? You're just making stuff up. Feel free to explain what issues you're seeing, but proposing to know the cause of it just makes you sound stupid.

 

[Thoughtful Thug]

4 players with no AIs is the best way to go. Seems to me I have no issue playing with others when I have this many. Also when you find a setup room where the host has setup a game with a map size bigger than small, and no turn-timer as well as the game pace being not quick: then you should leave.

You should also ask how many city-states there are since there isn't any info about it in the setup room.

 

[swordspider]

The best, most reliable way of playing multiplayer is to start a game and have your friends join through steam. Never had a crash that way. When playing on the 'multiplayer internet', well the crashing is intense and it never works where everyone gets in.