4X mmorpg?

So you havent heard about "Society" then?

https://forums.galciv2.com/?forumid=161&aid=107171


Its a "MMORTS" (massive multi-online real time strat) that SD's working on.

The reason there hasnt been any mainstream Massive online RTS ( there are plently of small independant online games like this, if you do the looking and like waiting days in between turns) is because of the rather obvious difficulties involved in coordinating and keeping interesting "strategic" gameplay for masses of players in a genre that traditionally expects opponents to be playing simultaneously. Not being able to defend yourself in a persistent world because you get attacked while youre sleeping sounds about as fun as waiting around for someone to come online so you can attack them.

SD thinks they have this solved and has a lot of cool ideas about custom player content.

Yeah I heard of society but it doesnt seem very appealing for two reasons:

- Its neither not a sci-fi but rather a medieval setting.

- Its not really a 4X game since it seems that it will be based more on exploration, expansion rather than exploitation and extermination.

Also the problem with being attacked while logged of could be solved by having an AI that controls your empire while your logged of. Since it would be very hard to have an AI that matches a human player on a tactical level then the combat should be strategical. Meaning it should be mostly based on the strength and number of your military units combined with the experience of your army rather than the tactical ability of you as a player.

That doesnt mean combat should be stale and boring, it could be rendered by a advanced state of the art 3D engine but with the AI controlling all your units beside maybe the flagship.

Armada Online Howzat?

Information is sparse but it shows promise.

Bingjack brought up a good point, one problem that these games face is how to defend yourself when logged off. AI could be used to some extent, it's possible that it could be good enough to be acceptable, but how much control does the AI get? What if the AI spends all your money on defenses that you didn't want? It would take quite some time to get this right.

Another problem, is that in 4X games you generally increase in power throughout the game until you have a super powerful empire near the end. This presents a problem, because you will have players who have been around a long time with a huge empire going up against new players with a tiny empire who don't stand a chance.

I'm not saying that a massively multiplayer 4X game is impossible, but it will take a lot of thought and creative ideas to figure out how to solve these problems.

Is the Alpha test for Armada free?

none of you have heard of EVE online THE 4x mmo

www.eve-online.com

It has everything you could ever want and more

Armada just looks like an EVE clone to me. Not that thats neccesarily a bad thing.

Yes but EVE costs money to play, which in my opinion makes it less attractive

none of you have heard of EVE online THE 4x mmo www.eve-online.com It has everything you could ever want and more

Ive played Eve and, in my opinion, its not a 4X game at all. You control only one ship and thats it. Also it gave me a very artificial feel when I played it. Felt more like you were using some kind of (poorly designed) operative system than actually controlling a ship.

Btw having a monthly cost for a MMORPG is more or less mandatory. It costs money to buy and run expensive servers.

A few games have been able to do it, and build up even larger fan bases.

Anyone heard of Guild Wars?

I wouldnt call Guild Wars a mmorpg. Rather a multiplayer game with glorified chat rooms (the towns).

Ever played Time of Defiance, MMORTS, as implemented sucks. But there are a few Brits that are hardcore about it. I wish MMORTS weren't all crappy adventures and weak executions of real time strategy games.

There is one such game called Mankind. It is very old but still kinda good. The biggest drawback however is the tediousness of havign to transfer resources. I mean if u didnt have to micro manage resources so much, like if the enterie warehouse of a planet was linked into one pool and u had an aoutomatic resource shipping between planets, then I would play the game. As it is now I got bogged down trying to micro manage too much and it drove me bonkers. I had a nice system thou, and almsot all tech level 3 stuff. A little fleet too :/ Kinda miss it.

Try Space Civilizations at spaceciv.com. It's a true 4X MMOG.

Thanx for the linkt o Spaceciv. I am playing it right now and I'm loving it

Gfx is too bad/non existing.

Why would you need gfx in a game like this? Spaceciv is only a 4MB instal! And it can run on any machine. Anyone who misses Moo2 will feel right at home.

I require good gfx in any game I play. I didnt put all that money in my rig to play games that doesnt use it.

Not really a 4X MMORPG but more of a MMORTS. Probably the first ever? Started back in 1998.

http://www.mankind.net/

Yeah I talked about mankind up there but thnx for the link for the lazies

Allright, here you go...SAGA:


WWW Link


Little is known about it at this point, but it specifically bills itself as an MMORTS. Closed alpha testing is underway. They appear to have former Starcraft people on board.

I personally dont think theres any good way to pull this concept off. The whole notion of strategy gaming is assumes two sides starting off on more or less balanced footing...which defies the notion of persistency. Not to mention the whole issue of what the hell happens when youre offline, or when the person you want to attack is offline.

I think it will be persistent. I think it will give opportunities for "strategic thinking". I think there will be combat that happens in "real time". But I dont think theres any real such thing as a MMORTS...at least, not a fair one.

Armada seems like a fancied up Stellar Frontier.

WWW Link

This is from the Shrapnel games forums. It's a thread on the same topic. There are many games listed. Space Civilizations and Astro Empires look promissing. It seems that soon this type of game may be on the store shelves.

There are only 2 games that would fit into a 4x mmo space RTS genre . One was being created by sony online years ago . They gave up because it's a nightmare. The other was a mmorts based on dune and being created by a french company but it seemed to disappear years ago . I remember seeing it at e3 one year and it looked awesome to bad it never hit main stream .

There was, and maybe still is, a mmorpg called "world war II online" that was pretty good. The problems of the territory/empire/continuity didn't come up in the sense they have here, because it was a first-person-shooter type. When you went to sleep, it was about the same as a soldier going to sleep or on leave or something. If your side lost or gained ground you just took up from there and played on when you woke up ... like in real warfare, as an individual soldier. I quit playing because they couldn't get the ai right (it could shoot through trees and buildings and kill your vehicle before you could even see it), and they kept adjusting the vehicle/aircraft to pander to a certain crowd that was always complaining ... "the german fighters are too superior" ... or "the ai machine guns should be able to kill a plane with only 5 bullets" ... there was even a certain tank, the british matilda, that was completely invulnerable! After hitting one with over 75 rounds of german medium tank fire, in the rear, and it didn't die, I knew something was fishy in ww2online-land.

I don't see any way of maintaining the continuity with an entire fleet or empire taking a time out ... I guess some limitations just can't be overcome. Unless, maybe, you turn your empire over to someone else to play with when you need to sleep.



Eve suks. Oh, it's fun learning the new stuff etc, but after you figure out that the older players, and even the supposed-to-be-impartial moderators, spend 90% of THEIR time laughing at and thinking up ways to exploit the noobs out of sheer boredom, it assumes it's rightful place as trash and a waste of time and money.