So open question asked on the KS in regards to a coop mode in which two players share building a city. I though about this and think I could see a problem. While I like the idea of building a city with a friend unless we can divide the villagers up it could cause AI issues.
Say my friend and I divide up some tasks, I take farming and he takes building a house. Since from last weeks live stream the AI will prioritize work and if farming is a higher priority then I will get all the people and he will have to wait till I’m done. Which seems less fun then us both working at the same time to improve the city. This might be a moot point in later game when we have dozens of villagers, but might make for some conflict early on in a game.
I think it would be ok if you both received a set amount of settlers each, safety in numbers or go it alone, or if there was a way to designate who controlled which settler but I don’t think I personally would enjoy a shared control system.
But I don’t foresee ever using the co-op mode personally so I guess I am less worried about this than others who may have been eagerly awaiting it.
That being said I don’t think it’s possible to tell what the future may hold as it is still in very early development and as Tom and Tony have said on many occasions that everything is subject to change at the moment while they work towards a beta release.
I am not worried in the least. I am confident They will devise the perfect system to fit their game as they see it. And honestly I think y’all should be confident in this as well.
I think in this special case it could be easy: Farmers work on farms, carpenters build houses. So you will get the farmers and your friend the carpenters.
Of course we still need to know a lot more about the class system and how our villagers work togehter
Both build the town up from scratch; one works on surveying and hunting and travelling, the other on building defences and farming. As the town becomes a city, one would work on crafting and building and training while the other takes a party and goes out adventuring. Maybe calling for reinforcements if they need help or have the defences ready if they are being chased back into town.
I don’t know what the issue is, I think this is a great idea! I love the idea of having two separate cities in the same world with which to establish trade and territory and to provide back up and adventure together…but I’m fine with either
I posted this in the Kickstarter feed, but I thought I’d post it here too as it belongs to this discussion. Forgive me if that is a breach of forum etiquette. I don’t use forums much.
If all players start with their own set of villagers, what is the difference between two players working together on one city and two players working on their own individual cities? Distance? What if allies could use the same buildings regardless of who built them?
It sounds like people are hung up on allies having to fight over the same villagers, but what if the number of villagers were doubled along with the frequency of enemy raids with each player controlling half the villagers? Perhaps there could be a toggle so that you could make certain units controllable by your allies. This would be especially useful in battles so that there can be one commander while other allies focus on supplying the army.
The more I think about it, the more I think that all allies controlling the same villagers could still work quite well if that is what the developers go with. Since it isn’t going to be like Starcraft where you click on a unit and tell him to go do something, control of individual units really isn’t at issue. And as you accumulate more citizens, whatever issue there is gets negligible. Mostly the problem would be one of good communication so that you and your ally don’t start building a carpenter’s shop at the same time and end up with two carpenter’s shops and no farms, or similar.
Well maybe there is a way to assign villagers to certain players. Like if you have ever played those games where ally’s can’t hurt each other but can give men to each other.
Here is my first post on Stonehearth discourse (as I finally succeed at registering), i posted the following thing on KS feed about my vision of co-op :
Having two different cities makes co-op more fun and deep for me.
Imagine you play with a friend :
Ok then you go on food production (from farms to finished products as bread for exemple) and i will focus on crafting armors and weapons for our soldiers, you will then need to trade those goods (each city will need food and each will need equipment for their soldiers / settlers), via caravans, and you will have to protect those caravans, all that trading aspect do not exist in one city controlled by two players. And it is a cut off of a co-op mode.
I feel the same way regarding co-op, perhaps as time progresses there will be multiple ways to play co-op, same city and different city etc. Although we can’t be 100% sure of what their plans are at the mo!
I think two separate cities would work really well to fit the RTS aspect of things - this is all conjecture but - for example your friend has a small army but they’re really not suited for heavy combat, they’ve sent out a scouting party who have come across wyvern riders heading towards their settlement, you’ve built up a small force of archers and send them over to bolster your friends defences.
So stickies don’t seem to exist in this forum, but I see that we are getting discussion about multiplayer, and specifically coop, in several different threads so maybe somebody could summarize/link to the different threads for newcomers to follow.
So far as I’ve read, I haven’t read any ideas on coop that seem mutually exclusive. The most extreme seems to be two+ players, each with their own settlers to control, starting widely separated so that each can build their own city with voluntary interaction between players. The other extreme is two+ players controlling the same set of villagers in the same area with forced interaction and cooperation. But if player starting distances could be setup at the start of a game and player responsibility for certain villagers could be togglable, I think one could smoothly transition into the other.
Yer we’re all still getting to grips with Discourse! There is the ability to pin topics to the top of categories, but none have been pinned so far! But anyway
I think at the moment the majority of the conversation surrounding multiplayer are in these two threads:
and
There is a discussion [urlhttp://discourse.stonehearth.net/t/personal-mods-integrated-with-mp/649/10] here [/url] regarding the integration of mods into multiplayer. But apart from that most of the discussion has been in the top two threads above.
After writing the above, I realized a problem that I haven’t read anyone address in regards to multiplayer. I’m not sure that a Minecraft-like drop-in, drop-out kind of system is going to work very well for a game like this. This was always a problem I saw happen in long standing Minecraft servers, but what happens when new players want to join a old game? If new players automatically get a new set of 5 villagers, it would be so easy to abuse this to get lots of villagers right at the start of the game. Even without that consideration, a new player who wants to build his own city is going to need a place to build and resources to do so. For well established servers, this may mean villagers having to walk for a long time before they will find sufficient free space if every player starts close to some spawn point. Not to mention it would be so easy for some griefer to just walk forever over a server map, get all the encounters in a reasonable area to establish and then clear them all out so that other players would have to walk for large spaces before they would encounter anything. And what happens when some players log off? Do the villagers just stop moving? I’m curious to know how these issues will be addressed.
Perhaps it should be a progressive system? By this I mean you both start off managing one settlement. As the game progresses, you’re gonna have more settlers, more resources, so you can go and found another settlement somewhere else, and that settlement and everything within will/can be controlled by the second player?
I used to love playing Starcraft 1 in this mode where two people controlled the same side. You’d have 2 of each race’s workers, and the player 1 base.
There is no conflict for orders; if you select specific guys; whoever gives the most recent order would take precedence. If you just add things to the queues, they will choose between which is the best:
Observer will tell Unit that there are two build options, and player 2 outlined a farm, and also player 1 is wanting some hammers made. He will use his own priority to pick which he will do; there’s no issue with two people adding orders to the list
In anno, the multiplayer is basically the same as the single player. City builder/management game with npcs and trading and stuff. Anno2070 is a pretty cool game. Anyways, when you play multiplayer, it just puts the other people on their own islands, you can trade with them and whatnot. Make alliances and fight. The game doesn’t go on unless everyone is present, so you can’t destroy everyone while they are asleep or something.
In two player co-op I could live with needing my game partner to also be online (I plan to give my other copy to my brother) since I would have other single player games running in parallel to get my fix while he is offline. However this would seriously limit how many could play together as coordinating many people to be online at the same time for the same length of time is very difficult normally.
