Campaign Multiplayer Ideas

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nsg3

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Who doesn't want a multiplayer campaign? Where you and your friends can start their own kingdoms and start an alliance, or war with each other.

The BIG problem I see in implementing this for a decent experience is the TIME CLOCK.

When does the time clock PAUSE, when does it PLAY, when does it FAST FORWARD?
Can anybody just click pause and it pauses for everybody? That wouldn't be cool if they were stopping the clock when you were wanting to fast forward.
So, obviously the time situation is a problem.

So here are some ideas, maybe you could implement them all with ability to turn on/off each option to customize the experience:

1- You can have a "Father Time" - Presumably the host by default. Who can at any time control the clock. So if everybody is calling for a time pause or fast forward, it can be done.

2- Some type of Time Vote system - when players click the time buttons it will cast a vote visible by the other players. if all of the players click the same button within an allotted time then the time will respond accordingly.

3- Timed Pause Periods - You could set values of length of pause, and time between pauses. So, every so often there would be a pause for a specified amount of time. So everybody knows when the break is coming and how much time they will have. You could allow a vote to end the break early if everybody finished what they needed to do.

4- Full Speed Ahead - You could set an option where the clock plays at regular speed non stop. This would obviously be a higher difficulty situation. You would need to consider the time you were spending in your menus, but know that the other players had to spend similar amounts of time in their own. It's really a more realistic battle situation. You don't get to pause time in war to change your outfit.

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Another idea is make it where a 2nd player could join your squad as a companion, or a vassal(that they create) for the entirety of the game. So you would only have the the one kingdom. Even if you could only stay in the same party, it would be better than not being able to play the campaign with a friend at all.


Anybody else have any ideas?
 
I would suggest slowing everything down. Say, make a day last 15 minutes real time. If you get in a battle, you'd only have the remaining time to actually fight it. So, if you catch an army with 6 minutes left to the day, you only have 6 minutes to fight before it resets. Then you would be on the next day, and you have a full 15 minutes to fight it out.

The advantage of this is that friends or enemies could reinforce, or at least get closer to attack your fatigued, wounded army. The downside it would make the game slow and boring. This could be mitigated by having ingame chat, so you are hanging with your friends. Plus you would have to have set times... like 7-9 on certain days. If people back in the old days could schedule their time around TV shows (before streaming), they can do this. Of course you'd also need several servers to manage several battles should they all happen at once.

But it would be awesome if a bunch of friends could be in a faction and form an army with each player controlling a certain arm of the army. Right now it is too hard to try control the basic range, cav and infantry, let alone the subdivisions.

But people have time in the evenings. And just hanging with some random strangers on the internet while your army travels is still better than watching network TV.
 
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