If you can’t do something well. Don’t do it.
That’s been my philosophy on game development from the beginning. In Galactic Civilizations, it meant not having any multiplayer. We didn’t have the budget and resources to do multiplayer well. So we didn’t do it.
In Elemental, single-player is our focus. But we have decided to have multiplayer and that means we are going to do make sure it is done right.
Real-Time strategy games do well in multiplayer because the game continuously moves forward. Players don’t have to wait for other players. In turn based, players inevitably have to wait and that makes them less ideal.
From a design perspective, having lots of different options for handling turns is going to be our focus. From a sheer budget point of view, we cannot justify the resources required to do multiplayer if only hard-core grognards are playing it online.
So let’s look at the different options and then we can discuss your ideas on how we can make a turn-based strategy game fun in online multiplayer.
Elemental will be able to support multiple different turn options so we don’t have to pick one (though we will ultimately *default* to one).
Option #1: Traditional Turn-Base
This is where each player gets their turn. They hit the turn button and then the next person is able to move. There is typically a time limit on turns.
Option #2: Simultaneous turns.
This is where all players move at the same time. When done, they hit the turn button. There is typically a time limit involved on turns or a timer that starts when the first person hits the turn button.
So what are some things we can play around with here? What are some other OPTIONS we could have?
I like the idea of a time bank. You get N seconds per turn. If you finish your turn early, you get to add those seconds to your time bank. If you run out of time, it starts to cost you gold. Like 10 gold per second. If you run out of gold, the turn goes automatically.
There could be city improvements that give players additional time to take turns.
Example:
The default time you get would be based on what “League” you were in. 5 seconds for the “gold” league. “10 seconds for the “silver” league and 15 seconds for the “bronze” league. We’ll talk about these leagues more at GDC.
Player could build a Time Bank improvement that adds 1 second to what they get.
Each second they don’t use, goes into their global time pool. Players could “cash in” seconds at a rate of 5 gold per second they want to exchange for.
Obviously, the above would be for experienced online players of the game. Players could choose a variety of options here but what we are looking for is a way to satisfy players who know the game and want to play online with other people and not have it be a long slog.
Certain things would need to stop the clock. Namely, battles. We are inclined to have tactical battles turned OFF by default for online but players can turn it on depending on their setup.
Tactical Battle Options would include:
We will also have a Tactical Battle Threshold for minimum battle rating necessary to turn it into a tactical battle (ranging from 0 to 1000). You may not want a tactical battle of two soldiers but you might want a tactical battle when it’s two grand armies.
A lot of you, like me, have tried to play turn-based games multiplayer. And a lot of you, like me, found them very tedious and not fun because of the pacing.
I like playing mulitplayer RTS games and FPS’s but multiplayer turn based just has never made the cut. So, what do you think would make it something that would be compelling to a larger audience that you would enjoy?
I like simultaneous turns, and I like that once one player ends his turn, the pressure is on to complete your turn.
Five or ten seconds for a turn though? That seems insane for a TBS that is more like a RTS clickfest! To me the charm of a TBS over an RTS is the ability to think through your moves. If there are options for those that want a bit more adrenaline, i have no problem with that as long as there is a true TBS option with VERY healthy (but not unlimited) time limits.
Of course, I expect to be playing mostly single player NEways...
Simultaneous turns, seems the better approach. You should be able to set two sets of times however, first the timer length after the first player ends his turn, and a minimum turn time. That way you know you have 30 seconds, or 1 minute at least for your turn even if another player finishs his in 5 seconds. Of course you could set the min. time to 0, in which case I hope you're the speedy one
The more the game mechanics interact with turn time, the more the core game is shackled to a parameter that people are going to want to change based on personal preference. Being able to limit turn time in multiplayer is an unimpeachable option, but being able to exchange money and turn time is going to be a thorny balance issue for varying turn times, map options, etc., and involving time buildings in the city planning aspect of the game seems like a very bad idea. Some people are going to be able to do their turns faster than others, and what this will amount to in the end is a system of exploits and hobbles -- slow turn-takers filling up their cities with otherwise useless buildings, fast ones getting lots of free money. And is there an in-world explanation for the time/gold exchange? I really don't want to have an explanation of how I won a game of Elemental boil down to "I took my turns as fast as possible!"
