Co-operative conquer europe petition!

[Knight Olaf]

mati2, awww, that's a shame. But you know what, I bet the add-on will reach you in sync with us if they make it, so sign the petition! :)

[King Juhafin]

yes!! mati2, do a favor for all of us. :)

[lurking horror]

Signed....

[Maltro]

Signed. :go: :go: :go:

[celox]

well, i read previously that an addon such as conquering europe in multiplayer would take 6 months of programming....

regardless, signed!

[Knight Olaf]

Sign sign sign! Thank you people \o/

[William Blake]

Could you kindly add your "vision" of MP campaining together with your votes?

Like how many players you want, max - min? How long do you expect to play it online? 2-3-4-6 hours? Do you want a AI kingdoms or only human players? Things like that would be way more helpful for devs then plain "i want mp campaning too".

Im just curious to see how you picture it.


PS
I stand firmly on my grounds of "you can't do a mp campaning without major game redisign right now", so I kinda can't vote neither for, nor against.

[Paladin|Lazy|]

My vision of it goes like so:

If possible, develop smaller "realms" for shorter play. Players should be able to choose between shorter and longer games. Say, a campaign map of england with more defined cities, provinces, and possible players. This gametype would be 100% human.

Secondly, use map of europe for ongoing campaign games. Players enter the game and pick a country that's being controlled by an AI player and take command of it. If that player leaves, the country reverts to it's open AI controlled state, waiting for another player. If a player takes control of a country and happens to "win" with it, the game resets to whatever period map it began in.

No pause during tactical battles on either of these.

[Knight Olaf]

Could you kindly add your "vision" of MP campaining together with your votes?

Like how many players you want, max - min? How long do you expect to play it online? 2-3-4-6 hours? Do you want a AI kingdoms or only human players? Things like that would be way more helpful for devs then plain "i want mp campaning too".

Im just curious to see how you picture it.


PS
I stand firmly on my grounds of "you can't do a mp campaning without major game redisign right now", so I kinda can't vote neither for, nor against.

My vision of it would be something like this:

The gameplay is very similiar to Play on Europe in singleplayer, but with human players. I'd say 8 players max is a good figure. The other kingdoms are, ofcourse, controlled by the (Improved) AI. There are no tactical battles (Ie, you choose "I'll lead"), instead, battles are fought depending on a few new features. Like more terrain features, more unit features etc. You will have very little control over this, thus decreasing the "Pro vs. Newbie" battle chance. Instead, the real big thing is the other stuff. Like talking with other kingdoms for example. You have the same screen, but with a chat window. And later on, when you forge an alliance, you can talk to eachother without having to open a diplomatic conversation.

One feature I'd like to see is not more provinces, but some sort of indicator, that the enemy is making a push into your kingdom. For example, the border next to it would gradually shape into the new one as the siege goes on or something like that.

Some of these things would require lots of work, but a 6 month crunch should do it :P

[Noldy]

And ofcourse on LAN.

[Knight Olaf]

Yes, forgot about LAN :/

[Merlin82]

Ok i signed :)

[Merlin82]

Well i expect it to play 3-6 hours with an option to save and continue later :)And 2 options with AI kingdoms+players and with only players and if AI kingdoms+players battles vs AI happen automaticly but vs player you can choose tactical combat and if happen game paused during that time.Also fix option before game how fast game will be 0.5,1,2, min.And about map maybe good to make random map generator or make some fixed maps where you can choose nation you want and what nations AI will have or no AI at all

[lurking horror]

As far as I'm concerned, the "vision" would be strictly up to what the game developers thought realistic. I'm sure everyone has preferences, but this doesn't really seem like the thread to discuss them. Just to show our support as customers for some kind of WV MP.

[Crache]

Perhaps players could vote for a pause, and when more than 50% of the players agree to a 60 second pause or something, then it's paused for that amount of time. Unless the pause is forced by the host. The speed could possibly be voted on as well, it might start off at 4, but then when things really get bogged down, it might be cranked up to 8.

