I hope Co-Op players dont have to start far away from each other, I was planning to play as a Elves (or at least people that look like elves until there modded in) and my brother as Dwarves and he would live underground beneath my base and we would pool resources, ETC, he works on industry, I do magic and defence, what Dwarves and elves Respectively do best 
If they didnât start far away from each other, then the players wouldnât focus so much on their own cities. This would still be possible if trade routes were installed.
It might also be worth noting that they said an early version of PvP multiplayer will be some kind of Download and attack another players prebuilt village/castle. All of this was in the Kickstarter comments and updates.
I might also note that the Devs thought option #2 from above was the definition of co-op but there where many staunch supporters of option #1 during the kickstarter (of which I am not one).
Having said that, I think from the Devâs past comments, that if two or more players want to play a game together, they would connect to the âhostâ who would select the mods in play and other settings then they would all play the game at the same time. When one player needed to quit that would end that session. This is not the Minecraft way of running a server where you can hop on and off, but more like a traditional RTS, if people quit, the game is over (or suspended until everyone can play again).
I know I am in favor of this model. If I start a survival game (the default/basic game mode) with a friend(s) I would not want him to play without me nor would I want to play without my friend(s). The whole point of playing together is to survive the challenges by our combined wit.
The same is true of a âno enemies/sandbox modeâ. I want to be playing with my friends while weâre co-operatively building a great castle. When I have to leave I donât want to miss-out on the work and would want the game to be frozen until we could all return to play again.
From a programming perspective option #1 from the list is just allied PvP. Imagine a game of 8 player PvP where we have the option to make alliances. Essentially that is âplayers having each their own villagers to controlâ because you have to code honor into the PvP AI. What do I mean by âhonorâ, villagers from my village should not eat berries you collected or harvest your crops. Slaughter or shear you sheep, etc⌠This has to be coded into the PvP engine or their could never be an alliance AND discrete control of your own forces. With out that boundary to respect there could be allies but with shared resources only because any of my villagers close to your supplies would just take them.
I say this because I see option #1 of co-op play coming down the pipe much later than a single shared village by all players co-op. The single-shared-village is a much easier engine to code. At least, it looks that way to me.
This also leads to multiple levels of alliances in PvP games. Enemies is the clearest. Our units fight on sight. But allies has at least two modes. Friends, we donât attack each other. Shared resources (or single-shared-village), we give each other full control, or we both become capable of giving instructions to the same queue.
Breaking that last kind of alliance makes for some interesting algorithms for the game developer. Do you 50/50 split the units and the resources, or weight it to the balance the players had when they originally joined forces (seems unfair because the smaller player could have played better once joined).
I would love to be involved in those planning meetings with Radiant Entertainment as they hammer out the logic the game will run by.
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Shouldâve forked over the $5000 then! 
Would be interested to see who the 2 people who actually did do so were, and whether theyâre on the forums. And if you are reading this, kudos to you, my pledge feels pathetic next to yours! 
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If I was team radiant, I wouldnât have put that pledge reward in for a number of reasons. The biggest probably being that it would create a situation where you meet them at lunch, and they possibly want you to implement some REALLY bad ideas that you donât want to put in. The result would be an awkward moment where they gave you 5000 dollars, but you canât keep up your side of the bargain and give them what they want. âSorry we donât think that would fit into StoneHearthâŚâ âTHEN I WANT MY 5K BACKâ. Other reasons being:
- It makes the community feel that their opinions arenât cared for, even though they helped fund the game too.
- It isnât equal for everyone, non-communistic pledges are bad.
What? Okay, Iâm going to apologise in advance for delving further off-track with thisâŚ
Look, what Radiant wanted when they started was to get funded. Nothing more. They said it themselves during the campaign that they werenât shocked, but definitely a little surprised and relieved to get the money. From there, they went on to get 7x the goal, but whatever. At the beginning, when they set all that up, they were very unsure if theyâd make it. So they wanted to get as much out of every person backing as they could.
Now think about it. $2000 is great and all, but would it not be better to try and go for more? To convince those people with a bunch of cash to go higher? They certainly arenât (unless theyâre unbelievably generous/eager to see the game) going to just put up $5000 for no reason. So Radiant had to persuade them to. And what else did they have to offer? Theyâd already given a chance for input into the game with the $500, $525, $1000 and $2000 tiers, particularly with the $2000 as that wasnât just about naming things. So it wasnât that big a step.
And after all, it isnât an uncommon thing to offer at the high end of things. A high percentage of Kickstarters Iâve seen offer a very similar tier.
It isnât really all that much. Thatâs not saying I wouldnât love to be able to afford to do it, but from the way I read it itâs a one-off meeting. The tier reads as âAdvisor Tierâ not âDictator Tierâ. They should know that their ideas will be listened to and discussed, but not necessarily implemented. So Radiant would be completely meeting their side of the bargain. They never said they would act upon any advice given.
Radiant are doing plenty to show that they care for the communityâs opinions, regularly answering a bunch of questions/responding to ideas on streams and sometimes here on the Discourse. I personally feel that if someone backed literally 100x more than me, they should have an easier time talking to the Devs about their ideas, if Iâm honest. After all, these guys have paid $5000!
