So, how goes MP, then?

[UnOrthOdOx]

How popular is the MP now that it's been out a while?

[UnOrthOdOx]

That popular, eh?

[GeoModder]

MP on an Xbox console?

[waab]

Well only have CIV:Rev on DS so have no idea

Had it for one week and I must say that I love it!

[Grandpa Troll]

I forgot about this, just checking in, so no one has had any experience?

[zsozso]

just tried MP last night

I have tried to play an MP game online with PS3 last night and got a game going: found random opponents fairly quickly but then all dropped out after a few minutes and I was left alone playing a pure AI game.

I would love to play some games online but it seems we need to organize something, ad-hoc playing does not attract enough serious players.

[UnOrthOdOx]

Wow, I've never actually got people to join, so you're doing better than I have.

Depending on your definition of "night", I'ld be willing to hook up for a game or two over PS3. But, suffice it to say, my schedule is a bit...odd. (as anyone from the demogames can tell you)

To answer Grandpa Troll, there SEEMS to be an active group in MP. At least the leaderboards are filled up, and they seem to change, so they're playing somewhere at some time. But, I don't know if those leaderboards we see in game are combined with the xbox ones (likely more active on that system), or if the PS3 one is seperate and the playing times just don't jive with my schedule.

The Game of the week gets a lot of attention.

[zsozso]

I read somewhere (don't have a URL handy though), that the PS3 and Xbox games do not mix, because they are being handled by the PlayStation Network (Sony) and Xbox Live (Microsoft) servers respectively -- i.e. not by Firaxis or EA. So I guess the leaderboards are also separate.

Since my last post above, I have been able to get another game going, it progressed longer (about 20min) then the other guys started to drop out, then my system froze som much Ihad to cold-reboot the PS3. So it might not be merely a problem with the players but possibly technical issues with the MP side of the game...
Of course, this one experience does not prove much, so let's try to setup a game and we can discuss here if we got booted out un-voluntarily.

[zsozso]

technical glitches in MP

Last night we managed to play an MP game with UnOrthOdOx. Started out with 4 players, there was a significant time-lag, the game was responding very slow to any action. Then after a short while I started seeing system messages about data resynchronization to the other players, then players started to drop out one after the other. Then UnOrthOdOx sent me a message that he would like to re-join the game. Where did you find that option/functionality UnOrthOdOx ?

Then I looked around in the menu and found under the 'select' menu (where the city statistics table is) the option to invite friends to join the game. I invited back all 3 other players, but only UnOrthOdOx joined. After that, there was no more time-lag or synchronization message, everything went smoothly. So it is possible that one of the other players had a slow and/or unreliable network connection and that was causing the problems.

Overall, MP in CivRev does work and playable -- it even has mechanisms to recover from network disconnection problems.

For those who are not familiar with the MP options, a short summary:

There are 2 main categories: "Player matches" and "Ranked matches". A standard MP game has 4 human players and 1 computer AI player. It is also possible to play with fewer humans.

The "Player match" is just-for-fun category, where you can play against random opponents (quick game), setup or choose from custom game setups (choice of turn time-limits and scenario), play one-on-one games or private parties (by invitation only). On the setup screen where you are waiting for opponents to gather for a game, you can click on any other waiting player and invite him/her to be "friend". That is useful because during the game you can only invite back people from your friend-list to join a running game (in case they got disconnected). You can also invite friends to startup a new game in either private or free-for-all category.

The "Ranked match" category is a leader-system, i.e. there is a ranked list of players. When you enter a game in this category, the opponents are selected by the system automatically (presumably it chooses players at similar rank level). Depending on the outcome of the game, you move up or down on the ranked list. These games are always started with 4 players, there is no one-on-one option here.

[UnOrthOdOx]

I didn't find the option. At least not on purpose.

Here's how I saw it:

I was sitting there. And I got the following messages:

Arabs declare war on me. Lose attacking my unit.

Arabs drop out of game. (I believe that was their sole defender of the capitol, but never got to find out)

Zulu declare war on you, you drop out.

Zulu resync.
Zulu drop out.

I waited there for a while, and the game was just hung up, the timer not moving, me unable to do anything in game, no menus, no moves, nothing, so I figured you were starting a new game anyway. I'm guessing I didn't wait long enough because you must have been re-joining.

Anyway, I quit that game (had to quit civ all together), reloaded, and was bumping around the mp menu trying to see if there was a way to find you, then got a message you invited me to a game.