The multiplayer dialog could allow you to choose between allowing AI or disallowing AI. Perhaps AI would only be included in LAN games. Without AI kingdoms, outlying provinces would just be rebels and you still might encounter stronger rebel/militia. Also, maybe you could set the number of provinces that each kingdom could select before the start of the game. So players could agree on their specific location before they even start. You could set up a short quick game this way by having everybody choose one province on an island, or you could select 7 provinces each on the mainland or wherever. Kind of like placing your units in a game or Risk. You could also enable/disable the entire map being visible. One thing that might be interesting, is if the host could select a preset that limits the areas of the map that will be played on. So units wouldn't be able to pass the map border, even if there is more of Europe outside of it. Might be possible to allow creating a custom selection too, just by selecting provinces. Wouldn't need to update unit movement code to make them act as if the border was an obstruction, there could just be a notice that pops up, "you cannot leave the area, by decree of god" or something. :) If the province selection is a wierd shape, that would get annoying, but whatever seems proper could be implemented.

There probably wouldn't be any particular need for an alliance feature in the multiplayer dialog because that can be set during the game easily, but if people wanted to lock their alliance so they could never wage war against their ally even if they wanted to, it could prevent people from ganging up on one player, breaking previous agreements. Perhaps the host could initiate a vote to allow aliances to be broken.

I'm sure it would be useful to set the type of AI to play against, and maybe there would even be a type of AI that would be allowed for internet games. For example, normal, aggressive, defensive, etc. That way you could tell the AI to basicaly sit there and shut up, maybe trade with eachother and all that, but they wouldn't be trying to expand or anything. So you would never get attacked by AI unless you attacked them, and they wouldn't invoke alliances against you. That way the whole "brain" of KOH doesn't bog down everything. The AI would be more or less static. There would be no need to track AI armies moving through lands nobody can see, because there wouldn't be any moving outside their own provinces.

Just anything that can be done to simplify the AI portion of it. The only reason people would need the AI to be there if they're fighting against friends, is for trading or for invoking an alliance against other players (if that's even necessary). I'm sure all those little notices about every detail of what's happening could be trashed if they aren't caused by a player. In a LAN game I figure those could be kept, but there should be an option to allow people to see an event log that only includes player-invoked actions. A LAN game could probably be kept as close to playing alone as possible, except with player controlled kingdoms.

I'm sure a lot of the multiplayer problem lies in the battle mode. When other players are not in battle, and you go into I'll Lead mode with either an AI or another player, not only could another player attack you, but you could unknowingly ignore important events and you could be wasting useful expansion time. Maybe other players wouldn't be able to attack players who are in a battle, excepting an attack on the battle they're in. So it might be possible for 3 or 4 players to join the same battle, but they couldn't lay siege to a castle while that battle is going on. If this were to work, it might be necessary for battles to have time limits, so players don't become invincible yet inactive while running around the battlemap forever avoiding the enemy.

If 2 players send armies against eachother and the armies meet, but only one player chooses to Lead the battle, while hte other just chooses to just let them fight auto, perhaps one player might be denied the Lead? Or he could just fight the AI and if he loses, then fine. I think there would need to be an additional dialog, so that you could see the status of the other player's decision. If you want to Lead, but you only want to Lead if the other player will Lead also, then there should be an agreement/negotiation dialog before a battle starts. If both choose to just leave hte fight auto, then it's good, if one chooses to Lead, and the other chooses to fight auto, then you would be able to change your decision and lock/finalize. Perhaps at first a player would want to fight auto, but let the other player know that they will come to lead the army in a minute, because they're bringing reinforcements. So one player would lead and be fighting AI, while the other player arranges for reinforcements to come to the batle. Once the re-inforcements get there, he could decide to Lead or let the AI continue to fight. If he chooses to Lead, then he takes over the existing AI that was fighting in his place.

Since battle timelines and worldmap timelines would be merged, unit movement time comparatively would be unrealistic. It might take 30 seconds to move a group across a battlemap, while in the worldmap it would take 30 seconds to cross an entire province. However, it would make it easier for everyone to manage.

Once these details have been ironed out, there are plenty of interesting gameplay modes that could be thought up. For example, a race to 40,000 gold, or a race to conquer a player kingdom(any player kingdom, first to defeat a player wins the game), or the first to expand to 10 provnces. The first to achieve 5 kingdom advantages, etc. Plenty of gameplay modes to give more potential ways to win the game quicker than having to conquer all of europe.

-Crache

[weaz]

What about; every player start with 1 province, all the other provinces are neutral and don't create armies, they only defend their cities. You can make smaller maps by dividing: Western europe map, Africa, ...

[Knight Olaf]

Crache, you are a genius :]

[Merlin82]

btw the link for petiton no working

[Webmaster]

seems to be that the apache of petitiononline is offline

[Knight Olaf]

Just what we needed :[