Is TCP/IP Supported?

[cato13]

i couldnt agree more with what timewalker just said. i think the key word here is "CHOICE". ive noticed (and not just on these forums) a lot of snobbery for want of a better word from so called hardened/grognards wargamers who seem to sneer at the thought that people might want to a play a game such as this over a network connection. comments such as "go play warcraft" get thrown into the debate which does come across as bein very pretentious.

ive no idea what the sales figures are for EIA or most other games on these forums but there may very well be hundreds of players who would like the option of playin over a network but who are overlooked cos the feature isnt there.

[fvianello]

Some food for thought (hopefully):

Assuming 1 hour of gameplay with 7 human players, on average you will spend time as follows:

8 minutes playing your phase
52 minutes waiting for others to play their phase

[cato13]

yeah i realise as ive said previously that with the current turn system in EIA then tcp play aint gonna be much better. its just a shame that the game wasnt designed with this in mind, like COG for example which has tcp and a wego turn system

[timewalker03]

ORIGINAL: HanBarca

Some food for thought (hopefully):

Assuming 1 hour of gameplay with 7 human players, on average you will spend time as follows:

8 minutes playing your phase
52 minutes waiting for others to play their phase

That is where if you really wanted to create a fun environment add a voice service to your game. That way if a person is working on his/her turn then people could talk or conduct the side diplomacy that goes on. Also if people were intelligent players, then before the first turn of the session they would have worked out a plan for their first turn and a couple of contingencies if theirs is scuttled due to unforeseen actions. I remember before Going over to Dave's house who was the person where the game was kept under glass, my roommate and I would have planned our strategies and contingencies and most diplomacy was conducted before we all arrived. The other thing in every game I have played is that when the world is not at war, then the game moves much quicker than your 8/52 example above. Now if the players are inexperienced then yeah it may take longer. Also if this is the case, then how in the world did anyone ever complete an 1805-1815 grand campaign. Unless you played for days straight by the 8/52 rule of Han Barca The game would take 1/hour = 12 hours/ year for all to complete 12 turns and 120 hours/game. So if you played 3 hours per week it would take 40 weeks to complete a grand campaign.I know I never played in a 40 week campaign and we played 3 hours every week for 3 weeks per month with one week off. One last thing about this is why is it such a bad idea to implement this if some people want to play this way. It seems that some are so against this that they would do everything they could to influence otherwise. Like make up stupid game time play examples. If all you play the game for is to show how tactically literate you are then PBEM may be the best for you. If you like the company of others albeit not FtF then TCP/IP will be the way to go.

Also a ventrilo voice server is $5 per month for 20 people to use at one time.

[fvianello]

Timewalker, that's not an opinion. It's a division.

[timewalker03]

A division/opinion is irrelevant either way. Each game group will move at their own speed. Offer TCP/IP and the choice will be yours not to play it. If you champion PBEM and don't care about TCP/IP then you won't use the feature. I know I have 7 people I know today who would use it staring tomorrow. We are all scattered across the US, and this would allow us to play like we used to.

[zaquex]

ORIGINAL: moopere

ORIGINAL: zaquex

ORIGINAL: HanBarca

Too bad I cannot post polls, I'd be really curious to see how many among the TCP/IP fans have actually tried to play a game with other 6 human players.

This is a in my oppinion strange question. Could you elaborate on what you want to know and for what purpose this question is relevant.

Probably two possible aspects of relevance (though I'm not the original poster):

1) Its hard getting even 2-3-4 known guys who are not physically located at the same house/club/whatever to participate at known times for known lengths of time via tcp/ip - look at any tcpip multiplayer games for proof of this...RTW/NTW2/M2TW even World of Warcraft. Generally tcp/ip seems to work best at collecting ad-hoc players together for reasonably quick (1-2 hour) games of something.


2) I've not personally tried PBEM yet, but perhaps its not a difficult as some are proposing. Time consuming yes, but then, this is not a game thats meant to be started and finished within the same evening.

Regards,
Moopere

It is strange how PBEM fanatics seem to be so terrified as soon as TCP/IP is mentioned. I would really like to hear good arguments to why a TCP/IP solution would be so bad. Personally I think there must be a big misconception on what a client server solution can do.

Playing a TCP/IP based game with more than 6 participants is in itself nothing strange; millions of players do it every day. And there shouldn’t be any unsolvable technical issues with a TCP/IP implementation. I sometimes play a game where up towards 30k concurrent connections is common.

I personally think that EiA is much more suitable for TCP/IP. Marshall has been forced to make radical compromises to try to make EiA remotely possible as a PBEM game. We are approaching a point where further time saving changes would compromise the fundamentals of what makes EiA such a classic game.