All that aside, the turn length examples given in the journal entry are shockingly short. I presume they're not intended to represent likely final results.
Another thing about turn length -- at the start of the game turns will be shorter. As the game goes on, people will need more time to manage their empires. A single limit across the whole game -- will that be balanced by the players being forced to build time buildings as the game progresses? What about in singleplayer? (Although concerning variable turn length and the fast turns of the early game, an option to impose a shorter time limit on the first X turns might be a good idea. See also my quick start idea.)
Players are often attracted to turn-based games by their capacity for carefully measured decisions made without time pressure. In MP, and certainly in SP, there will be plenty of people who don't want to deal with time limits. An elaborate system to bind time limits into core gameplay will be wasted on them. A time limit system is a good thing to have, but it ought to be self-contained.
Well I'm not a big multiplayer guy but I would like to play against others if it's not painful. Unfortunately I find these kinds of games painful to play multiplayer.
So what would and wouldn't work for me?
1) Simutaneous turns - would never play in a game that uses it how I have seen it in Civ style games. If it ever comes down to who clicks fastest than I hate it. The only way I would play a mode like this is if you basically give orders but nothing happens until the end of turn button is pressed by everyone. The resolution happens etc. Not sure if that is possible for this game, usually games that use this are made from the ground up to work that way (i.e. PBM games, Dominions).
2) Convential - Yes that should be there but in a game of this scope (potentially) it would bog down too much I would think. Should be fine for smaller maps though and should be an option for those with lots of time or close friends who can work well with each other.
3) Time bank stuff and time limits don't work for me. 90% of the time I am fine with it but that other 10% I really need extra time to plan things out. Not saying you shouldn't have just I wouldn't play in a game that uses it. I love turn based because I have enough time to think and plan out things. Time limits will eventually eat into this. Plus I have things going on in the real world that would inevitiably cause me to miss turns completely (i.e. random unexpected interuptions that can't wait).
4) The best option for me would be some sort of format where turns are run at regular intervals (could be 5 mins, 1 hour, 1 day or 1 week as examples) or when everyone has completed their turn. Basically a PBM type of format (or Dominions). Without this I just won't have the time other than for small battles. I don't like the stress of having to constantly check if it's my turn or sit in front of the computer all day. Again not sure if it works for this game as it isn't designed for a give orders then do everything format. Maybe you can make it work though.
And as an afterthought, I don't mind WE GO turn processing in the Combat Mission games, but I think sequential is probably better for something on the scale of Elemental. I don't want, for example, to have an army trying to fight an enemy army that never actually engages the enemy army because every time my army moves, the enemy army simultaneously moves elsewhere.
Simultaneous turns!But instant attacking adjecting tiles to prevent army crossings.
... I like this idea, of minimum time as well as Time + fastest player. As well as time banks ... accumulated by anyone that finishes before the minimum time has run out.
Yea ... thats pretty much my favorite idea.
How do you implement this? Do tactical battles just interrupt the orders phase?
While I do like the ideas of using simultaneous turns or a turn bank system (which I think would add a cool level to the game) I had thought of another alternative. Not sure if this has been done before but I think it might be interesting to have a normal round robin turn system in which one person is planning his turn and all others are engaged in a mini game that somehow would tie into the "real" game. This would give all others something to do when not in a turn and could add to the depth of the game. I am just brainstorming but I was thinking of something along the lines of political maneuverings behind the scenes, this could be a chat interface or perhaps a screen of offers and counter offers that could be sent between players. Pledges of allegiance, information exchange, marriage offers, etc. Or perhaps the mini game could be to control npc characters and creatures to target the other factions with these units. Other than that the mini games could just be fun games that don’t necessarily need to be tied to the main game, they could just be fun games to pass the time of turns.
At first I was thinking mini-games like a few others have suggested, but then I changed my mind. I still agree with needing something 'to do' in between turns, but I'd like to keep it as part of THIS game.
