HELP SID Make a Civ Massive Multiplayer Game!

[Atahualpa]

So how do they work:

Everything is abstracted! Land for example, your a province in a kingdom on an island. You can expand and everyone can expand, but you reach no borders. Your province strength is measured in networth, the more networth the better you are, but the real strength is networth per size, that shows how beefed up you are.
Well so you build buildings that tweak various factors and you train your military (needs e.g. 15 hours training time).
Then you send them to attack others and grab their land so that you grow, or you invest in expanding.

.... well it's complicated and probably unsuited for civ.

[Maniac]

A feudal 'democracy' game where everyone starts in control of their own city.

The only problem that exists with lots of people playing a turn based game is that the game can't advance until everyone has played their turn. So for something massively multiplayer there should be real good ways for humans to plan things and automatically be executed several turns in the future (bad luck for you of course if something unexpected happens). The AI governors really are incompetent and will always be, so letting them handle stuff really isn't an option.

[Lemmy]

I have been seriously thinking about a DemocracyGame-mod for Civ4 (well, mostly about the backbone till now), it would integrate DG management tools both in-game and on a seperate website. I think if the right tools are provided, a demogame could easily become Massive Multiplayer, for example 16 Civs, 64 players per Civ and you have 1024 players per game, without the hassle of manually organizing things through the forums.

...i'm trying to think of some examples, but i haven't played a demogame for over a year (or two) now....ok, i got one..
The minister of defense wants to have a discussion on how to plan an assault on an enemy. Last time i played, that meant taking screenshots, adding labels/arrows in Paintshop/Photoshop, uploading them and then start the discussion on the forum.
One ingame tool could be placing pins on the map, associated with each pin would be a discussion thread. The minister could then place a pin on the map near the enemy he wants to attack and associate a discussion with it. Selecting the pin would bring up the discussion thread related to it ingame, you'd also be able to reply to it ingame. Now if you also want to refer to a location in your reply, then you would also be able to place a pin on the map, and link to it from your message. Not all pins have to be visible all the time, there could filters and such to keep a good overview.

Another more obvious example would be leadership.
The backbone i had in mind would require an online login, associated with your online profile would be your status in the game, for normal players it would something like "citizen", but the president or whatever you want to call it would have a kind of leader status. Ingame only leaders would be able to give orders to units. The mod would also allow for ingame polls, including those for leadership. So after a leadership poll is closed, the winner would automatically be given a leader status.

many of the current [massively multiplayer] games kind of follow a certain mould [and] I think that... breaking that mould with an idea like Civilization would be very interesting.

I think that means he doesn't want Yet Another Utopia Clone...lord knows how many of those are around by now, seems like hundreds with most of them only having about 100 active players and a few hundred multies, casual players, and people who try it out for a week and then abandon their account.

[Stuie]

Originally posted by LaRusso
silliest idea ever. hopefully sid has not lost it completely

Silliest ever? What about that Dinosaur game?

I'm just not an MMO fan, so I'll pass.

[Jon Miller]

I think that there is some good ways to do this...

but it seems to me to be more RTSish.. (where you go give orders.. and then they play out in real time, and when you aren't logged on you have govenors doing things)

one of the nice things about Civ is that it is TBS, so everything is very game like, and combat is very immediate (which is hard to do if oyu give your troops an order, and then it takes until next thursday for them to do that order)

I think that there is no way you can do anything, but have some RTS elements (a turn per time..)

who do I email, btw?

Jon Miller
(was telling my frenid about an idea I had for a MOM MMO)

[Addled Platypus]

No one else wants to be a worker


I am hoping to be a nuke !

[MarkG]

Originally posted by Lemmy
I have been seriously thinking about a DemocracyGame-mod for Civ4 (well, mostly about the backbone till now), it would integrate DG management tools both in-game and on a seperate website. I think if the right tools are provided, a demogame could easily become Massive Multiplayer, for example 16 Civs, 64 players per Civ and you have 1024 players per game, without the hassle of manually organizing things through the forums.

...i'm trying to think of some examples, but i haven't played a demogame for over a year (or two) now....ok, i got one..
The minister of defense wants to have a discussion on how to plan an assault on an enemy. Last time i played, that meant taking screenshots, adding labels/arrows in Paintshop/Photoshop, uploading them and then start the discussion on the forum.
One ingame tool could be placing pins on the map, associated with each pin would be a discussion thread. The minister could then place a pin on the map near the enemy he wants to attack and associate a discussion with it. Selecting the pin would bring up the discussion thread related to it ingame, you'd also be able to reply to it ingame. Now if you also want to refer to a location in your reply, then you would also be able to place a pin on the map, and link to it from your message. Not all pins have to be visible all the time, there could filters and such to keep a good overview.

