Civ V Multiplayer

[TheCarpe]

Alizee and I were talking, let's see what times work and who's in, and see if maybe we can throw together a multiplayer Civ 5 game this weekend (or whenever).

Who's in?

[Plinko]

As soon as someone pays me forward a copy, I am .

Seriously, I will buy it soon!

[Agent X]

I would definitely be in. My kids have soccer games during the day tomorrow. I'd be available tonight or tomorrow night. You guys thinking co-op play or vs.?

[Tungsten]

Sure, I should be able to play.

[Tyrian]

I'm in! Most of the weekend I'm free, and tonight if need be. Compies are boring.

[Espada]

If someone gets me this game I will play whenever you want.

[Boss Llama]

I think probably a versus game, all players, no computers?

Remember, this could take anywhere from 4-8 hours, even under the fastest of gaming conditions

[Cpt._Keyes]

whenever, im down

[Tungsten]

Is it okay if I'm not too good?

[Boss Llama]

But of course, Tungsten We're all still learning the game at this point.

[The Spanish Inquisition]

How's the public matchmaking? Anyone tried it?

[TheCarpe]

So last night Alizee and I tried a Duel game and it was kind of a disappointment. I'll let him say more since he was the one who tended to get the raw deal on most of the occasions

[Boss Llama]

Haha, I was raging like mad. Sorry about that, Carpe There are really two main problems here, and a couple minor ones:

Simultaneous Turns:
Basically, it all comes down to wildly clicking your units and desperately trying to give them orders before your opponent can give orders to theirs. While doing this, you're fighting the fact that the HUD wants to move you to whatever unit it thinks is important, generally one on the opposite side of the map, so your screen is constantly being snatched away and put somewhere useless while your units get slaughtered The lag between giving orders, the server interpreting orders, and you seeing what your foe did, means that things are constantly doing one thing on your screen, then suddenly changing as the server gives precedence to something you hadn't seen yet. For example, attacking with what you think is a full strength unit which, by the time the server resolves, actually had only 1 or 2 health. Also, moving out of harms way, and then being informed a couple seconds later that you actually died before moving. There is no way to avoid this except for just waiting for your opponent to do all their moves first, which means you will take massive damage or simply be dead before every turn. Not acceptable.

Undefendable Embarkation:
Carpe and I had actually been talking about the potential for this issue the day before we played, and it bore out in full. The embarkation system is great, don't get me wrong, but due to the fact that embarked units have absolutely zero defense, and you have no way of making a sea-transport that doesn't die instantly if touched, all it takes to defend a coastline against any army, no matter how technologically advanced, is a couple triremes. They can hide in port or sheltered coves, and the moment an embarked unit comes in sight, they can head out, wipe the floor with them without taking damage, and then retreat. Triremes already have twice the movement and sight of an embarked unit, the better ships are even more out of line. The only defense is to build enough combat ships, as an attacker, to completely lock down the ocean in both directions, which means you can't build an army to attack with, because the cost, production time requirements, and happiness penalties for having both an army and a navy are so large. Neither of us got more than a couple of attacking units beyond the beach of the other's territory, and the one time I managed to get a sizeable group (like 5 or 6 units) in and attacking his capital, the entire group lost to the nearly undefended city.

Barbarian Spawning:
Maybe it's a function of the tiny map, but barbarians were all over the bloody place. If you let a square remain unexposed for about 2 turns, a camp would manifest itself, so I had a couple full time units doing nothing but run in a circle killing barbarian camps continuously for the first half hour. In order to expose everything, I pretty much had to pursue a crazily overexpansionist policy of building cities absolutely everywhere. Based on Carpe's city count, I think he did the same. Unfortunately, this didn't work, because then barbarians starting spawning within our exposed sight-lines, and even inside the controlled territory of our cities. Not coming in to them from outside - literally spawning in the worked hexes next to our cities. This was very frustrating, as was the fact that at one point, a single barbarian warrior wiped out, in one turn, two spearmen and a warrior of my own, all of whom attacked him with increasingly positive odds in their own favor.