I like the 'bank' idea, not as time, but for 'spells/abilities'. For example, the quicker you complete your turn, the more 'mana' you have to mess with your opponents. This is calculated by taking the difference between the FIRST player to end their turn and the VERY LAST player to finish. Spells/abilities would be more powerful the higher the mana cost and these would ONLY be able to affect other players. These would have no beneficial effect on YOU. They would only be used to make life difficult for OTHER players. There would be enough incentive to end each turn as quickly as possible so as to not give your opponent lots of free mana.
Hopefully I explained the premise well enough.
Guys... I've just worked it out. Frogboy wants to use micro-transactions to allow players to buy a section of time, $0.1 per 10 second slot. There will be a big BUY TIME SLOT button o the interface that you can hit when you REALLY need that extra time.
Its all so clear now!!
Lets face it though, if there is a 'pay for extra time with gold' option very few people will actually use it. Theres no way brad would force it down your throat - how ever much he would enjoy it.
Actually I love the way Empire does this. Each military unit has a zone of influence. If you enter that zone the 'defending' army gets the option to attack, they can dismiss it. In multiplayer you would give it a 30 second time out or something.
It makes choke points actualy CHOKE POINTS rather than the LOL - "I went round your units and took capital lolol" points.
Please please please make WE GO an option.
I don't really care if its laser squad nemesis or combat mission styled. But please don't give the advantage to the person who moves fastest, which is the problem with simultaneous games in CIV.
In a play by email (not sure if this is on the cards) I truly think you need to be able to review what orders are being sent.
In a real time (everyone online at the same time) game having the server resolve everyones moves at once would make me happy, preferably while still being able to do city/kingdom management at any time.
What about grabbing an idea from Space Rangers? Much of that game was real-time, but every once in a while you'd get shunted into a text based choose-your-own-adventure type passage.
Translating to TBS, you enter your moves, then while you're waiting for everyone else, you get to progress your text adventure. You'd need a "Last time, in text adventure world..." type reminder so you'd always know where you were up to, but it would allow flavour quests that could also impact the game in a real way. Something like you take the role of a scout trying to track down an elusive hero - successful completion lets you recruit the hero. Or a tamagotchi style thing where you're raising a baby dragon (or other animal x) - which may later be useful to your military if you don't get it killed raising it. Or you're a builder going through your apprenticeship - depending on how you do, you unlock a new building or improve/deprove an existing building.
The longer you take to complete your moves, the more time the other players have to advance their side-quests, potentially earning an advantage, so you're encouraged to keep your turn short. And on the other side, if you're the one doing the quest, you've got something meaningful to do while waiting.
Just making most things an "option" seems to be the best (and safest). You Go-I Go; Simultanious; Time Bank, all of them. If Civ can do it, I'm sure Stardock can give it a stab
I am probably old-fashioned, but turn based per faction is much more suitable for me for a few reasons.
1: If there is no pressure on how to develop your grand strategy, then error is less likely to creep up.
2: With simultaneous turns, it can begin to be a 'wait for your opponent to make a mistake' to capitalize. Albeit by having an ungarrisoned fortress or after a badly played encounter.
3: Map, technology, and events will always play a factor in a game. The map alone, well unfamiliar to one and known to another can play a huge factor and to be penalized for not knowing seems a little harsh.
4: I would be in favor of setting a time limit per turn; afterall, there should be a pace for the game to continue.
I can also imagine a few drawbacks and the most common one is, "well, what do I do while player A is up against player B?" and I think that answer is very tricky one to solve. While having everyone able to see the combat unfold may seem like a good idea at first hand--it fails at hiding where the battle may take place. The old line, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" comes to mind and showing the general location of where a combat is can be quite devastating to a player or players. Unfortunately, watching a player decimate an AI in combat will eventually lose flavor as the same strategies are repeated against the machine and having to watch each and every encounter can create some, "finger-tapping" especially if the combats are extravagantly planned.
But there always has to be drawbacks and drawing the line on what's fair game is entirely up to the players participating in the game.
I think a time bank system would more break multiplayer games than anything. Especially stall them too. I think the best way to go along time banks is if players that are losing badly against other opponents gain only 10 percent of the time they would originally have and add that on top to give them a little more breathing space.