When I accepted that, I saw it was the same game and several turns had passed with the ai taking over (and really screwing over) my civ. So, I made the best of what I could with what they left me.

I tried to get the 'private chat' thing to work, but apparantly that's only for microphones. No texting I could find anywhere. Which would be cumbersome anyway.

I was rather impressed how smoothly the game went once we reconnected, though. Very nice. Don't know if the lag was because of a weak connection, or just trying to sync 4 players instead of just 2.

And for anyone wondering, Zsozso kicked my ass. Thanks, partly, to a streak of winning 6 of the 7 even-odds battles we had, and one where he was at a disadvantage.

Whoever the Arab player was didn't impress me in the short time he was in the game. Never met the Zulu player.

Still, much more fun than the standard AI stuff. Gotta play some more to see if that initial lag is typical or not.

[zsozso]

Sounds like you experienced the same kind of complete system freeze I had the other day.
Interesting that you saw me drop out before the Zulu, because I did not experience any system freeze in this game, for me it seemed that everybody else dropped out.

The Arabs did not impress me either, I killed one wandering warrior form them, then we declared peace. Then I only met them again when played by AI -- poorly of course.

The Zulu player seemed much better organized. First came scouting with a Galley, stepped on my land with the militia crew that I killed. Few turns later the ship came back loaded with a warrior army plus an extra warrior. He was about to take over my capitol (I only had 1 warrior defender at the time -- not even veteran). My warrior army could only get back 1 turn too late if he attacked but he dropped out of the game at that point and the stupid AI did not attack. I had another city already, so I could have survived losing the capitol and maybe able to take back with the warrior army but it would have been a significant loss.

The winning streak against you was freaky. I did not have anything strong enough to attack your archer armies with advantage, so I kept attacking at even-odds out of desparation, not expecting to win them all... When you attacked my warrior army and saw you have higher number I was hitting my head for my stupidity to move the unit ahead without the support of the stronger horseman army. I was about to revenge with the horseman army when I realized I won the battle against odds. Weird...
So, I was lucky this time, that's all. It sure was much more fun than against the AI. There were moments when I had to scramble all my units back for defense in the fear of losing the whole game.

Thanks for the fun game! I hope we can have a lot more of these.

[UnOrthOdOx]

Yes, we need many more games.

Got tied up last night. (sick 2 year old)

I don't know the schedule for next week just yet, I'll let you know when I do.

[zsozso]

I'm sorry for your kid -- hope he gets better soon!

I played my first ranked MP match, it was pretty good. There was no lag even with all 4 players. One dropped out after a few turns, the others played to the (bitter) end I was playing Aztec's (again -- my favourite), got lucky starting position and snatched 4 out of 5 ancient buildings fairly early in the game. I found both other human players relatively close to me (but closer to each other) Greeks and England. The English had very strong archer armies, so I decided to leave them alone until I get much better tech. I stole a Setler unit from the Greeks, took it away by ship and built city on an island. When I got back i saw a Spanish city next to Athen -- looks like the AI player also snatched a Setler and built right where there. I took over that city, then brought along a few horseman armies and managed to take over Athens despite it having a wall. Then I made several more cities, focused on research, took over the 2 AI faction capitols (Madrid and Washington) while getting catapults and knights. When I got relegion and went Fundy I felt ready to take on London. It was not easy, I lost a lot of units and help the defenders get upgrades and generals, but I kept building more and more knight armies and spies and eventually they ran out of defenders around 1600AD. I was not so lucky as in my game against you, I kept losing battles with clear advantage, e.g. 36 against 24 strength and still losing. But overwhelming number of attack units won the day. I had 6 cities with fairly good production capabilities cranking out the kinghts while the English had only 2 cities in total, so they could not keep up. So it was a really fun game and best of all I won My rating number went to 1235 (from default 1200) which made me jump from around 2000 spot up to around 1000. The top players have around 1800 rating, so that's a long way to go...

Overall my feeling is that it is better to play ranked game, than random opponents, because people don't give up so easy they keep fighting because they want to win -- there is some motivation.

[UnOrthOdOx]

So, you PICKED aztecs the first time? I couldn't tell if people were picking or not, so I set it to random and ended up with the short straw...

[zsozso]

Yes I picked Aztecs. I thought you picked Mongoles for the barbarian-join early city collection advantage. I've had one MP game where I got creamed by another Aztec player, so it seems that the game even allows 2 players to pick the same civ. I also noticed that in MP games the opponents are typically factions who have some early-game momentum advantage.