The Multiplayer Exerperience

[driveby]

"Manual Combat in Progress"

Other things happened, but the aforementioned occurrence occupied so much time, proportionally, that I'm hard pressed to remember anything else happening.

Tactical combat is a very large part of AoW gameplay. Notwithstanding the fact that auto-battles eliminate such a large piece of AoW gameplay - they forfeit the competitive edge that tactical combat poses; something the player deeply desires in any multiplayer scenario.

Any argument about the necessity of locking non-combatants from action from a balance standpoint could and should be addressed through special rules to smooth out the pacing of the multi-player experience.

Please tell me there is a desire to do something about this sore spot crowding the multi-player exprience.

[Kyun]

the solution for this is called play by email.
everyone can do all battles manually, you can still play a multiplayer game and you don't need to be available for 5 hours a match but can play it in smaller bits.

[Bazil]

I usually just let people watch the combat, but I have a group of friends I'm playing with so I suppose it could be different if you didn't.

[Dr_K [Rosencrantz]]

Originally posted by wie Ebenholz:

the solution for this is called play by email.
everyone can do all battles manually, you can still play a multiplayer game and you don't need to be available for 5 hours a match but can play it in smaller bits.

Except PvP battles. PBEM and Real Time multiplayer are mostly complements of one another due to most people's preferences.

PBEM: Manual vs AI, Auto vs Humans
RT: Auto vs AI, Manual vs Humans

Originally posted by drivebymessiah:

Any argument about the necessity of locking non-combatants from action from a balance standpoint could and should be addressed through special rules to smooth out the pacing of the multi-player experience.

Please tell me there is a desire to do something about this sore spot crowding the multi-player exprience.

If you search hard enough here and on the forums there have been numerous posts about this. I've never seen any solution that actually adequately addresses ALL problems with making an inherently turn-based game into a real time game. And any of the solutions that addressed most problems are not worth the time investment.

Is there a desire? Probably. Is it worth the time & effort required to fix it? No. Devs have said that it essentially requires a reworking of some core mechanics.

[Malaficus Shaikan]

I am just going to be a a*shole here are say:
If you want to play a real time stratagy game, go play a realtime stratagy game.
Age of wonders 3 is turnbased and if it where up to me we remove the simitanous turn and be done with the wannbie rts mode.

[Nogaxeh]

Well pit of rectum, "Maleficus", go play some Endless Legend and see how they handled multiplayer there, still the best multiplayer experience in a turn based game that I have witnessed (and NO, I am NOT talking about the combat, which we all know is pretty empty compared to this).

Some things which I believe Endless Legend did right.

Audibles on when other people have finished their turn, and a constant reminder on when everyone else is waiting on you to finish. It's amazing how much of an impact this has on game speed, and it is so very very simple. The little dots in AOW3 are just not enough.

Being able to cancel your end of turn indicator. There is some considerable delay in this game at times, ok, fair enough, but accidentally hitting the end turn notification, or hitting and then realising you still had some things and then having to wait 5 minutes for other players is frustrating.

Finally, combat, there really needs to be something more to do other than staring at the screen while someone else is in combat. Even if you were not allowed to engage in combat yourself, moving your units, queuing production, researching tech, none of it works. That's kinda average.

While this game is great, there are many many things that could be improved upon next time round in AOW4. Coming up with a new way to handle multiplayer should be one of them.

[sikbok]

Hi,


First of all, please let's try and keep this conversation polite. Discussions on this topic have a tendency to go toxic quickly, which is a shame.

Originally posted by Nogaxeh:

go play some Endless Legend and see how they handled multiplayer there, still the best multiplayer experience in a turn based game that I have witnessed.

Yes, they did do this nicely. But ...

AFAIK their battles occur on the world map, not on a separate tactical map. This is what allows combat and empire management to be done at the same time by several players. That's a choice the team working on Endless Legend made - probably at the start of development - to make multiplayer seamless for all players.

However, I think this is also what limits them in what they can to in their tactical battles. I've only played some Endless Legend for fun - as opposed to testing thing explicitly to determine why they've set up things like they did - so I could be wrong about this. But, I suspect they have set up their battles in a way to make things work given they choices they've made.

When we started on AoW3 things like this were discussed. However, we see tactical combat as one of the pillars of the franchise and thus chose the option where we were sure we'd not be limited in what we could do in tactical combat. I still think that was a good choice.

tl;dr, you can either have a game like Endless Legend with a nice seemless multiplayer experience or a game like AoW3 with a larger focus on combat, not both.

[Malaficus Shaikan]

Originally posted by sikbok:

/snip

Accauly you gave me an idea.
If they dont want to wait for manual combat there is an option that forces auto-resolve.
Yes you would lose out on one of the pillars of age of wonders but it is either that or wait.