I personally think that if you do simultaneous turns, you need to provide as much incentive as possible for players to play efficiently and not soak up time (or disincentive.) On the same token, you want to give people who have already ended their turns something to actually do with their time while they wait. So here is my idea...
Players that finish before the last player hits "end turn" take part in a mini-game with each player inside of their own minigame. The minigame will represent the sovereign doing personal research, courting heroes to join, or mana augmentation in his spare time (presumably while other sovereigns are over-managing their empires.) The mini-game's parameters would be different depending on the the activity and the player could choose which activity to enhance. Players who finish sooner get to play the minigame longer and enhance that goodie more.
Naturally, it wouldn't be a huge bonus you'd get, but it'd still be quite an incentive to play efficiently.
The more I think about the concept of a 'time bank', the more I hate it.
I generally don't play multiplayer TBS unless I'm talking directly to the people I'm playing with.
If I weren't, I think rushing through a turn in 15/10/5 seconds would utterly ruin the experience for me.
Part of the strategy genre to me is 'the mind game' Talking with your opponent, making a friend here and there.
Besides, when have you ever, ever played a TBS into the hundreds of turns where (if you're playing seriously and managing everything you can) those turns didn't take minutes at a time.
Sure, it isn't the best way to do multiplayer TBS. (And lets face it, MP TBS is a fickle beast at best)
But a 'time bank' would make me not play it at all.
I played Civ 4 plenty in multiplayer. Granted, it wasn't the SAME experience, it was still a fun experience. Personally, I wouldn't mind playing Elemental with my friends, too, with the timer off.
I'm unsure what it meant by 'simultaneous'. I envision 2 versions:
-our moves are independent of other players and when we're through moving/building/etc. the computer resolves conflicts (similar to Diplomacy where folks write down their orders and when all are done the orders are revealed and resolved -- we don't know what the other player are doing until after we're done moving -- fog-of-war).
-our moves are not independent -- I'd see the other player's moves in real time (minus lag/etc.) during my turn and can react to their moves during my turn (when would battles be resolved?).
Regarding 'time banks' -- I play turn-based games because I don't care for clickfests, so I wouldn't make use of 'time banks' or similar 'hurry up' options. I can see how many would like such a feature tho and think it'd be a good feature.
(Apologies for the length).
I've given the TBS + multiplayer problem a lot of thought over the past several years so I would propose three (or really two and a half) options.
Traditional Plus
In this mode, turns would occur in sequential order as normal (player A first, then B, then C, etc). However, while player A was taking their turn, all other players would have full access to everything they would normally be able to do on their turn. This means they can design units, change build queues, move units etc. the catch being that none of the actions would actually take place until they confirmed the actions on their turn.
For example: while player A takes their turn, player B designs a unit and sets it to build while player C issues move orders to their units (or any other actions). When player A ends a turn, player B can confirm all their actions taken during A's turn so that they actually take effect and then proceed with their turn as normal (meanwhile A and C are planning moves).
I see three major advantages to this system:
It should be relatively easy to implement (depending, of course, on how the code works now).
It actually shortens wait time between turns because players are planning, movng, and adapting to the other players actions prior to their turn actually taking place, resulting in shorter official turn times.
It retains most of the advantages and appeal of TBS systems.
Additionally, a time limit could be added to prevent a player from just sitting on their turn.
Simultaneous Turns
Overall, I like this idea. However, the idea of a timer starting when the first player hits the turn button seems very abuse prone to me. Imagine a player in a situation where victory is strategically impossible (or with a drastically smaller territory to manage than his opponents) just trying to hit the turn button as fast as possible to force the next turn and limit the actions the other players can make (a good real world strategy, that has nothing to do with how well they play the game). Or imagine a sore loser just hitting the turn button at the start of the turn in the end game when large territories and critical battles abound!
Instead I would propose that when a game begins, the players would agree to a time limit on turn length. When the turn timer reaches 0, players would have a brief opportunity (5-10 seconds) to vote on whether or not to reset the timer (to take more actions on this turn), or move on to the next turn. A player could also choose to end their turn prior to the timer expiring preventing further moves that turn and automatically voting to advance to the next turn when the timer expires. Players could also vote at any point to change the timers length.
