Very good decision imo.

Of course, i still want to see MP in FE too. But for now i can live without it.
Focus on the Base Game first, get that thing working right first, then once everything is set, you can add MP.

Multiplayer would be cool I'm sure, and if they add it later on down the road I'm not going to complain and I'd even be interested in playing a good multiplayer game. The thing to think about though, at least in my opinion anyway, is that this is a 4X strategy game. Traditionally, there aren't a lot of 4X games that are multiplayer or even designed to suit multiplayer. Yes, I know there are some that are, I don't need examples, and yes, I know that some of those have been successful. Mainly though 4X games for me have been single player and I expect most of them to be single player. If there is a multiplayer then I consider that a bonus.

I like my 4X strategy games to be grand scaled conquest type games though and traditionally it's usually rather hard to find a group of like minded people willing to sit down and play a game that we all have to invest at least 6 to 12 hours into so we can properly finish a game. This is yet another reason why in games like this multiplayer is usually a after-thought.

I would love to be able to play a grand sweeping campaign with actual human players, sure, but in reality unless it's a physical table-top game and you have company over, or it's something you can play by e-mail, it's almost impossible to pull off.

What I would like to see for FE (which was something I would have liked in WoM) would be a "Wizard Duel" type of multiplayer with two player created Sovs hurling magic at each other, countering spells, summoning units to fight for them. Kind of like MTG without all the cards. Frogboy and I had a conversation once about the possibility of something like that for WoM and what we talked about sounded really cool. The resources just weren't there for it though and I fully understand why. Maybe things can change with FE, for now though I'm ok with it being single player.

I'd be ready to pay for a separate game that is all about multiplayer tactical battles with a bith more depth (since there would be no AI).

Elemental: Duels of the Sovereigns

We are the 1%.  :-P

I already posted in another thread but got pointed over here, so decided to toss in this thread that I play strategy games, even TBS games almost exclusively for the multiplayer aspect.

Just a few minutes left on my beta download, so it's hard to make a post complaining about something when I'm this close to getting to play a game that was designed by the guy that made my favorite strategy game of all time, Fall From Heaven.  :-P

Here's hoping it's great, and spawns the effort to add multiplayer in the future.

You tell em Heavenfall you tell em.

I really fail to see the "I didn't get what was promised" argument.  You may not have liked the MP in EWoM, but it was there.   So you were never lied to.   FE was never sold to you as guaranteed to have MP, in fact as has been pointed out, Frogboy announced that MP was in jeopardy months ago and most of the people responded that they wanted him to focus on SP over MP.

I would love to play with other people, but even if FE has MP I will never play it:  know why? I don't have time to sit and play a 4x game with other people for hours.  In fact, I would say that most of the people who would play would want to have a way to save the MP game to play later, since who really has 8 hours at a time to play a computer game.  Not the majority.

In any case, add me to the people that are glad that SP was focused on. I'd much rather have 200+ spells, monsters, etc.   MP is low priority in my mind.

Agree.

The idea that Stardock announced that there would be no multiplayer two days before the beta is total BS.

It has been known for quite a while.

Frogboy mentioned about a pitboss type infrastructure having been set up.  This is where you login and take your turn when it is convenient.  However I am guessing that tactical battles would need to take place at one time, as people taking different turns one by one would be very slow, except if they were in the same time zone and logged in for a while.  But still, a pitboss type solution would be a quite interesting way of getting around the problem of everyone having to have the same game in long sessions where more than one person has to be available concurrently for hours at a time.

Sooooooooooo glad there is no multiplayer as that means ALL of the resources goto the MAJORITY of US and not the 1-2% that play mp once and then go on to something else. This is WONDERFUL news. I got soooooooooo tired of the MPers helping to ruin the single player game of Age of Wonders:Shadowmagic which is now just a POS game nobody plays. Got soooooooooooo tired of balance balance balance from the MP crowd. Now, this game doesn't have to be balanced and in fact that is what made Master of Magic great. Good going Stardock glad you saw it our way.

