multiplayer vs configurability

[moomin]

They recent uproar over in the CivIII forums about Firaxis decision not to include mp with the initial release of C3 got me thinking. I've never played any 4x game mp, mostly because I can't imagine how to find all that time for all those players, but I've played a lot of SMAC/X this last year in sp, and have long since come to the conclusion that playing sp is OK, even after you learn the AI behavior, if the game is just configurable enough.

In SMAC/X, I'm still having interesting gaming experiences simply by deleting the sea colony pods (so that the AI can't sqander it's resources on a seemingly endless number of useless seabases) and deleting all air units altogether, since the AI doesn't have first clue about air warfare. Playing on preforrested maps with a "good" land/sea ratio and "bridges" between landmasses I've found the AI does very well indeed. Other threads here have pointed out other options to make the game more challenging or interesting; mucking with the SE options, having no crawlers, aso.

All this makes me think that mp isn't all that important for 4x games, as long as they are easy to reconfigure to your particular needs. As SMAC is probably _the_ modifiable game out there, at least on the closed-source side, I'm having high hopes for C3 as well. Mp or no mp.

[Googlie]

For a bunch of tweaked-AI games that give a decent SP challenge at all levels try some of them at Rynn's Gallery:

http://googlie2.tripod.com/rynnsgallery/

Various players in addition to me have crafted interesting challenges and games - no alpha.txt edits in any of them (just using the scenario editor to set up a more intelligent or stronger AI)

G.