A question for Civ II MP'ers

[Ghengis Brom]

I've played Civ II but never Civ II MP. I now play Civ III exclusively. Can someone who lpays Civ II MP answer a couple of questions?

1. How long does the average Civ II multiplayer game take to play?

2. What seems to cause the greatest amount of lag time during an MP game?

3. What, if any, problems do you have coordinating play time with an opponent?

4. How often do you actually get to finish an MP game?

As I said, I've never played Civ II MP and I don't have any plans to. The reason for my questions are that I'm trying to understand what Civilization II Multiplayer is like, pros and cons, so that I have a better understanding of what Civ III MP may be like (if it's ever released), and what kind of game-play.improvments should be expected.

[ColdWizard]

Originally posted by Ghengis Brom
1. How long does the average Civ II multiplayer game take to play?

depends on the type of game (duels or not, map size, etc.) duels can be very short (30 min to hours). diplo games can last for months. the more players there are, the longer the games take

2. What seems to cause the greatest amount of lag time during an MP game?

i seldom experience lag in the few games that i play (with 56k dialup). i believe that it depends mainly on the connection of the host.

3. What, if any, problems do you have coordinating play time with an opponent?

i do not engage in regular games. my schedule is such that i cannot reliably make a given time and therefor will not make a commitment that i may not be able to keep. i play what i term as one-night stands, play when available and continue if possible (and if practical, *glances in rah's general direction*)

4. How often do you actually get to finish an MP game?

depends on what you mean by finish. given my skill (or lack of) it's generally fairly obvious who will win (aka not me ). games lasting into the modern age seem fairly rare, except for diplo games.



i far prefer Civ2 MP (despite never winning) to civ3 SP, it's a lot more fun

[Flatlander Fox]

CW answered most of the questions efficiently, but I'll add a comment:

Civ3MP will not be possible without one big, hefty supercomputer and a high speed connection. Even then it will be sloooowww. Too many packets to be sent, and not enough space to send them in.

I shudder to think how long some of the more mundane factors in the game will take. The game takes forever in SP, it will be horrifically long ( ) in MP.

Why do you think that Firaxis cannot come up with MP right now? But when they DO come out with it, it hopefully will eliminate many of the problems that it's predecessor had.

[Jac de Molay]

Good point about the reqs for playing Civ 3 MP. Us "old-fashioned' civ 2 types may be waiting quite a while to play Civ3 MP. I hope they fix the problems with OS compatibility I seem to notice.

Dave