PBE Multiplayer

Feature requests or ideas
ketzerei84
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Posts: 16

PBE Multiplayer

Post by ketzerei84 »

I've played a number of 4x games, and something which stood out in one of the Turn-Based series I played was a Play-By-Email Multiplayer option.

Works something like this:

1) Players email their saved empires(or in this case race templates) to a person(not neccessarily a player) who acts as the game 'moderator'
2) Moderator creates a game with agreed upon settings, loading the saved templates submitted to him as the players.
3) Moderator emails the savegame to player 1

When player 1 finishes their turn and hits 'end turn' the game auto-saves, and displays a pop-up message saying 'please email FilePath/FileName to PlayerEmail'

Repeats for consecutive players.

This would of course require a few other changes.... how I see them:
1) Ability to choose 'save as' on a racial template you create, so you know where the template is for easy access.
2) Ability to choose 'load' when creating or choosing race, in order to load a template from a file
3) Ability to set a password on a racial template(so that when you start your turn it asks for a password)
4) Add a field for 'player email' when creating custom template
5) When creating a multiplayer game, have an option for 'game master password' the game master will be the only one able to access and change game settings, and their password will also function to bypass any player password.
6) In multiplayer games have a game master option/checkbox to turn on/off AI control(using racial default settings?) for races in the game. This way, say 13 people are playing a game, one ends up in the hospital, the other 12 want to keep playing. Game master can toggle AI control of the missing player's race.
7) This one is kinda big imo: When in multiplayer, set races to 13 max(as the game currently has), but some ;players may choose to base on the same race-style, which is fine, assign colors to the player slots. So 13 players could all choose Tantik as their racial style, and have their modified race templates built off it, and the game will allow this, but player 1 would have the logo, empire borders, and ships tinted red, player 2 blue, etc.
8) And finally, because of how treaties work, allow a player to set their race's disposition towards another empire manually. This could even be enabled on single player, If both races need 'allied' disposition to have an alliance and research treaty, then both players would have to set disposition towards each other as 'allied' in order to have those treaties. This will enable galactic politics and shift double-dealings in multiplayer.

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Zaimat
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Re: PBE Multiplayer

Post by Zaimat »

Thank you for the detailed suggestion. Horizon wasn't built with multiplayer so it's not an easy task for us to add it but it's something we will consider going forward. If not in Horizon perhaps we can do it for our next 4x game.

Is Play-By-Email the main way you like to play multi-player 4x games?
Horizon - Lead Designer | a.k.a. Raf

ketzerei84
Explorer
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Posts: 16

Re: PBE Multiplayer

Post by ketzerei84 »

For turn based 4x games, play by email is my preferred multiplayer style. Cuts out a lot of the hassle that comes with setting up time to hotseat it, throw a lan party, or dedicate a chunk of time to logging into a remote server.