Despite this we are still looking at a game where a reasonable 24h response time will on average give you one or possibly two turn files a week. The majority of these turns you finish in less than 10 minutes. Each turn will probably take you 10 minutes of administration (loading programs, downloading your mails, copying files, ziping/unziping files, attaching files to mails etc).

This ratio of “fun” will be experienced for the next 10+ years if this is the pace you progress, IF you manage to play the game to its end. I'm sorry, no matter how much I love EiA, I think I will have more fun and less frustration doing something else.

TCP/IP will not solve all of these issues. It will however remove the administration part; it will make it possible to implement a more interactive way to play diplomacy and naval etc, if so desired. It will make it more or less impossible to get away with reload, iteration or edit cheats. It will provide a way to play the game in an FtF like pace, if and when you can gather all the players. As long as there is a stable and reliable server, the players will never be worse off than with a PBEM game.


Regards



zaq

[NeverMan]

ORIGINAL: HanBarca

Some food for thought (hopefully):

Assuming 1 hour of gameplay with 7 human players, on average you will spend time as follows:

8 minutes playing your phase
52 minutes waiting for others to play their phase

This is true, but it's the same for F2F and worse for PBEM.

PBEM: 8 minutes playing your phase
possibly a few days or more waiting for others to play their phase

It's not like with TCP/IP you have to be stuck to the computer or even only staring at EiA waiting, you can "multitask".

BOTTOM LINE: No matter how you want to slice it, TCP/IP does NOT slow the game down, it only gets as slow as PBEM in the worst case scenario and as fast as F2F in the best case scenario.

[moopere]

ORIGINAL: zaquex

Playing a TCP/IP based game with more than 6 participants is in itself nothing strange; millions of players do it every day.

I'm not a big gamer in general so this surprises me. For my benefit, can you name a single title where about 6 known players all arrive at their computers at the same time for the same length of time in order to game together as a game of this type requires?

ORIGINAL: zaquex
And there shouldn’t be any unsolvable technical issues with a TCP/IP implementation. I sometimes play a game where up towards 30k concurrent connections is common.

The issue that I was referring to (even if no-one else) is not technical its human. I've been campaigning and fighting one-off battles in the Napoleonic Total War2 (NTW2) community for quite some time now and I can tell you first hand that getting known players to all come together at the same time to fight out battles is extremely difficult....nearly impossible in fact.

Now, of course, different communities are different in how they approach these types of things and it may well turn out that the EiANW community could be relied upon to be punctual...I wouldn't presume that my personal experience is necessarily indicative of all communities.

Regards, Moopere

[zaquex]

ORIGINAL: moopere

ORIGINAL: zaquex

Playing a TCP/IP based game with more than 6 participants is in itself nothing strange; millions of players do it every day.

I'm not a big gamer in general so this surprises me. For my benefit, can you name a single title where about 6 known players all arrive at their computers at the same time for the same length of time in order to game together as a game of this type requires?

Its fairly common in games like EVE, WoW, CS etc but its besides the point there is no requirement to have 7 players online for the game to progress no more than it is for a PBEM game and it will never progress slower than a PBEM game.

ORIGINAL: moopere

ORIGINAL: zaquex
And there shouldn’t be any unsolvable technical issues with a TCP/IP implementation. I sometimes play a game where up towards 30k concurrent connections is common.

The issue that I was referring to (even if no-one else) is not technical its human. I've been campaigning and fighting one-off battles in the Napoleonic Total War2 (NTW2) community for quite some time now and I can tell you first hand that getting known players to all come together at the same time to fight out battles is extremely difficult....nearly impossible in fact.

Now, of course, different communities are different in how they approach these types of things and it may well turn out that the EiANW community could be relied upon to be punctual...I wouldn't presume that my personal experience is necessarily indicative of all communities.

Regards, Moopere

I understand it can be dificult to get 7 players online at the same time and how difficult this would be is to a certain degree dependent on the age, location and working/family conditions of the different players.

But again the point seems to be missed. A TCP/IP game enables a possibility to play the game faster it doesnt make the game slower or more difficult to play, at worst it would be played at PBEM speed.

[cato13]

the paradox series of games (EU, HOI) regularly have sessions once a week where 6+ players play for a few hours so it does happen. is there any official word on this? are we ever gonna see tcp play in EIA or any future games that are similar?

[fvianello]

Its fairly common in games like EVE, WoW, CS etc but its besides the point there is no requirement to have 7 players online for the game to progress no more than it is for a PBEM game and it will never progress slower than a PBEM game.

Actually, it will be slower.
A PBEM game does not require to have all 7 people online at the same time; if one player is missing, the others can play their phase and the game will proceed up until the missing player phase.

In a TCP/IP game, you cannot even start unless all players are online.

