MULTIPLAYER: Who would buy this if it had multiplayer?

[DacapoMage]

I certainly think that by now, all games that hope to sell loads of copies and grow a massive fan base SHOULD HAVE MULTIPLAYER. If I can't socialize with my friends while playing a game, why bother? Single player mode should only be for tutorials or practicing tactics. AI is no substitute for real people. This game has a lot of potential, from what I can see, but I'll never know unless a multiplayer feature is added, because I'm not going to even consider buying it without multiplayer. So, to sum up, NO MULTIPLAYER = NO BUY.

[Etherlight]

A game like this is very long to play mp, a typical game for me last 3 to 10 hours and I'll be hard pressed to find anyone willing to commit that much time to play together. Plus there are reasons some players prefer to play alone.

[Genesi]

The original War of Magic had multiplayer. It did not work. The game had too many issues. They took it out for the other games (Fallen Enchantress and the new Legendary Heroes) Brad did state at one point that he would love to add Multiplayer back into the game at some point since they did spend all that money on the backend system.

[tekhedd]

I don't play multiplayer games, and I love games like this. Other than that, I agree with you that no games should have single player modes and that games you play in single player mode are completely worthless. #sarcasm

[Geist]

It would be nice. If you are willing to spend 3-10 hours playing then someone else could too! Hell it's all me and Batcat do all day. Join us in group chat already!

[Shidapu / Aedra]

This needs multiplayer, im tempted into buying at the 66% sale, but it's a no go without Multiplayer.

Otherwise, it sure is a masterpiece, except for the lack of the obvious..

[Machin Ator]

Of course it should have multiplayer.

Stardock's weakness has always been a lack of multiplayer modes. In GalCiv2, there were endless excuses and long-winded reasonings on why multiplayer was never implemented. 'Focus on the AI', bla bla and other such platitudes.

The reality is, even semi-broken games such as FE would have a much larger fanbase if multiplayer for these kinds of 4X titles was included.

There are no longer any legitimate excuses for future Stardock releases. If they want my money, they'll stop posting frogboy's '10 reasons why we don't have multiplayer' and start making it happen.

[Darkeus]

I could care less if this game has multiplayer. Oh, that is why I bought it a long time ago. :-)

[Shamgar]

Not me. I don't like Civ multiplayer or any of these kinds of games. I haven't bought this yet but the multiplayer button would never be pushed even if I did. I'm looking on forums for thoughts on the current state of the game.

[Eccy]

Yup, no MP -> no buy from me (even with 66% off, which is tempting indeed). Sorry stardock, if I remember right you messed up GC II (again, wonderfull turnbased strategy game without MP) too. :o( I would love that Stardock would hire somebody who actually know how to implement MP into their games since obviously they have nobody able to do that...

[Gethan]

"all games that hope to sell loads of copies and grow a massive fan base SHOULD HAVE MULTIPLAYER." I quite disagree. L.A. Noire, FTL, Half Life 2, Bioshock. All great games I played, all focused at single player. So I really disagree with that statment.

[AngoraFish]

Multiplayer in most games is a complete waste of developer time. Other than for FPS games, only a tiny percentage of gamers play multiplayer at all. In my experience, those who do play multiplayer then go on to spend hours upon hours b*tching about sync errors, empty matchmaking servers, griefing and gumbies who drop out the minute they lose their first battle. Hopefully Stardock will continue to focus on adding single player content rather than wasting time catering to a miniscule niche multiplayer market.

[Red Gaming Cat]

I'm of the opinion that strategy games that take half a day to play from start to finish shouldn't be multiplayer, unless of course there's a group save option. But even then very few people are willing to keep on coming back to play unless they personally know each other in real life (college buddies, coworkers, etc). There's a very small fanbase that are willing to play MP for exceedingly lengthy strategy games. Most gamers nowadays just don't have that kind of attention span. MP (and the costs of supporting it) is only economically viable for shorter games that don't take 10+ hours to finish, such as FPS' or MOBAs.

[AngoraFish]

And, at the end of the day, I play computer games to take a break from my friends. If I wanted to hang out with my friends I'd, you know, be hanging out with them not using them as a back-end to prop up cr*ppy AI.

[m00ska]

Some of you act like if they included multiplayer, singleplayer would cease to exist. I work a few weeks out of every couple on months, so in my case, when I'm off, I have plenty of time to play all day and night with a couple friends once in awhile. I would have grabbed this at $40 had it included multiplayer. I may grab it at sale price to see if it stands up to other Stardock titles.

[AngoraFish]

Some of you act as if including multiplayer is a trivial add-on and not a time-consuming, costly and thankless exercise.

Civ 5 has been out for two and a half years, has an enormous budget and a first-tier publisher, yet I hear that multiplayer still isn't working properly.