Great game; poor multiplayer

[Knight]

After playing lots and lots, I've found a few quirks, most of which have been mentioned and will be corrected with subsequent releases. All in all, a good way to fail a semester.

BUT multiplayer stinks worse than the CD. If you PBEM, it's fine. I am not up to playing a turn a day for a year, though--my attention span just doesn't cut it. Failing a networked game ala Civilization, I have a couple of suggestions:

1) When you finish a "different machines" turn, SE4 saves a file and immediately quits. Likewise after the Host/gamemaster processes the turns. If this isn't a bug, it is an annoying feature. I'd much rather SE4 quit to the start screen so you could immediately start another turn.

2) Rather than PBEM or communicating directly to the host, I'd like to be able to use something like www.xdrive.com a little more transparently. (Xdrive being an Online virtual drive capable of being seen by many at once.) The process would be something like:
a. Save game file to Xdrive
b. Individual machines grab file and
generate orders for the turn.
c. Host waits for all the individual
orders to be saved to xdrive.
d. Host automatically processes turn.
e. Goto a.
(Ewww. Flashback to basic.)
Pretty please, Aaron?

[Seawolf]

Knight,

I don't think this was meant to be a networked game.

------------------
Seawolf on the prowl

[TankGirl]

I couldn't agree more Knight. I must say that after seeing how well the rest of the game was done, I was kind of shocked to see how poorly the multiplayer functionality was handled. On the up side it would not be all that difficult or time consuming to add the sort of functionality you're suggesting... Just allow each of the "clients" to specify one central location for the master game file and the host automatically processes and updates it. This wouldn't even need to take comms protocols into consideration... just paths and polling for file updates. Hopefully MM will see fit to add something like this soon or I'm afraid this otherwise great game may have a short life-span on my hard drive, since Stars Supernova Genesis isn't all that far away...

------------------
Be seeing you (in my GPS)

TankGirl