Show me on the doll where the bad MP men touched you. Do you have a support group available in your area?

Anyway, this is what I hate about statistics like "90% of Sins players only played single player!" and stuff like that. It's only tracking people playing through the online systems, and strategy games are generally much too long for a random matchup with a stranger. I can name at least... well, at least 10 people that have plays the crap out of Sins multiplayer, but not a single one of them has ever ventured onto Ironclad Online. Same goes for Civ4, I've logged literally hundreds and hundreds of hours of that MP on that game (as well as mods like FFH), but not a single minute of that is logged anywhere on Firaxis' end. To them, I'm just one of the many single player people, which couldn't be further from the truth.

I'm not arguing that SP isn't the majority and I'm not arguing the business prioritization, but statistics don't always mean what you think they mean.

Great set of posts

To add something to the discussion, I am surprised that Heroes of Might and Magic has not been mentioned as it is the closest type of game to this one (either III, V, or VI). It has tactical battles and is multi-player. I have played a few games of all three in mulit-player and I have to say it was not a good experience in any of them.

This is because of the tatical battles of course. If you play with more than two people, then whenever two people fought, everyone else had to wait around and do nothing until they were done. Given the number of battles in Heroes, this got old pretty quick.

The solution that was implemented (in V I think) is that the people whose turn it was got to play in what was called 'ghost' mode where they could move around the map in limited fashion. Needless to say, this did not do much to help the wait time while the tatacial battles were going on.

While the battles could be auto resolved, in pratice, this was not done because the losses from the AI running things were generally much higher than if run by a person. As auto-resolve was an option on a per battle basis, the players who used this a lot were at a disadvantage to those that did not. So this had the effect that 90% of all the battles (including those against netural forces) were all run by a person versus using the auto-resolve function in order to stay at a par with everyone else.

So to solve the issue with a strategy game like FE with tactical battles would be required to either auto-resolve ALL tatical battles to have all the human players have the same type of losses or find some creative way that people not involved in a tatical battle have someting they can do while waiting for others to finish. Or maybe a completely new tatical system that no one has thought of yet

I do play a lot of the CIV series MP (III, IV, and V) and even that has issues with waiting on others to finish their turn, especially if they have a large empire. However, as there are no tatical battles in Civ, the wait time is still much less than it is in Heroes. So it is more toleable. Especially since you can still look around at your stuff and plan out the next turns. Plus, if you really want to move the game along, you can set a time limit/move and when the time runs out you are done and the next turn begins. This makes the possible wait time even more managable.

Once last example, Total War Empire. You cannot play MP in the strategic mode (at least I could not the last time when I played it a long time ago). Only the tatical battles were MP. To me that sucked as I wanted it all So I never bothered as I wanted the tatical battles to mean someting in a larger context.

The MP games that I hve found work the best (at least imho) are all real time games. These are like Age of Whatever (fill in with whatever version you want lol), Hearts of Iron series, etc. and pretty much any turn based game that has simultainous turns AND no tatical battles. This is because for many MPs like myself it is the wait time between that is the killer.

If FE can manage the wait time between turns in MP by some reasonable method that retains the flavor of the game, then MP inclusion makes sense. If that is too costly, too hard, etc., then MP does not make sense. To me it really is that simple.

Btw. what are the demographics of TBS gamers? Or probably I should say customers. (those who actually buys, you dont develop stuff for people who just pirate)

I think I have read somewhere that largest group are males in late twenties and early thirties. If this is indeed true, than the lack of MP play/interest from this group is not really surprising. TBS MP is very time consuming in that manner, that you need guaranteed long uninterrupted session... something that I have real troubles to find - being in that demographic group myself. And synchronizing these quite unique sessions with my friends? Impossible.

On the other hand, singleplayer is perfectly fine, since I can save and quit whenever I am forced to by outside circumstances.

