Ideas for multiplayer when it comes out in 2020

I have 3 suggestions so far.

  1. co-op : two players controlling the same city to survive. nothing more to explain.

  2. 2 or 4 corner deathmatch : 2 or 4 players start in the corners of a map (probably not a random map)
    and they have 3 in game months to build up their army before something starts forcing them to go to the middle to fight it out.

  3. massive online capabilities : one very large map in wich people randomly spawn into. it would have to only load in a small area to the players or it would get laggy…or many small connected maps in which you can send raiding parties or traders to other settlements. This mode would run on a very slow speed and never stop to keep realism.

I’m just joking about the game taking forever for multiplayer, you are doing awesome on the game!

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The online for this game will be very tricky because it’s faster than something like sim city, but slower that age of empires.
Maybe in online mode time will go way faster. Or maybe it will be something like Minecraft’s towny where you create your city somewhere on the map and then you fight/make allies with others.

The problem of it being real time is that when you go offline then good bye progress. Your city will just get rekt.

A solution to this could be to make something like clash of clans wars where you can only attack in a certain window of time.

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You have a good point, perhaps you go into some sort of sleep mode when
you aren’t logged on. But you also wouldn’t gain any progress either

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I do really hope that they enable some limited form of multiplayer before too long. I think them waiting until more features are implemented was really smart, but there are enough systems in the game now that there is value in starting to experiment with more than one person connected. It will only get harder to take care of these things as the game gets more mature. Just a simple way to have a second person viewing a town to test the basic connectivity, then adding the ability to set commands, and eventually the presence of a second town. All of these are functions that prove an ability to have them, and will provide a great starting point for when the design team wants to start looking at differences in game play with more than one person.

For game design decisions, I suspect that will stay on the back burner for a long time (but probably not until 2020 :P). One thing that would probably be a really important multiplayer test case is people wanting to live in happier towns. With Alpha 20 giving a much better idea on who is happy, and why, this is an opportune time to look into two town set ups. The basics of multiplayer would really prove to be a nice companion piece to Alpha 20, but there isn’t a way to try it out yet.

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I like the idea of every Player has his own city. Don’t kill me but i think something like the last failed SimCity can work very well for Stonehearth. You can build your city, visit neighbors, trade with them or send your troops to raid the cities, the last one maybe automated (you can’t defend your city when you are offline…)

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