Some noob questions about multiplayer...

[LightningHobo]

Does this game allow team matches, such as 2v2 or 3v3? Or can there only be one victor?

Does it have a good population?

Is it relatively bug free?


Thanks for any information. I'm considering buying the game, but it all hinges on whether or not I can play with friends against others.

 

[Bat-LB]

1. you can set up teams, like in every other strategy game around. this teams cannot be broken, so you will always be bound to that team. if you wn, your team wins. diplomacy ingame cant lead to 2 winners.

2. good population? actually, no. but usually you dont want to play with random people anway and if u want, there always some people to join your game.

3. bugs... not much game-breaking bugs in this game. its more like some balancing issues and the idiotic real time moving while the player's turn. (you and your friends move in real time, so War against an human player is like clicking the hell out of your keyboard.

 

[LightningHobo]

Ah man that's a bummer

I've been looking for an RTS to play competitively for a while, looks like I may have to go to Age of Empires 3. Thanks for the information, I definitely appreciate it.

 

[swordspider]

Lightning-

Bat answered correctly but some of the worst bugs are in the launch and the lobby. If you can actually get a game 'started' then they tend to run pretty smooth.

One thing that messes with people is when they can't 'move' any units or click anything. Ironically, the fix is stupid easy. 9 times out of 10, they clicked their city-attack and tried to attack a unit. If you don't attack a unit, you can't click on anything until you do (or right click). Since right-clicking in this game is almost never used, they think they are locked up. The way you tell this is that their cursor will be red. It usually only lasts one turn, but they can't even click to end their turn. Anyway, you may come across that.

On the population... well play a few games and make some friends and just stick with them. "Open Games" typically crash and PEOPLE ALWAYS QUIT which is really a pain in the neck. If you are playing with people you know, they won't quit so easily.

Have fun.

 

[E66man]

If you are looking to buy a product based solely on your desire for multi-player, I would tell you to run, not walk, away from Civ V.

As has already been pointed out, the active community size is quite low. You can easily get a sense of that by just looking at how many new threads get started in this forum that are about problems vs. people discussing strategy and how much fun they have. If your main opponents are going to be people on the Internet, you will run into the lobby problems that Spider brought up. There is also what is (for me) intolerable lag in every single game I've played. In a turn-based game, I expect the online lag to be near zero, however, Civ V has worse lag than any RTS I've ever played online going back to 2000. If the turn timer is enabled, there are times I can not even finish my moves for the turn due to the lag. For this reason more than any other I've stopped trying to play this game multi-player until some patches come out that attempt to deal with these issues. As I assume this is a low priority for them, I may never come back since I'll be playing a more enjoyable game by the time they get around to it. Note that Firaxis just recently started advertising to hire multi-player programmers, so that also does not leave me confident anything will change in the near future.

If you are only going to play with friends over a LAN, you may not run into these issues, however, some people have reported lag issues still persist even in a LAN environment. Without knowing all the details of their network setup it would be hard to say how prevalent this problem is. Even with no lag, user-created content is not yet available to be used in multi-player, so if you and your friends like to share maps or mods, you can't do that, either. Combat animations are also always off; some people really don't like that since if you didn't happen to have the battle right in front of you on your screen, it can be unclear how and where you were attacked. Despite all this, there is a hardcore group that still keeps giving it a go, so you can probably find some games with them (maybe Canuck Soldier can reprint his Steam channel link in here).