spore multiplayer?

[Billzymcmanlyson]

Originally Posted by TheBlaDk

Yes, also imagine the amount of user-created content that would need to be downloaded before you could enter a server! :O
If you would have a galaxy where you could find all the other peoples empires at least.

Haha, that is a damn good point!

It is not going to happen... but we can dream..

[sirgabrielthehud]

Originally Posted by TheBlaDk

Yes, also imagine the amount of user-created content that would need to be downloaded before you could enter a server! :O
If you would have a galaxy where you could find all the other peoples empires at least.

wow... anybody could answer that! you would only download the content when you discover it!

[TheBlaDk]

Originally Posted by sirgabrielthehud

wow... anybody could answer that! you would only download the content when you discover it!

If you look at the download tab while you're downloading, you'll notice that it usually takes 2-3 seconds for a single creation to be downloaded. I wouldn't like to find a city of undownloaded things...
Ofc it's possible to make some white blocks to replace the creations while they're getting downloaded, but that wouldn't really be so exciting I think.
Also, you need to define discover. Is it when it get's inside your view? Because if you're orbiting a planet and you just need to see that small creature, then fly to the next, then a city of buildings and citizens, then a fleet of ships just because you had to find a special plant, and then fly to another planet where you need to drop it down I can imagine lots of downloads stacking up.

Anyone can answer anything, but comments always have to measured by how thought out they are (not saying mine was).

[sirgabrielthehud]

Originally Posted by TheBlaDk

If you look at the download tab while you're downloading, you'll notice that it usually takes 2-3 seconds for a single creation to be downloaded. I wouldn't like to find a city of undownloaded things...
Ofc it's possible to make some white blocks to replace the creations while they're getting downloaded, but that wouldn't really be so exciting I think.
Also, you need to define discover. Is it when it get's inside your view? Because if you're orbiting a planet and you just need to see that small creature, then fly to the next, then a city of buildings and citizens, then a fleet of ships just because you had to find a special plant, and then fly to another planet where you need to drop it down I can imagine lots of downloads stacking up.

Anyone can answer anything, but comments always have to measured by how thought out they are (not saying mine was).

I got an answer to that too! when you are zooming into a planet as you know it loads for a bit. during that loading proscess you could download any new content! simple!

[TheMrZ]

which would make that loading bit even longer!

It ought to be downloading this content all the time, when it creates a new world it should download all the content for it, not when you get there!

[g9w82]

TheMrZ, in dispute of your points on the earlier page about traders in the civ stage and friendly creatures in the creature stage, traders buy cities. They pay, and trade routes give money to both groups as well. Making friends in the creature stage could help you progress- this could be like normal Spore with just the AI controlled things being controlled by other people!

[TheMrZ]

Ok then, proceed to be whooped:

The point I am making is that all the peaceful interactions rely on the co-operation of the 2nd party, and their attitude towards you.

Consider Civ stage trading:

You have one city, and someone wishes to set up a trade route with you. You will get money from this, so all very well.
However, as we know to advance beyond Civ stage one must take over other cities, and hence traders must be able to buy them as currently.

You have one city, as you only ever start with one city, and you have a trade route for financial benefit. The trader now reaches the stage where they are able to make an offer to purchase your city.

What value will you accept for your city? None! You will not accept any price as if you do, you will lose your city and be out of the game! You will never get to use that money, so there is no incentive to accept any offer, and accepting any offer will make you lose, so you will refuse any offer.

There is no threat in refusing any offer, as a trader is unable to attack you. Even if they could, potential defeat is much better than certain and instantaneous defeat.

If you have multiple cities you may sell one to the Trader for a sizeable sum to spend that on military vehicles and conquest, but if you do then you will probably use them to attack him at a later date!

To solve this you would have to make the player unable to refuse the offer, simply making the trader player guess the amount as currently in game. However, the player will know this threat and simply not accept the trade route. If that is made involuntary, then they will protect themselves by instantly declaring war on any Traders.

Also there is no threat involved in attacking a Trader, as they have no combat capabilities beyond their turrets, at worst it will cost you a bit of money for the units which you will reclaim when you take over their city and add it to your income flow.