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just a quick (OT) comment ⌠I have a feeling the vast majority of KS backers who pledge those extremely amounts are simply interested in being mini âangel investorsâ of sortsâŚ
most probably have no interest in the rewards that come with those tiers, and just enjoy being able to give back to the industry they obviously care quite a bit about âŚ
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Or they might somehow be related to the KS-ing team and feel KS is a good way to show their support.
Okay, can we get back on topic now.
What settings would you like to see for the SH MP?
What settings do you think would work best for most users?
If this topic keeps going off topic. Will it be closed?
yes, and this was the comment that broke the camelâs back⌠locked!
kidding⌠carry on⌠
(and stay on track) 
The sense of freedom on this forum seems to be leaking away. Steve, you are a conversation killer. As Kendrick Lamar once said; â***** donât kill my vibeâ.
That was a joke in case you missed that. I lessThanThree you Steve. Please donât hurt me.
I wouldnât mind having some game modes with special goals for the players to meet, either together or against each other. There could be more peaceful PvP variations, such as the economic challenge of reaching âXâ number of citizens or a certain resource, and of course combat-oriented games like capture the flag, regicide, and king of the hill.
Thereâs a lot of opportunity here. I personally hope the team has a combination of both âplayers are friendly to each other/work togetherâ and PvP options together for a truly diverse library of styles and variables to play with.
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agreed⌠and while iâve traditionally been a single-player PC gamer, i have really grown to enjoy my multiplayer MC sessions with the kids⌠and as you suggested here, can see so much potential for cooperative modes in SHâŚ
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I think weâve had similar discussions around gametypes before but ⌠I would love to have something similar to the Warcraft 3 days ⌠in regards to the creative ways that the game can be played!
Things like a capture the flag style game, a wave/ tower defence style game ⌠these sorts of things would be awesome.
Well, on paper they would be awesome, itâs putting them into practice thatâs the hard part
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a wave/ tower defence style game
yea, I would love to see that one. Although low on the towers and more wall, soldiers protection and traps. With the occasional small tower. While still having to manage farms and workshops. Repairing walls and building new defense structures.
It is a sort of Action-packed Stonehearth wave defense.
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Perhaps more of an onslaught, with mobs coming at you in waves fairly constantly, but you just have to respond to them regularly?
Of course the game would have to be tweaked slightly; advanced population growth, cheap access to soldiers and start with a decent sized starting town including necessary facilities and resources to produce soldiers instantly.
But other than that my idea would be the two (or more) of you controlling and trying to grow (probably necessary to keep up with the mobs which are ever growing in power) whilst fending of wave after wave of enemies. Some free time between waves, whether that would increase or decrease (I could argue for both, decrease probably better though so you can do the necessary building to make future soldiers possible) or constant, would probably need some tweaking. A bit like CoD zombies in terms of the âwavesâ.
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The only thing I want to say about multiplayer is do not screw over single player in any way to achieve multiplayer capabilities. There will no doubt be a large number of people who do not want to play multiplayer at all.
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I really wouldnât worry about that.
Everything weâre hearing from the team is indicating that they want to nail that single player experience. So far it seems that multiplayer would be a continuation of single player that you get to experience with friends and family rather than a whole different beast.
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first of all, welcome aboard!
as my esteemed colleague @Geoffers747 has mentioned, this does not appear to be the direction the team has taken⌠multiplayer has been discussed quite a bit (as is to be expected with virtually any game), and it seems the team had a different take on (for example) the co-op experienceâŚ
and looking at this stretch goal, itâs still very much a single player experience at heartâŚ
Player vs. Player City Raids: Select a party of adventurers to storm a copy of another playerâs city and bring home their treasures. Leaderboards will rank and track the deadliest fighters and most impenetrable fortresses.
Initially I was expecting an open world like Minecraft and you got the option of choosing a location but from seeing the alpha it looks like you get a random slab of land with even more random resources. Dwarf fortress in which Stonehearth seems to be inspired from you get to choose where you start on a map after a resource survey.
Iâll quote another game here for those of you who may not know of it and its a lot more along than this game in terms of playability and thatâs âTimber and Stoneâ.
After discovering T&S on the very eve of the launch of StoneHearth I was saddened that one guy has managed to put together a game with more playability in the same time frame. Still he has said that multiplayer was the last thing he will consider doing but IMO he has a start as his is built off the original dwarf fortress land selection process and for a game that could go into multiplayer its a good and bad thing. Good because you need an over-world to select from to start up bad because first onto the server will take up the best lands if you broadcast resource quantities.
So what stone hearth needs to do given the current format is create an over-world you can select your slab of land from and when your online it simply loads it in and its active and when your not it becomes inactive after a while (I say, a while, because in pvp you shouldnât be able to just jump offline in order to defend yourself). This would help with server load as well like the chunks in mincraft are loaded and unloaded to minimize computer resources. I personally would ditch the cube map as well and opt for the hex or octagon map so you have more neighbor borders. Not that a cube style still wont work as traveling to a friends aid needs some mode of transport so you still need the over-world map to either travel through or magically transport your troops. Not to mention trade routes.
Personally I think this game should be built off trade, for multiplayer at least. A low resource area will need to establish friends to trade with in order to stop enemies from coming in and plundering them. As for pvp well its a server option to allow it or not so one setting wont effect the original basic game play.