automationgame.com

hi,

i've used the search function but couldn't find anything specific about how the multiplayer mode will really turn out.
there was a long discussion about real time vs. turn based which got me thinking:

have you thought about making multiplayer mode to work like it does in those online browser games where the game progresses over a relatively long time?
for example a game takes one month, which would mean about 2.5 years pass every real day and you don't have to be constantly online to play it.

because a tycoon style game like this is relatively slow paced and a traditional online mode where you set up matches to play in one evening don't really work
over a time frame of 74 years.

setting it up as a long term online game would mean everybody could log on and off as they please and we could have games with great numbers of players making for interesting competition.
thus it could run pretty much exactly like singleplayer mode except with real people instead of ai.


cheers,
stonelouse

Pretty interesting idea, the consistent-world approach would definitely make it feel larger, but there are quite a few problems I see with it:
- Players that have no life will have a clear advantage as they can better time when they do things.
- A game that starts off with full player count (16 for instance) would quickly drop as people screw up and leave or get bored and leave, in turn making it boring for the remaining players.
- A persistent world needs servers to run the game, as it cannot practically be hosted by players. This costs time and money.
- Time moving that slowly means there is a very limited amount of things you can do every time you get on.
- Everyone having loads of time to design engines and cars means the most anal of players will have an upper hand, instead of those who can make good decisions on the fly.

1. players without any life will ALWAYS have an advantage...
an easy way to counter that would be that the customers would start favouring other car makers when one gets a huge amount of market share.
like in the real world certain cars are superior to others, yet other cars still get bought because some people don't like certain manufacturers or don't want to drive the same car that everybody else drivers.

2. the game should be open to enter at any time, so people would still be able get into the game later on. if there are not too many games to choose from, people will join even if its say the year 2000 already.
or if someone goes bankrupt, he can close his company and start a new one in the same game. also the number of these open games should depend on demand, so a new game only gets opened when the others are nearly full.

3. these servers should not cause huge amounts of traffic or do they? all that gets transmitted are a few statistics. you create a model, the stats get transmitted and every couple of minutes you get the information about market share and other people's models. it doesn't need to be updated every millisecond like in a shooter or something.

4. the time scale needs to be well thought out. but think about it, if you have a regular company that has around 10 car models which get updated every 5-10 years or so you would already need to design
3-6 cars every day. thats already quite a lot. if anything the time should run slower.
however, the user really can influence the amount of work himself by choosing what kind of company he runs. if you run a smaller company like porsche, you need to design say only 1 car per day on average,
if you run something like ford you would need to design 10 cars a day.

5. as i said in points 1 and 4, hardcore players will always have an advantage, no matter how you set up the game, yet you can counter that by a. adjusting time scale to balance it out and b. let the customers want some diversity on the market. just like in reality where people still by french cars, even if the german or japanese ones are much much better.

I think you've got a good point here. I see this as a valuable addition to the game, IF worked out correctly. A bit balancing here and there could make this turn out good. Only thing left, is the servers to run/maintain. But I'm sure there is also a solution to that.