Obviously, this "evidence" is just anecdotical, but I would love to be directed to some polls/surveys/statistics etc.

Ok why would you have to rewrite TC if you had two players fighting? All the rules and such should be the same as if you were playing the NPC. And personally the MP expereance should be excatly the same as SP. No short cuts to make it faster for the ADD kids I would like the full SP game in the MP.

Never played Demogod or Sins but my question is how many hoops did you have to go through to set up a Multi-player game? Could you host it without having to go to some third party source like in Civ. I have played AOW:SM mp many times yet it was hosted on my PC without having to be logged into some third party server. And personally I perfer not to have to log into a Third party server to play MP and I'm willing to guess that there are a few out there that also don't want to go through the third party server system.

The choice of including MP in FE or in future expansions is hard to justify from a purely financial perspective. Not including the MP feature will cause a reduction in demand only for those MP-fan for whom the MP is an essential feature in game, one without which purchasing the game makes no sense. Admittedly, this is not a large share of the market, and it would hardly cover for 30% of the budget - though this number seems really huge to me.

But the financial perspective is not all, and you guys at Stardocks seem to be the kind of people who put their hearts into games, and care to make things well, and memorable. The small fraction of the market that likes MP does it in a very passionate way. Make a MP expansion for them and they will love you forever.

That said, I believe that it should not be hard to add the possibility for, say, two players to play a non-simultaneous MP game exchanging turns, as in the hot-seat feature of HoMM. It is the same game, you just allow two humans to participate. The AI should also be roughly the same. This could give some opportunity for MP when not many players are involved, and setting a turn time limit could partially balance the increased length of the game. But I am not a programmer, so I may be totally off here.

PS:I do not full get what Frogboy means when he writes "A lot of the feedback we got was that if we weren't going to be able to have tactical battles have multiplayer support then the whole thing would be dissatisfying". What is the MP support for tactical battles? Is it to allow a human to cast spell during someone esle's tactical battle?

PPS: I have just realized that several others had raised some of the above points, sorry for repeating them!

AOW:SM multiplayer has a simultaneous mode and it works pretty good. And that game is pretty old. So your assertion that it can't be done is false. And you do not have to sit through the others TC combat using that mode

Then you have not played a good TBS with good MP. TBS is the one genra that should have multiplayer it is a STRATAGY GAME after all. And lets face it while the AI can be fun it is no match for a real player. I've played TBS MP like AOW:SM and CIV with a mix of Players and AI and these have been by far some of the most fun games. Why wouldn't anyone want the option of multi-player in a TBS game. You don't like MP then you don't use it however I have played MP games where I played multi-factions against the AI too with out another player being there and this was fun as well.

Now of a game company is only going to put in a half-ass MP into the game then I don't want it (as we had in WOM.)

MP should SP but with multiple players. It should have the option for connecting to the host PC with an IP it does not need to have third party server connection but it can.  Hell if they would just allow the IP connect and open up the SP to MP without changing anything except adding Simultaneous battle as in AOW:SM and CIV then I would be happy because this is the MP I like.

I don't get you people. It does not take any more time than playing single player. What 4X MP games have you been playing that takes for ever to play?  My average 4x SP game takes about 2 weeks of time to finish (I only play on the largest map with max Enemies selected.)

With Simultaneous (which any good MP TBS game should have) it takes the same about of time (Sometimes it is even quicker.) Having a timer is nice when playing slower players but I have rarly had need of it.  Keep in mind I do play a lot of SP and MP and I never had these time issues you speak of. But then I rarly play stangers and I mostly play IP when avalable.

What are you talking about. AOW:SM SP and MP is a damn good game. How has it been "ruined"

Maybe because it was designed all wrong?

Even if it's a loud minority, I'm pretty sure that everytime someone brought up the desire to have MP in any 4X game it's always been "Just singleplayer game with MP functionality". I was shocked at first when I was hearing these talks of including wizard duals and no tactical battles in MP... Even remember talks about making EWOM for online competitive play... Huh? It's like the whole design effort of the multiplayer was targetted at the wrong crowd.