Another more obvious example would be leadership.
The backbone i had in mind would require an online login, associated with your online profile would be your status in the game, for normal players it would something like "citizen", but the president or whatever you want to call it would have a kind of leader status. Ingame only leaders would be able to give orders to units. The mod would also allow for ingame polls, including those for leadership. So after a leadership poll is closed, the winner would automatically be given a leader status.

excellent ideas

[Kataphraktoi]

well thats great,if you like being on demo games


id rather get some gameplay than RPing. should try something like neverwinternights,that had me going after an hour(playing on an elite RP server)

[Wise Ass]

I think that if they are going to do it, which I don't know that I agree with it wholly, they should have a map large enough to hold 50+ nations...

each nation starts like a regular civ game where you play to expand and what not. This would probably require that every civ start at about the same time to build a decent sized empire. but after everything is established once a player is logged off you simply can't interact with that civ. So you can't declare war on a civ when that guy isn't playing. So for the people who play the game like 24/7 they would have the ultimate advantage over some one who doesn't play much, but at the same time a good leader of people who don't play often would have to build a coalition to beat the *******s who just try and use the game to crush everyone. The key to a mmociv would be a strong balance of power, and a slingshot research/economy system. So fi you start in the 4000bc and come back in 400 ad, the game sling shots you up pretty quickly allowing you to get advances more quickly and units more cheaply. while for those who are on the game all the time research should take days at a time so they don't get terribly far ahead. It would be an incredibly hard game to balance out.

[Jon Miller]

Originally posted by Lemmy
I have been seriously thinking about a DemocracyGame-mod for Civ4 (well, mostly about the backbone till now), it would integrate DG management tools both in-game and on a seperate website. I think if the right tools are provided, a demogame could easily become Massive Multiplayer, for example 16 Civs, 64 players per Civ and you have 1024 players per game, without the hassle of manually organizing things through the forums.

...i'm trying to think of some examples, but i haven't played a demogame for over a year (or two) now....ok, i got one..
The minister of defense wants to have a discussion on how to plan an assault on an enemy. Last time i played, that meant taking screenshots, adding labels/arrows in Paintshop/Photoshop, uploading them and then start the discussion on the forum.
One ingame tool could be placing pins on the map, associated with each pin would be a discussion thread. The minister could then place a pin on the map near the enemy he wants to attack and associate a discussion with it. Selecting the pin would bring up the discussion thread related to it ingame, you'd also be able to reply to it ingame. Now if you also want to refer to a location in your reply, then you would also be able to place a pin on the map, and link to it from your message. Not all pins have to be visible all the time, there could filters and such to keep a good overview.

Another more obvious example would be leadership.
The backbone i had in mind would require an online login, associated with your online profile would be your status in the game, for normal players it would something like "citizen", but the president or whatever you want to call it would have a kind of leader status. Ingame only leaders would be able to give orders to units. The mod would also allow for ingame polls, including those for leadership. So after a leadership poll is closed, the winner would automatically be given a leader status.


I think that means he doesn't want Yet Another Utopia Clone...lord knows how many of those are around by now, seems like hundreds with most of them only having about 100 active players and a few hundred multies, casual players, and people who try it out for a week and then abandon their account.

the problem with this is that is wouldn't be enough to get someone paying a monthly fee for it

that is the reason of MMOs.. and that (I Bet) is what Sid is looking for

otherwise it is just another, larger scale, MP setting

you need something that will get people playing all their spare time, every day...

also, it would need people to be able to not sign on, for a period of time (like a week) and still be able to be competitive

also for new players to join, and be competitive..

this is all hard to do with a normal Civ framework

I think I have some Ideas though

JM

[OzzyKP]

Yea, the key to massive multiplayer games is there is one (or a few) really big worlds in which everyone inhabits, and the game never starts or stops, it just keeps going. So a 60, or even 1000 person game where everyone starts up the game from settler and follows their civ through, won't work. You won't get enough people together at the same moment when the game starts, and of those, people will start an account, and not come back, and then there will be tons of dormant civs sitting around. The game has to be open-ended. People have to be able to come and go.

The Demogame idea is very interesting though. A lot of games have "clans", so that culture would transfer well to a demogame idea. If you have enough people on a team co-leading a country, you could, in theory, have someone at the helm of the nation 24 hours a day, so there are no gaps in game play.

