Just thought I’d give my 2 cents on how I feel multiplayer should work in stonehearth and what I’d enjoy.
So the only game that’s kinda like stonehearth that has enjoyable multiplayer that I know of is transport tycoon.
I think the reason it’s fun is because it’s basically just single player with friends. You don’t really compete with your friends or ally with them you all just do your own thing and interact with each over in whatever way you like. It’s the player choice.
So I think that all you need to do is add some kind of diplomacy and trade options into the single player game and treat a player in the same way as you’d treat ai.
Like dungeon keeper 2 and transport tycoon.
I think there should be benefits to both being friends and being enemies so that this game doesn’t just turn into a war game. You should be able to simply build and trade between cities if you want.
This game also takes a long time to play so a player should be able to leave and join the game at any point and give the ai orders to take care of the city.
This all does mean that the game needs better ai. You should only start the multiplayer once the ai works well in single player. At the moment all the ai does is pops into the game, gets confused then die. They don’t even build the tents they live in.
The ai needs to:
Build and upgrade
Attack and defend decently
Trade and have relationships with the player and other ai
Have more instructions that the player can set so that it automates itself.
Once these are done in singleplayer, multiplayer could work in the exact same way.
This would be great because everybody plays stonehearth in their own way. Multiplayer shouldn’t feel like an extra game mode, but just playing normal stonehearth with friends.