Hence a trader will never win Civ stage in multilayer if it is not altered significantly.


Now onto creature:

If a creature has only social parts in creature, and tried to befriend a combat creature, the combat player will see no benefit to allying, as the social creature is unable to help it in combat. However there is benefit to attacking: he gets easy food and DNA points, and there is little to no threat of defeat.

The only way there would be benefit to a combat player of letting a social player befriend him is if he too received DNA, and more than if he hunted the social creature. Now consider the advantages of being social over combat: no one will wish to hunt a social creature as they gain more DNA by befriending, so there is little to no chance of anyone ever attacking you (unless they're new to the game, in which case you can run to the safety of a more experienced combat creature)

Hence you are likely to find people queuing up to befriend you, progressing you rapidly to tribal, and no risk of attack.

As a combat creature however you will risk being attacked by more powerful combat creatures, and will have a harder time gaining DNA as other combat creatures will be reluctant to let you kill them for the DNA points, they receive no benefit from dying so will fight back.

There will be a huge advantage one way or the other without, as I said already, a significant shake-up.





The problems arise purely from motives: in all cases, there is a clear and sizeable advantage to taking one option over the other, and so the vast majority of players will choose that option.

For spore to work as a multiplayer game, there must be advantages and disadvantages to each option, or clear advantages of working together with any type of creature and NPCs as hostiles to work against together.

[Rocoty]

What about the stages that only happens on your home planet. For example the creature stage.

If you are in your OWN solar system with your OWN home planet, why should other peoples creature stages be on YOUR home planet?

Just think about it... If they have their own home planet, and you have your own home planet.........

[sirgabrielthehud]

Ah! I just noticed a mistake here! thousands of creatures on one planet but just one to evolve to space? maybe there could be something I call "battlefields" it will be a planet that changes color to your need but not the shape. a battlefield planet is invisible in the space stage. and in civilization and tribal stage you wouldnt have to conquer everyone. jsut a certain amount until you evolve into the space stage and get your own planet.

[sirgabrielthehud]

And also it could download everything all the time in order of how near you are to it.

[TheMrZ]

So the creature stage is you alone on a planet, but tribal and civ there are others to compete with?

The fact of the matter is this: in tribal and civ, you want to be the one to make it to space stage. To manage this, you should go up against anyone who will make it to space stage before you. No one will want to lose, so they will all gang up on the closest few to space. Hence to reach space, you need to basically defeat everyone (at least long enough to capture enough cities to reach space)

You haven't addressed any of the space stage problems either: space stage is all about getting valuable systems and acquiring systems off each other, so you need to be able to conquer systems, but equally you need your systems to stay safe

[TheBlaDk]

Originally Posted by sirgabrielthehud

I got an answer to that too! when you are zooming into a planet as you know it loads for a bit. during that loading proscess you could download any new content! simple!

Have you really thought that answer out?
If you read my message, it took 2-3 seconds to download each creation. Now, you just stick all these downloads together each time you visit a planet, instead of distributing them when you're on the planet.
Let's say there are 4 different buildings, 1 civ species, 9 animals and 3 different vechiles, even though different civs use different buildings.
That's 4 + 1 + 9 + 3 = 17 creations. That would take more than 30 seconds to download.

Welcome to the planet. You have to wait 30 seconds before you can enter the atmosphere.
Well, then you'll need a really exciting loading screen...

[TheMrZ]

I feel a little animation showing your ship burning through the atmosphere on entry would be a pretty good loading screen, especially if the camera panned around a bit and you could see peeks at the surface through the clouds.

[TheBlaDk]

Yes, or even an entire mini-game about hitting the atmosphere at the right angle... For planets with atmospheres ofc.

[TheMrZ]

Why another mini-game? If you're going to include that, then make it so you fly your ship around the system and down into the atmosphere and to surface level all in the same control mode. There should be plenty of time while you're doing that to load.

Also, it varies depending on the shape of your ship! Though I wouldn't expect Spore to be capable of discovering the optimum angle for a fast entry with varying atmospheres and ship designs.

[TheBlaDk]

No, I wasn't really serious about that.
I don't think mulitplayer Spore is a good idea.