[timewalker03]

ORIGINAL: tonedog

the paradox series of games (EU, HOI) regularly have sessions once a week where 6+ players play for a few hours so it does happen. is there any official word on this? are we ever gonna see tcp play in EIA or any future games that are similar?

Not as long as people continue to toot the horn of PBEM. There seems to be a lot of resistance to this feature and until Matrix sees that there is enough people who want it then it will not happen. Matrix is truly slow to respond to any requests and the best example of this was the tutorial. Instead of launching with one it took the a month plus to finally agree reluctantly even still to implement the forthcoming tutorial. Matrix will be slow to respond to the implementation of TCP/IP as am embedded feature in the game. As you see they put their stock in the PBEM feature and let the AI go to the wayside which baffles me since this is a computer game which was developed over 5+ years.

As long as you have people like HanBarca who act like they know the answer even before the feature is implemented and those crappy arguments is what Matrix will hang their hat on as long as they can. It is easy for people like him to make arguments that TCP/IP will fail because there is no proof to the contrary since Matrix has no intention of implementing this feature anytime soon. Look at this game if you will. 1 Programmer over 5 years developed this game and at release the game had so many bugs and fixes needed that the first patch had over 70 corrections to the game. The game has sub standard AI and that is a tragedy since this is a "computer" game. The whole focus has been on the PBEM feature of this game and people champion the method of play as the only way to play as you have seen in this thread and others over the years. It is sad that TCP/IP continues to be put down and that people exact their expertise without ever one game played using this method. In fact the sad thing is people are saying it would take to long and giving time/turn examples without any proof.

As long as the short sighted people continue to weigh in and Matrix continues to ignore those of us who want the TCP/IP feature then it will be a dream for us. I have already put this game on the shelf and consider it a waste of 70 of my hard earned dollars. I will continue to watch its development and as I have stated earlier have a group of 7 people waiting on TCP/IP play. When the day comes I will pull the game off the shelf reinstall it and enjoy it with my friends.

[zaquex]

ORIGINAL: HanBarca

Its fairly common in games like EVE, WoW, CS etc but its besides the point there is no requirement to have 7 players online for the game to progress no more than it is for a PBEM game and it will never progress slower than a PBEM game.

Actually, it will be slower.
A PBEM game does not require to have all 7 people online at the same time; if one player is missing, the others can play their phase and the game will proceed up until the missing player phase.

In a TCP/IP game, you cannot even start unless all players are online.

where do you get this misconception from?

[timewalker03]

He is making it up as he goes along. He has no facts because there are none. This method of play does not exist. Also if people choose to play at a faster pace and the world is not at war you can do 12 months in an hour in a FtF game and would be probable in a live TCP/IP game. or as many as the computer connection will allow between the 7 players.

[fvianello]

ORIGINAL: zaquex

where do you get this misconception from?

How are you going to play a EiA tcp/ip game if France player is missing?

[timewalker03]

ORIGINAL: HanBarca

ORIGINAL: zaquex

where do you get this misconception from?

How are you going to play a EiA tcp/ip game if France player is missing?

HanBarca when you played FtF games with your friends did you have players missing each time you played? You must not have much faith in humans to continually bring this up or are you the one who would bail on a game?

Why do you assume France will be missing? I believe the people who will play TCP/IP will have a personal investment in the game because the TCP/IP will allow for realtime communication unlike emails being sent back and forth. I realize PBEM allows those marginal players to skip out on games easily since the communication is sterile and impersonal because of using emails. PBEM allows for a great amount of anonomous play. TCP/IP would be a more personal method of play allowing for better diplomacy (realtime) greater increasing the importace and enjoyment of the diplomatic "back stab". I do believe with all of the interested players at least in the United States it would be easy to find 7 consistant players to play the game and live up to a schedule. If it can be done in FtF games with people having to drive to other peoples houses and dedicate the time necessary for travel and play it can be done with people going from their kitchen to the computer which is by far a lot less travel time then driving someplace.

[cato13]

i certainly wont be spendin £30 for what is essentially a pbem game as it stands. if matrix have a reason for not implementing tcp play in most of their games the fair enough, who am i to knock em im just statin a fact thats all. and im sure in not alone.

and what is FtF?

[fvianello]

I presume FtF stands for "Face to Face"

[Froonp]

ORIGINAL: tonedog

i certainly wont be spendin £30 for what is essentially a pbem game as it stands. if matrix have a reason for not implementing tcp play in most of their games the fair enough, who am i to knock em im just statin a fact thats all. and im sure in not alone.

Same for me.
I have a friend who bought the game, and began a 7 player PBEM game, and the game crawls at the rate of 1 turn a week. Given there are 120 turns in the game, they'll finish in 120 weeks, that is more than 2 years.