Hello, a friend and I recently tried the Agony mod in multiplayer to confirm if it works in multiplayer and also how it plays in the first place seeing as this would be our first go of it.

So first of all as Epic users for Troy thanks for putting up a download link. I looked into downloading your texture mods but it seems the workshop for Troy is locked down to only those which own the game on Steam so external workshop download websites or SteamCMD itself doesn't seem to work for downloading anything off the workshop here. That's a fairly minor niggle though and I think for multiplayer testing the less mods active the better, even if they should be harmless texture mods. Also, I believe for the media-fire download link only one replacement of the dots is needed to avoid the steam censorship.

The extra playable factions are great for a couple of newbies to ensure they're positioned close together. Getting two side by side took a little while, though. Haven't looked up what kind of sorting the game uses by default on the faction list but it's quite a jumble going through them. It would be great if CA had added a really minor feature where you could click a province on the map display and if that faction was a valid option you'd change to their selection.

It looks like almost all of the factions which have become playable don't have any multiplayer descriptions when hovering over their main icon but you can still see their debuffs/buffs to units etc from hovering over their other little secondary icon.

It was a bit late when we were trying out the mod but we did manage to get two short games in. One only 6 turns and the other 23 turns.

The first game I had picked a minor faction which begun with 2 small settlements but no facilities to recruit units. It seemed clear after a short while that my faction and my friends faction were probably supposed to be at war and his one is supposed to eat up mine. After a blunder with auto-resolve (which on the surface seemed like a sure thing but a single champion archer guy killed almost all our peasants) we lost our forces and I couldn't exactly rebuild them so we fully intended on starting over lol. This game ended during during our final desperate battle. At some point during this battle the game on the host machine froze up and eventually the game closed it-self, back to desktop. Seemed similar to an infinite loop kind of bug or something but hard to say. Didn't see anything specific to cause it so can't say if this was a one off or not, or even due to the mod or a vanilla/game engine issue.

Second game my friend picked the same faction and I picked another one on the opposite side. This time I started with a faction capital and a small settlement, which should be far better. Like the previous faction though I couldn't recruit units. My settlement building didn't unlock any units and their tier 1 unit production building also did not have any units or bonuses available. My friends versions of those buildings though did. I can't remember what the factions chosen were specifically but they were both Thracian I believe and situated somewhere northwest of the map. They could unlock units at tier 2 with their defensive/garrison kind of building. I don't mind this too much as it was kind of fun take on the game being a little bread-basket for my ally and going into feed mode while trying to push up growth, and otherwise assist with my small group of peasants. I mis-prioritised some stuff though and could have likely gotten that T2 building up had I not for example built the T1 military building hoping it was just a UI bug and then forgetting to replace it with a growth building.

We did get into only a couple battles during this game but it all seemed quite stable from the campaign and battle standpoint this time, at least until the very final battle. It seems the feature which automatically ends the battle and hides the HUD can cause a weird de-sync as this was the first battle we tried to chase down enemies in, rather than just clicking end-battle quickly. When this feature kicks in it looks like it works properly, the HUD for both players hid away at roughly the same time, the battle went into slow motion and shortly after it ended at what looked like the correct time. However, during the brief loading screen the battle had stated it was a close defeat rather than the victory we had. Also, all the units on the display showed full HP here. After only a couple of seconds the host was suddenly automatically on the main menu, game over and time for us to sleep lol. It was only one battle we allowed to end that way so can't be 100% sure that was the cause but it does seem to be highly likely.

I think we had fun with our short campaigns of your mod in multiplayer. I like the way the campaign really seems to get the player to make difficult choices. All the extra campaign mechanics seem to add quite a bit to the decision-making process, which I think is good. The resource excess feature was kind of fun to juggle, prioritising the growth but also the resource gain by giving each other resources depending on our goals at the time. I think there was only one little niggle which came up during the campaign side of the game which was a little annoying but is probably a vanilla issue. I had one of those multi-choice dilemmas pop up on my screen and had some choices to make. The title of the Dilemma which sticks out of the UI at the top was actually covering my resource numbers so I couldn't see how much I had, which made it difficult to weigh in properly on which options to choose.

The battles felt right to me. I last played Troy at launch and the not so good battle balance there played a role in me not replaying Troy again. In vanilla (launch) troy it was just a mess, units would just run through each other all the time and there wasn't any sense of any kind of front-lines but here we have that and it's fantastic :). I do understand vanilla is likely to be better now after DLC/patches but what you have achieved here seems great to me.

Well done with the mod. I think it's great but probably not quite there for multiplayer in terms of stability, it seems very close to that point though as all the Campaign mechanics upto that point appeared to be syncing correctly without issues.

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Just as a small clarification, we downloaded from the mediafire link at roughly the same time so our versions of the mod should be the same one.
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