In the interest of fairness however, I would only consider this option viable if:
Actions taken during a turn do not actually take place until the end of a turn.
Unit movement will automatically adjust to other unit movement (ie, if unit A attacks unit B, but B moves, A will change it's path in an effort to intercept unit B ). This mechanic would also have apply to situations where something in a location needs to be "claimed", perhaps forcing a battle or comparing unit speeds (not player speed) to see who "gets" it.
While this would help keep the game moving, the major disadvantage of this option would be bringing the TBS closer to RTS, generally rewarding speed over strategy in my opinion.
Allied Mode
In this mode,allied players would take their turns simultaneously, thus, shortening the time between turns. Unfortunately, if alliances are subject to change and or there are no allies, this mode becomes less and less useful. Therefore, I would propose this be an "add on" to Traditional or Traditional Plus mode rather than a mode in and of itself.
Finally, just a couple of thoughts:
I would like to keep "hot seat" style play as an option, just in case.
I think the On/Human only/Off tactical battle idea is excellent, along with limiting it to large/critical battles.
I don't think the "Time Bank" idea works very well compared to other options. I don't see any benefit since early turns are usually shorter than later turns anyway.
I personally dislike the time is money (gold = time) mechanic. I can see it as an optional add in for players who want really fast game play, but I would definitely like to see it remain an optional component.
So that's it, my two cents. Looks like a good game, keep it up!
(face palm)
Guys: Listen. Carefully.
Rather than talking about how much you "hate" this or that suggestion why not offer your own?
If we do have a time bank option, it will be just that, an option. Don't like it? Don't use it. Similarly, we plan to support BOTH simultaneous turns as well as traditional turns. It's not an either or. We plan to have both.
There's no need to express how much you hate someone else's MP preference because you aren't forced to use them.
What we are looking for here are ideas on how to make MP for fun. If you won't play it MP anyway, then telling everyone how much you hate MP won't help either.
Keep the ideas coming but also let's put aside the need to say how much you hate a given idea.
think that auto-resolve should be the default of all trivial-to-moderate sized battles. Epic conflicts should be able to be opted-in just because of the high stakes at hand.
Simitaneous turns are bad. Very bad. Nice concept but open to abuse and also open to bugs.
Abuse such as clicking faster than everyone else, trying to end other peoples' turns prematurely, waiting out timers so that the other person plays "end turn" before doing sneak attacks, etc etc etc.
However, being able to queue actions (modify your governo'rs priorities, design new units, queue building productions, etc etc etc) are all very, very important and allow "pseudo-simul" movement. I know that in Civ IV you can do city management, etc even in "end turn" mode, so it should be something similar to that but perhaps a little more thourough (make sure that you ask for permission before executing moves, etc etc, though!).
Regarding turn-timers all three of these need to be guarenteed:
A minimum amount of time given to all players (that gradually increases as the game continues)
A maximum amount of time given to all players
A maximum "wait time".
Early game you have a 30 second minimum turn with a 5 minute max. After all players (but you) have "readied up" you have 2 minutes to complete your turn. But, regardless of everything you cannot take more than 5 minutes unless multiple people still want to move, where as the "vote" system works well (eg, if 3 out of 5 people haven't completed their turns the last 5-10 seconds could have a "vote to extend" which would extend the max timer by 1 minute. At least 50% of players would have to vote for the extension to go into effect. Players who have ended their turn vote "no" by default).
I know the vote-to-extend violates the maximum wait time but I think that it would happen rather infrequently and if HALF THE PLAYERS need more time then something else is at fault (the maximum time is too short), which isn't neccassarily the devlopper's fault, maybe that game is just very active at that stage in the game.
But, it should have the maximum wait time to prevent stalling. If minimum time is 3 minutes, maximum is 5 and max wait is 2, if I end my turn at 140 seconds, then you only have 260 seconds to move. If I ended my turn immediately, you still get 180. Even this system is prone to abuse though :-/
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