State of Multiplayer

[Ghadaro]

I've been considering Gladius for a while but I was wondering about multiplayer options given how unreliable steam store tags can be for actual multiplayer functionality.

Specifically what form/forms of multiplayer does it allow? eg. Asynchronous(PBeM), Hotseat, LAN, Synchronous Online

How reliable are the live servers?

What level of customisation is there to multiplayer games?




Most of my multiplayer gaming in strategy games tends to be asynchronous either AOW3 style where its all done on their own servers so you log in and it tells you what games you can take turns in or PBeM like Civ5+GMR where you play a hotseat turn then the save is automatically sent to the next player who is notified its their turn.

I've not really had the best experience with live online connections in strategy games over recent years and disconnections can be especially frustrating in turn based strategy unless there is a long game dedicated server with a good grace period (synchronous/asynchronous combi setup like a civ4 pitboss server).

[I>U]

Game doesn't work with Siltherine PBeM++, so don't expect any features from there.

Multiplayer is asynchronous-type handled with Direct Connect instead and UPnP master-list is the only "live server" there is.

Considering the quality of this netcode, I'll let the other people speak for it:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/489630/discussions/5/1638675549017029676/
https://steamcommunity.com/app/489630/discussions/0/1736633446491600596/
https://steamcommunity.com/app/489630/discussions/0/1736633878446023678/

And that's only a tip of an iceberg. People playing on their official discord is pretty much have a sinlge crash daily (~50/50 for netcode and vulkan being the reason), but, funny enough, netcode only scratched me back in days when I was active online.

You see, these devs aren't completely competent when it comes to coding things. For once

https://steamcommunity.com/app/489630/discussions/5/1637536330457859122/

they seemed to fix crashing on city kill, right? Not so fast

https://steamcommunity.com/app/489630/discussions/5/3338785229798849742/

fixed again, but

https://steamcommunity.com/app/489630/discussions/5/1740008576842201211/

Just between you and me: that existed long before these exact reports. And it got fixed. For real. Then reappeared. Then got fixed again. Probably.

So, the thing is, it may either affect you heavily, or not even barely. But no matter the gain, the devs would likely not being able to fix it. They aren't responding to netcode or vulkan-related issues, because, it appears, they can't get on of top them.

You can very well end up being another "minority" https://steamcommunity.com/app/489630/discussions/0/1607148447816732665/?ctp=3#c1736633665864982791 , considering for how long the issue stands right now. Or you may not.

[Ghadaro]

Thanks for the detailed response its much appreciated. I'll probably wait until a slightly better sale since it wont be suitable on the multiplayer side.

[easytarget]

I've played right at 75 hours in co-op, not a single crash. Zero. Nada. None.

As I've called out previously I think it's a tad funny I have to start a new MP game to invite a friend and then load the save, but that's trivial.

So while you can designate tinfoil hats lengthy rant as the best answer the reality is it's far from it. The reality is a vast majority of the people who bought this are doing exactly what I've been doing, playing the game MP w/o any issues and never bother showing up here and talking about it, because you know, it just works for them.

[Rippermon]

90hrs single play 80 hrs multi only had 2 crashes total. Playing on an old 3770k and gtx 1080 with 16gb ram

[Ghadaro]

Originally posted by easytarget:

So while you can designate tinfoil hats lengthy rant as the best answer the reality is it's far from it. The reality is a vast majority of the people who bought this are doing exactly what I've been doing, playing the game MP w/o any issues and never bother showing up here and talking about it, because you know, it just works for them.

Thank you and Rippermon as well for the added input but from my side it doesn't actually change much and what I>U posted did give me the key information I was looking to find out.

Most of the people I play multiplayer strategy with are available at different times to me. The way the post reads I at least assume by asynchronous direct connect I>U meant live sequential play which isn't at all suitable for the main reason I've been looking at the game which is that Slitherine published games typically have good support for asynchronous multiplayer via the PBM++ system.

Ingame bugs I can work around or if its connected to an easily moddable file potentially fix or set up a bypass for so that doesn't worry me, if there were serious issues in that regard the steam reviews would be expected to be a lot worse.

With live game connection issues I'm well aware that in any game people who are unhappy or have issues will be by far the most vocal, if something works there's little need to bring it up.
At the same time I'm looking at the suitability of a new game for a group of players and we don't have the best track record for drop outs in strategy games which isn't helped by the fact we have 2 of the group in Australia, 4 in the UK, 1 Brazil, 1 West USA, 1 Spain, 2 Russia and 1 Poland.


I can appreciate how it looks from a player who has played without issues but for my situation I would consider Gladius as a game to add to my single player library but don't really feel I can justify it for the whole group to purchase.

[I>U]

Originally posted by Ghadaro:

Thanks for the detailed response its much appreciated. I'll probably wait until a slightly better sale since it wont be suitable on the multiplayer side.

You won't have to wait for too long - Rok has confirmed in discord that Tau gonna be anounced soon. Following CSM's pattern, it would be 1,5 months from there to release (they had postponed CSM's release for a month, though). And the game goes on sales like a fallen woman around the new races release https://steamdb.info/app/489630/ (15 jan and 18 jul would be Nids and CSM respectively - they don't pick those dates randomly, so there would be at least 1 more sale in next 2 months, probably followed by general Steam sale or thematic GW's one).

Also, judging by the data from https://steamcharts.com/app/489630 , there is always a sale in a month after the game hits the magic number of ~90 players average and the game has 180 in this month.

Now, considering how real my data is. You can go to /multiplayer or /support channel of discord yourself and type "crash" in the Search field, but I did it in your stead. https://imgur.com/a/4N6eZX7

Sorry for all the censoring, but "naming" is against global Steam rules and I got my posts deleted for that by another dev, so I don't want to give Proxy this opportunity, escpecially because I've already had my "last" and official community warning for calling them the opposite of "mature" word. Though, you can always check that info yourself [the last "game crashed" message in /multiplayer was 5 hours ago].

I won't conceal that I'm totally at war with Proxy, but, in my vision, they had started this conflict that is pretty much impossible with other devs. At any rate, I can do damage to them by telling the truth, and that's what I do.

Last, in regard to that person with insults - she played co-op and I never saw her on Discord, which pretty much means she played with the same person all that time, because official Discord is the last multiplayer community alive, expect for groups illegally playing this game, and it turned out like that after they've moved to Vulkan - you may believe me or not on this one.

Me personally couldn't play with one of my friends, who had migrated to Canada. Like, we couldn't play at all and had to use Parsec. Also, there was Wire*** person in Discord, from Canada as well, and one of us had to step out when enough people had gathered down for 2v2 or 3v3, because no matter who was hosting, people had been crashing from the lobby in just a few turns if both of us were there. It was this severe. Of course, I had lesser issues with other people, which, like I said, were only scratching my MP experience.

So, even though she bought this game on December's sale only, she is indeed right - it's only minority suffering from the netcode, because competitive MP's community is minority for this game by default.

[Rippermon]

I have only played this game multi with peeps in the UK and it only crashed once for me and once for the peeps in the UK. So it ran smoothly 99percent of the time.And I live in the US so there were no probs at all. Smoother than most of the games I have played online multi with US players. Hope this helps a bit