If you had a large enough map, a world map I imagine, and new players start as small city-states either placed randomly, or placed by some game admin to avoid putting a new player next to a powerful empire.

Teamplay could manifest itself either as lots of city states working together in a compact of some kind, or one larger empire/nation with unified decision making that is shared by the participants on that team. Different governments could emerge this way. Players could have options for how to organize their larger state, either all players vote on actions (either all or some), or just elect an emporer to run the whole show, and then switch off. Or divide up the empire into smaller chunks that players could opperate independently. Or some combination of it all.

Too much settlement could kill the game. It'd be too easy for expansionists to just gobble up a bunch of land. So maybe outlaw settlers, or make them very difficult to make. Or... is culture gonna be Civ4? Maybe allow players to only build cities within their borders, and have culture acrue slowly.

The game could be pretty smooth, and interesting if there are enough players on a team to keep it going. But how does one get to that point? If I join, get assigned my city-state, I'm not going to have a big team assembled yet, so I play for an hour or two, and then leave the game. Then what? AI control? hmm...

Maybe have all the cities pre-created, and people just join (or are assigned) teams instead of everyone getting their own civ? That'd probably work better, but a big part of the interest with massive multiplayer games is you create and customize an identity that is unique to you and can grow and advance through the game. If you are are just left in control of someone else's civ, then you don't get that sense of ownership so its less itneresting... hmm...

That also begs the question, why would anyone join a team and play a small role in someone else's nation instead of starting their own? Or conversely, would people just flock to the biggest and strongest teams, and perhaps NOT start their own?

But, if there were 64, or whatever, people in charge of one nation, what would the game play look like? They'd just be voting on stuff and debating tactics? Honestly, that sounds pretty boring.

My only thoughts on how to address that would involve changing the game drastically. Like players controling individual characters or units within a city-state/nation. But Civ isn't really set up for something like that.

hmmm.... an interesting idea..

[OzzyKP]

The game play would really be tough to do. It would have to be turnbased, but they'd have to to be simultaneous. I don't know about you all, but combat in simul games is really fricken annoying. Who ever hits the key first wins pretty much. I think that would get too frustrating to retain people's interest for long.

Again, thinking in terms of individual characters, people could join a team/nation and each person could be a soldier, and be outfitted with as much weapons and armor the nation can produce and their tech level allows. Of course if you wanted to have a war, all your soldiers would have to actually be online at the same time. So that'd be impossible... hmm...

Unless battles were done in real time, but were scheduled between two opposing nations. Of course that creates lots of other problems. If I was a bigger nation and wanted to invade a smaller nation, he could just duck me and not schedule a time. So that'd be impractical too.

The idea seems entirely incompatable with a TBS game. If the turns are every hour or every day or so (or heck, even every 10 mintues), then its not enough to keep people's interest. If they are every minute or two, then the game progresses too fast, and when people step away they miss way too much.

[Dinner]

Originally posted by Koriand'r


sounds like a disaster in the makings.all he wants is a massibly online cash cow

Indeed. This would be nothing more then Sid attempting to cash in on the latest video craze even if the game is totally unsuitable for such an application.

If they pull another bait and switch like they did in Civ3 where hey promise MP to pre-orders then make people buy it in an expansion pack then I will not be buying. MP is just a basic feature for every decent game in 2005.

[LDiCesare]

The major problem is, in mt opinion, persistency. In Civ, the world evolves. Whereas in MMORPGs it does not. It's always the same world, with the same laws, and the same rules all the time. In civ, you have eras, periods when one can't build a boat, periods when one can fly a plane. Once you advanced past a given tech, things become obsolete and the game changes. Railroads can revolutionize the game. And when you've reached modern age or near future, the game has to end, because things can't evolve any more. That's not compatible with a persistent online game.
So a massively multiplayer online game would have to feature games that last for a given set of time. For instance, the game would last 1 year Real time. Turns would have to be run automatically maybe every day. This means prolonged periods out of the game would be catastrophic. If you go one week on holiday, you've lost 7 turns during which you have been attacked. So it's almost mandatory that people band together to guide a civ or they pass their nation to someone else during their vacations, which is impractical.
So I think any such game is bound to have some sort of collaboration between players of a civ in order to work.

[Jon Miller]

I Am thinking slow real time

with enough to do to make things interesting.. even if it takes a while for your troops to move..

I have an idea for 1000s of people to all have their 'civs' also...

while you could have guilds or what have you, I Think forcing people to guild from the get go won't be very popular...

Jon Miller