Multiplayer: Stable? Click race?

[Curt Carpenter]

Anyone heard anything about whether multiplayer is going to actually be stable? I.e. no desyncs. I'm not even asking for anything special like cross platform, just PC to PC. And will time between turns be much faster like multiplayer in Humankind?

Any news on whether there will (still) be an advantage for the host or player with fastest PC to be able to make first move of military units by clicking the fastest when a new turn starts? I pretty much only care about multiplayer, and those made multiplayer in Civ6 pretty painful.

 

[pokiehl]

I thought Civ 6 multiplayer was really stable. I hope the same for Civ 7.

Humankind turn times aren't really related to multiplayer, but they're faster because in Humankind, every civ goes at once. The AI is completing its actions while you are, so the time between turns is a lot shorter.

 

[Coldringo6]

Glad this topic came up. Civ 6 had been very stable for me when playing on the PC, and even via Steamdeck. The Xbox port has not. Do we know if the Xbox version ( or any version I suppose) will continue to be peer-to-peer hosted? Or will the cross platform functionality mean we'll play games hosted on servers (which would in theory help with sync errors)?

Sorry if this was asked and answered elsewhere.

Thanks!

 

[Nikolai II]

I found this in the Nintendo Life interview recently posted:

What can you tell us about Civilization VII’s multiplayer? It’s a common experience for many, including myself, to optimistically start a multiplayer campaign before running out of steam - will the new Age structure help multiplayer campaigns the way they will for single-player?

There’s several cool things about multiplayer. One is we're supporting cross-play right out of the gate, which is part of getting all the platforms together. The other thing is, breaking the game up into Ages means that it's not, “Oh, let's start up a multiplayer game and we'll be here for the next eight hours before we get to a conclusion.” Now, the game is structured so that it's in more digestible chunks. We play multiplayer all the time with our development team: those are two- or three-hour sessions to get through a game, not six- or eight-hour sessions. That's so much more suited to multiplayer. You can still have a campaign where you'll play through all of history, that’ll take longer than two or three hours. But I expect a lot of the way that's going to go is people get together with their friends and they'll play one game one night, one weekend, then the next night or next weekend they'll move on and do the next stage.

Civilization VII’s Creative Director Talks New Ages, Frenzied Drama & Being On Switch Day One

“Switch has been very, very important”

www.nintendolife.com

 

[Curt Carpenter]

I'm surprised that others haven't had desync problems with PC multiplayer. I wish I were so lucky.

I guess the click race issue of combat (when playing simultaneous turns) remains to be seen...

 

[Takfloyd]

The other thing is, breaking the game up into Ages means that it's not, “Oh, let's start up a multiplayer game and we'll be here for the next eight hours before we get to a conclusion.”

Comments like these are always insane to me, implying 8 hours is a long time for a Civ multiplayer game. I've never had a game last less than 40 or so hours.

Also I just hope there's no forced simultaneous turns even during war. The only really well-designed Civ multiplayer experience is Civ IV on turn-based mode. You move your units on your turn, click end turn, and THEN you choose productions, technologies, civics and so on and manage your cities while waiting for others to take their turns. With 3-4 players, it leads to a perfectly smooth experience where you're never sitting idle but there's also no broken "whoever clicks first wins" wars. It's baffling that they discarded that system in favor of a choice between either click-spam or waiting forever between turns while not being able to do anything.