MP Suggestion for BHG: 'Time Bank'

[yin26]

Dear Brian and Team:

For folks who come from a TBS background and are concerned about giving MP a try because pausing is not generally built into the MP model, how about a Time Bank? Example:

Players are given in increments (or perhaps for holding a special resource or as determined by research, etc.) 5 second chunks of time that get stored in a Time Bank to be used for pausing whenever they wish. The person who uses the pause gets charged the time for it while all other players get free use of that round. Allied players pool their time.

This would be an MP option so that anybody in that game on-line would understand that some bits of pauses will be part of the experience. Now, if you don't give folks too much time too quickly so that it really disrupts the flow of things, my guess is you'd see some very happy TBSers (and even casual RTSers) enjoy seeing pausing become a regulated, strategic part of the game.

You could also have global pauses built in for certain milestones ... age advances, city lost, etc.

Bad idea?

[GodSpawn]

Isn't that kind of like the "cannon time" feature that multiplayer already has? (Disclaimer: I haven't actually played mp yet, so I could be talking out of my @$$).

[yin26]

Cannon time? Huh...I saw reference to it in the options screen but promptly overlooked it. And obviously I haven't been on-line (or done enough reading). If such a thing is already in the game, then feel free to throw eggs of various ages in my directions.

[FrustratedPoet]

Cannon Time just slows the game down a lot, it's not actually a pause. Kind of like the action sequences in The Matrix or Bullet Time in Max Payne. You can navigate the map, give orders, queue production and everything as normal while the in-game time is slowed, of course.

IMHO (and I haven't played the game yet) it sounds like a good compromise between free-pause and no-pause, since it allows people to slow the action down for a limited period when the action gets hectic.

[Alexander's Horse]

The main potential problem with multiplayer is host advantage on lag.

[yin26]

Cannon time: Nice!

[Bridger]

Cannon time is cool, it only slows down the game for about 30 real time seconds though, so get those clicks in fast!

Also, the default cannon time key is backspace if i'm not mistaken.

[Axehilt]

Alexander's Horse, if the host has any advantage, it's around 0.5 seconds most of the time - and even in the highest tiers of competition this is fairly insignificant.

Besides, most RTS games (RON included, I believe) run on peer-to-peer networking models, meaning no player is really the "host" aside from being in charge of when the game launches. So all players suffer approximately the same amount of command latency, usually based on the slowest connection of all the players in the group.