It would be like if you had a game that is 'meant' for coop story mode play, but instead all the budget is put on deathmatch maps and gameplay.

Anyways, I'm basically going to end up repeating myself from my early EWOM complaints. But I have to say that this whole, no MP in the foreseeable future is beyond disappointing. Like others here, I lured my friends into getting EWOM so we could finally play a "Master of Magic-y game" in COOP. Not only did we face disapointment on the EWOM launch with it's absent MP, and then released but all wrong. Now it's "oh yeah btw guys no MP for FE, sorry!".

Maybe I had left the forums for too long, but no MP for FE comes out as a surprise. A bad one.

Concerning multi-player.  My principal interest in a multi-player game would be almost strictly cooperative in nature.  I've found that I prefer playing games with friends rather than against strangers.  It isn't because I am not competitive - it is because I have more fun with most co-op games.

I agree that it doesn't take any more time than a SP game.  Do you know how long it takes me to play a SP game?   Let's just say it's not measured in weeks, or days or hours.   So I am not a good MP candidate.  It appears that I may be in the majority demographic however.

I think my assertion is true, you would want to be able to save the MP game and start it up later when all the people were available.   Not an easy process.   If the MP system was similliar to say SoTS where an AI can replace a person, than yeah maybe it would work, but that is not what we have here.

So the question becomes:  Should Stardock invest more time/money/effort to make the MP system work for most players so that even people like me would play, or should they focus on things that everyone will appreciate in the game.   I think that they made the right decision in focusing on better SP features.  Just my opinion.  I am not anti-MP, in the past I played MP on a lot of games, I just found that it was not nearly as good as a good SP experience for me for 4x TBS games.   Other genres, I think lend themselves to MP a little better.

Uhm, unless I'm mistaken you can save an MP game and load it at a later time. It's been so long, I can't actually remember, but I'm pretty sure it's the case for it wouldn't make any sense at all.

Again, there is this strange perception that making the game in MP would require all this extra added stuff that would take away from the SP game. From what I understood the major flaw in how Elemental is coded is that it can't support MP tactical battles. That's the major thing that is required to change, now if it was done right the first time, it wouldn't be an issue.

Also, let's not confuse this debate with that of wanting GalCiv in MP. It's not like people are starting to pop out of the blue asking for MP, it was a flaunted and publicized feature. I'm just getting upset at the fact that since the MP got so little love from the players, they are semi using it as an excuse to drop it. If you build an inneficiant car and people don't buy or use it, it does not mean that people never wanted a car to begin with.

For those enjoy all aspects of MP, and are confused by the near hostility of some towrds you:  There are a lot of people that are "game loners" out there.  For many, the games they play are their lives.  They don't have or don't want others around when they play.  When you hear/read things like "it will take too long", that's loner talk for "real people will be in the game, and I don't like it".

To them, you are doing a direct attack on them when you sussgest MP.  In their minds, it might take something away from their precious hermit game time, and that scares and upsets them.  To them, you are actually tring to steal part of their game.

Fact is, great MP in turn based games has been around for over a decade.  As was written above, Age of Wonders did it; did it GREAT; and did it over 10 years ago.  And anyone who does not see that MP and Co-op are loved by most who have friends/family and wish to share the experience of a great game, or take on a challenge that no AI could ever hope to duplicate, either has blinders on or does'nt play well with others in the first place.

I won't say I/we are boycotting, or anything like that.  But sadly, I'm going to have to tell my friends FE has no MP, and that means none of us will be getting it.  Which is sad. 

MP for this type of game can and has been done.  Stardock said they were going to take as long as it takes to get the game right.  No MP is not "right".  I have no doubt that FE will get much better reveiws than WoM, but, every reveiw you read on FE  when it comes out will most certainly contain something like "FE has no MP".  And they won't be writting that to show how they upped the score, by why they lowered it. . .