After looking at my good friend @Alfie’s post on “How MultiPlayer will work” that can be found here. I got thinking about how everything would work again. But this particular thread has it’s own twist.
I have seen a good deal of posts that focus on the question of “How will SH multi-player work?”. But I have seen no posts on how WE as the community want multi-player to work. As things are still very early in development, and there has been little word on multi-player’s functionality, it is the perfect time for us to influence the final product.
So, how do we want it to work?
As usual with my threads, I will get the ball rolling, by explaining how I personally would like to see things work. I will do this by hitting the two versions of multi-player that are most likely going to be produced. Those being Co-Op and PVP.
Cooperative Play (Co-Op)
Before I get into the good stuff, I will quickly explain what I think Co-Op is. Co-Op is a online game mode that allows multiple players to work together in order to accomplish a designated goal. Now, how would this tie into SH? Well, as we have been informed, the game will respond to your play style. So, by building more knights, more enemies will spawn in. By farming more, less enemies will spawn in, and more challenges will appear on the farming front.
So, in my opinion. The way Co-Op should work is this; players will enter a game and will choose the location in which they want to spawn into. They will spawn in the same world. The area that Player A chooses to spawn in, will have to be a certain distance from where Player B chooses to spawn in. This would make the players focus more on their own cities. As it is Co-Op, Player A and Player B’s factions will be allies of each other, meaning that they will not be able to kill each other, and will be able to see through the fog of war (If there is any) wherever their allies unit’s are. The players will be able to trade with each other, and will be able to exchange services (Nights, farmers, builders, etc). The game will respond in the same way as it would in single player (Meaning that if you build military units, you will be attacked more, as I previously explained). After that, it’s just StoneHearth. If there are more than 2 players, the same rules apply.
Player vs Player (PVP)
This would be very similar to my idea of how Co-Op would work. The only difference being that the two cities would be able to attack each other and would not share the ability to trade or see each others units. Now, you might be thinking that there could be a couple of conflicts with this and there are.
- If one player is offline and the other is online, the online player could make quick work of the AI’s defending the offline players city.
- Players would focus more on killing the opposing faction, and less on their city management.
So, how do we fix this? There are a couple of ideas in my head. Those being:
- If the one player is offline, all of their units and the areas that those units can influence on their own are “Off limits” and cannot be seen or attacked by the online player.
- We completely ditch my idea for PVP and go with something else.
- PVP matches are limited by a timer. So for example, a match can only last for 40 minutes. Whoever is more successful at the end wins. Or, whoever is left standing wins.
If we went with the plan of ditching my idea, what is left? Well, we would probably have some system that allows Player A open his/her single player world up to the public. Once in this open mode, Player B can select a number of his units from his single player world, and then warp them into Player A’s world. Then Player B tries to kill player A, and Player A tried to defend. Whoever wins gets the spoils of war (Player B’s attacking forces damaged gear (Swords, armor, food, etc) (Player A’s city or a chunk of resources). This would be a very effective system in my opinion. But I am not done yet.
I believe that the timed match idea of mine would also be a very effective system. Two players would be injected into a world with limited size, a clock would be displayed. If one player left or disconnected, the other would win. Then, the two players would duel it out until one was completely wiped out. If both factions were still alive at the end of the time limit, then whichever one had the most points (Points would be determined by the population number, food, minerals, etc).
So, what about you guys? Do you think my ideas are sound, or do you have some of your own? This is a topic of great interest, and is very popular. I look forward to seeing what kind of feedback we get.