Incompetent Allies:
I was playing agressively to test the mechanics, and found much to my dismay, that the city-states are completely incompetent as allies. I allied a city-state on Carpe's island, which had a large and well-made army, complete with catapult, pikes, swords, etc, as I attacked. The idea was, of course, to have two fronts. During the entire battle, in which my troops were getting slaughtered as noted above, the CS's troops didn't even leave their territory. They milled around doing nothing the whole time, until my army was dead, and Carpe was able to turn and clean them out as well. I don't think they launched a single attack, despite being only 3 squares away from his territory. For his part, Carpe allied with the other CS on his island, which was equally bad. I had a single Samurai straggler that managed to get to that CS's location, and single-handedly kill almost the entire CS. The only thing that saved it was one archer that was hiding in the fog of war, and kept bombarding me along with their city, saving them with just a couple hitpoints left.

A quick game synopsis:
Our game was set on a duel-sized, East/West map - two miniscule islands seperated by a narrow channel of water. We built, had barbarian troubles as mentioned above, and pretty much took over the whole of our respective islands (5 or 6 cities, plus 2 city states, packed together for each of us). I built up an army of about 10 units, and launched an attack across the water. About 50% of the units were killed at sea by his triremes (it doesn't matter if you have your own - they instakill embarked units, but it takes like 3 or 4 turns to whittle them down using a trireme of your own). Of the units that made it to shore, they got eaten up rapidly by his land units, with I think a single archer making it within range of his capital, but then dying without getting to fire a shot. I'd managed to do some damage to his units, so I grabbed my second wave (including a great general) and sailed across, and got most of them to shore while his triremes were distracted somewhere. They made it to his capital again, and the entire army was then eliminated by the city with I believe 1 catapult, and maybe 1 chariot archer off in the hills. This is where I found out that you can't built a Citadel in neutral territory, which seems to eliminate a lot of the purpose of moving a general with the army. I had, by this point, Samurai technology, built 4 of them, and sailed across. One died in the water, two were killed by swordsmen before they could do anything, and one ran like a coward and hunted down Carpe's CS, before succombing to arrows. By this point, I was completely spent, having dedicated about an hour to nothing but continuous unit production and assault, and having done zero lasting damage as a result. With no more money, no more units, and my only ally eliminated, I settled in for defense. We built walls of range units facing each other across the straight, but didn't really do anything for quite some time. Eventually, Carpe decided to come get some vengeance, and launched a wave of triremes, longswordsmen, and ranged support across the straight. It worked out for him even worse than for me, as the entrenched coastline knocked out all but 3 units before they reached shore, two of which arrived severely injured. After a few more turns, we decided to quit and play Worms.

Analysis:
Civ V is a phenomenal single player strategy game, but leaves much to be desired for multiplayer. Simultaneous turns is what really kills it - it is programmed to be a boardgame, and boardgames don't work when all the players are frantically moving things around at once. Amphibious landings are virtually impossible if the enemy sees you coming, so East/West and North/South maps are not something I will want to play again, at least not on something that small. Carpe and I were in TS, so we could chat throughout, and were sharing notes, even while fighting. That made it a bit of an academic exercise, perhaps, but it's not getting a good grade at the moment. We plan to try again using a Pangea map, on a slightly larger setting, in the near future. Hopefully that will resolve at least some of the issues.

[Tungsten]

I think it's Songhai that can defend after disembarking.

Also, it sounds like it was really hectic. Was there an actual "end turn" button, or what?

[Boss Llama]

I think it's Songhai that can defend after disembarking.

Also, it sounds like it was really hectic. Was there an actual "end turn" button, or what?

Yeah, that's the Songhai special ability - to defend while embarked. Unfortunately, it's something every civ should be able to do some version of, but none except them can.

After you do all your moves, there is a Next Turn button. When both players have clicked it, the next turn starts, and the frantic clicking and cursing begin again.