Multiplayer review/balance issues

[The Cynoid]

So I got this game for the multiplayer 2 days ago and got 21 hours in 2 days. We actually ended up staying up until 8 am playing one day, something I haven't done in 5+ years since college. Suffice it to say it was quite enjoyable.

Here is what I thought of the multiplayer when compared to the normal game.

Multiplayer is more of a survival game. Where as single player on easy(~100-150% score bonus) is usually a joke to beat, multiplayer is actually really hard. I don't know what the reason for lack of population growth is but there were multiple games when we build every easy to get pop increase building and did not get a single guy join either town for 150 turns. Kinda rough when you start with only 8 people and 0 babies(much less than single player). Kids also seem to take much longer to mature, sometimes it took 60+ turns and they never grew up(it could have taken longer but wipes/restarts happened). In 21 hours of gameplay, we also did not encounter a single event which allowed a special/unique person to join through the event(I.e. tame an animal, get something magic, get an orc trade, etc.) This was probably the biggest change and made the game so much harder, every game felt like your starting 8 villagers needed to last you for at least 150 turns when you could start building palisades out of obsidian and the like en masse.

I actually really liked the difficulty for the most part but do wish villagers/good recruiting events were slightly more common. It was way too common to get some event that heavily poisoned 2/3 of your base units and killed them off before you could make it to the quest marker. I also wish there was a way to avoid essentially unplayable starts(Snow on each side in mountains. Being able to move 1 space a turn in multiplayer is pretty much game over.

Some god bonuses did not effect your friend. not sure if this is intended but only the host got the benefit of things like 3 free research points from your perun god power.

Not sure this is intended but you couldn't help people out with curses/quests. A lot of times we tried to have one guy focus on farming and one focus on fighting and when the farmer got cursed/poisoned/etc by a nasty event, the fighter could not go solve their problem for them. We basically had to trade an entire army over to the farmer so they could go get uncursed/poisoned/etc.

Last thing I noticed was that starts were not balanced. This is not necessarily bad but it could be pretty frustrating when someone spawned next to say vines/one higher level resource and could easily get ~10 easy research points just making clothes while the other person got stuck on wood/mushrooms and nothing else. Yes you can trade and such but it's not like league where you will get carried for 30 mins, here you might get carried for 10 hours and that feels less than ideal.

TL:DR fantastic game, MP made it even better. Love the survival approach of MP but some things could use a few tweaks I think.

[A'vee]

Hey, glad to hear you enjoyed the game.
The attraction rates or kids growing up rates were not changed in MP. Events should pop up for both players and the amount of those where someone joins the village is the same as in SP. So not sure why you're not getting people.
The only difference is that in MP you start without children and with 1 less villager, as a mean to balance things a bit since you've got a friend.
Bonuses from gods should be applied to both players, if they are not - that would be a bug.
Events and locations only affect the party that encountered them, so you can't heal your buddy's group unless they join your group for the healing event. We can't really change the way it works.
Unbalanced starts - well, that's the curse and beauty of Thea. You have to make do with whatever you're dealt. Or you can restart and get another surprise ;)

[The Cynoid]

Well for sure the perun 3 tech bonuses only works on player 1 So i guess that is a bug.

[MTaur]

How do the tier bonuses work for players having different levels in a god? Are the levels used separately, or do they use the greater level, or the host's level?

Also, I noticed in Giants that on the "Current Score" screen, the progress meter inaccurately displays the God level as one lower than it should. If you were going to jump from 2 to 3, the numbers on the XP gauge are 1 to 2 and then the gauge fills, and then it's 2 to 3. (I don't know if a fix was already in Multiprayer for this)

[A'vee]

Thanks, I'll pass this on to our programmer.
It's only hosting player profile that is used and this player will receive any points when the game ends.

[Waga]

When you play multiplayer with a friend, it seems only the one hosting gets experience progress towards their god, is this correct?

Also big shoutout to the fast interactions with the reports and topics! This is why I bought some coffee for coding DLC ;)

[The Cynoid]

@Mtaur/Senescence

Player one picks a god and both use it, you can't have different gods sadly. For the most part the experience is from both of you together(since your're both exploring) I don't think you get xp for your partners best item or tech but I haven't tested and don't know for sure.

[A'vee]

@Senescence - yes, that's correct. The problem with both players getting xp is that the joining player doesn't necessarily own the god that the host chooses. The xp takes into account both players, so if joining player crafted a really awesome hammer that was the rarest item in that playthrough, the host will get points for that.

[The Cynoid]

A'vee, since we're talking about some bugs here, is the save and exit button for MP a known issue? It crashes the game 100% of the time for me.(You can still do normal save then alt f4 when you're done with the game)

[A'vee]

Yes, we know about it, though it should still save the game before it crashes.
Not sure why is it happening, we didn't have time to investigate yet.

[Lorgus]

Are we 100% sure about the child growth rate being unchanged in MP? In my game I currently have 13 children (after losing 5 to the children growing up event where you lose 5-6 and get 1 adult), and I've only had a single child mature via the natural "growing up" event.

[plockets]

Originally posted by Lorgus:

Are we 100% sure about the child growth rate being unchanged in MP? In my game I currently have 13 children (after losing 5 to the children growing up event where you lose 5-6 and get 1 adult), and I've only had a single child mature via the natural "growing up" event.

I haven't done MP, but I can attest to growth being incredibly RNG based: I have played 200 turn games with only 1 growth, and other games where I have 3-4 growths before turn 100. That's just something that sometimes happens when you are dealing with events in the sub 5% range.

[Xaneorath]

Originally posted by A'vee:

@Senescence - yes, that's correct. The problem with both players getting xp is that the joining player doesn't necessarily own the god that the host chooses. The xp takes into account both players, so if joining player crafted a really awesome hammer that was the rarest item in that playthrough, the host will get points for that.

Hi!
I do think Thea is a lot of fun in Multiplayer with a friend .. but thats a really big design flaw, if you ask me, which unnecessarily takes a lot of attractivness from the multiplayer experience.
I mean: Im fine if I wont get xp if the correct god isnt unlocked. But me and my friend happened to start with a shared unlocked god, so we played that one. Still I did not get any XP after our match, allthough I should have been able to get it too.
Would it really be so hard to implement xp sharing IFF both player have the god unlocked and the host retires the game?