[TheMrZ]

Neither do I...well, I think there are ways it could work, but you'd need to totally change many of the stages.

Either you could have it multiplayer as in a few players, in which case you could adjust the current stages so they are all paying (eg in creature they are all the same species, you'd have to remove the followers or make it harder to compensate) or add in minigames.

Or it could be an MMO, in which case you'd need a radical structure shake-up. For a start having direct control of your empire militarily would have to go: You couldn't just choose who to attack and when, or else you'll get people ganging up to wipe out other empires overnight, you'd have to have battles given out by an AI confederacy of races which all the members of that confederacy get to join in.

[Stitch1200]

i suck
yeah*





*note i didn't write this it was my little sis

[TheMrZ]

hey, now don't be harsh on yourself, that's our job!

It's not you suck, it's that this thread is essentially a trap to lure you into suckiness. Spore just wont work well as a multilayer game, suggesting ways it could is just opening yourself up to people pointing out all the numerous flaws.

You'd really need to rebuild it from the ground up.

[Victor_Portella]

I don't know if it was already said here coz i didn't read all posts, but i have an idea on how could the problem be solved in case of defending an empire from others, each server could represent a home planet, i mean, in the tribal stages, we can make only allies, and even wining this stage this way, in the space stage, we can only play with 1 race per planet, instead, they could make possible to other players in the same server make alliances and war in the home planet and reach the space stage and help defending the planet from the hostiles and conquer space together, perhaps creating some clans for each solar system, and they could create a use for the goodies you extract from the planets, for example, the green stuff is good to make weapons, the red one is for food, the pink, to make spaceships, the blue could be to make tools for colonization and so on... i guess it's a great idea to make the game more interesting and not to repetitive as it actually is in the space stage

[TheMrZ]

in tribal you can befriend or destroy other tribes.

Having multiple players per empire means you don't get to design your species yourself, and have no control over the empire you are playing for, thus being nothing like current Space Stage, yet still having all the problems associated with multiplayer.

Also, there's still the issue of a planet or empire getting swamped. Clan-like organisations are usually predominantly made of people from a single continent due to the similarity in time zones. Hence, players in Europe can demolish US empires due to GMT being over 8 hours ahead of some parts of the US, and morning in Europe being midnight in the US and afternoon in Europe being midday (work time) in the US.
similarly in the evening predominantly European planets will be at the mercy of US ones when it reaches afternoon at the Eastern seaboard, as it's almost midnight in Europe and so everyone will be turning off.

Also, there's still the issue of larger clans simply swamping smaller ones with masses of ships.

The problem is that Space stage Empires mean conquest, and conquest means conquering someone else. And conquering someone else means someone is getting conquered. All the time.

Empire's cannot merely vanish off the map, long with all their systems, or become invincible when you're not online, as there needs to be someone to conquer, so in multiplayer Spore you can be conquered while offline.

As I've said, you need to completely rethink the game mechanics for Spore to work as a multiplayer game.

For spore to work as a multiplayer game it would have to be fully converted to an MMO, not half-heartedly so by simply allowing lots of people to play in one save.

[Stitch1200]

Why not have is so spore is a game were there is your galixy And you hook up to your friends one then poof your empire is there. up to 30 people in one galixy.

the other stages the same but with others.

[TheMrZ]

And then what? you empire is controlled by an NPC in their game, or by you yourself?

How would the game play work? as it is now, or adjusted to some end?

What would be the idea, what's the objective? you just all play together? sounds like a bit of a gimmick, or a trick people will use to get achievements like wipe out the Grox.

How does diplomacy work with other players? Is there diplomacy with other players?

[Rankrotten]

Yes, what about the Grox online? They could be wiped out A LOT quicker.

[GuardianVI]

I think what OP is saying is that he or she wishes that there could be more interaction between players in-game, which there could.

Of course playing the same galaxy is impractical and would cause a lot of problems and would not be worth it really.
Maybe a screen with a chat room in it, and you can have a private room for your friends and stuff, of course your game will pause so you don't get smashed up while you chat but that would make the game a little more fun to play.

But something that is most certain is that the game needs to get players interacting more in-game rather than out of the game, it would make the game w hole lot more fun to play