So I am watching the dev streams, (I try to watch every episode but I like to binge watch them in large chunks for several days at a time and so I do not watch them live) and I am hearing talk about how multiplayer -~=might=~- end up being limited to trading between singleplayer settlements.
While this is a feature I would =love= to see implemented along side actual multiplayer; I am a little concerned about this as I don’t really consider that to be true multiplayer (i.e. How pokemon for the GBA was not multiplayer even if you had a GBA link cable, or how a game including high scores is not multiplayer.) That gameplay, in my opinion, falls into a category of “massively singleplayer” games like Spore, Farmville, or No Man’s Sky.
The issue I believe the devs had talked about was “What happens when one of the players aren’t online.” To that; I believe Civ5 handles it very well. When you start up a multiplayer session that is already in progress, the players choose their respective virtual “chairs” and continue to play, if one of them isn’t online (I find that usually doesn’t happen when playing with friends, and if it does, it usually isn’t a problem anyway) then that person is controlled by A.I.
Basically I am just wondering if I will be able to have my hearthlings place a block, and my friend’s hearthlings also place a block, on the same map, and together we can build a settlement to defend off enemies or is stonehearth headed in a massively singleplayer direction?
(As a side note, I would like to say that; this isn’t meant as an attack on the game, or the dev team, I am just looking to express my concerns while also looking to see if these concerns are even warranted to begin with.)