IMHO SE4 did achieve both good SP and MP (pbem is a blast with this game !). It took some patches and mods to have good AI, but now it works very well, the scripted AI systems allowed for big progress.

But I understand Stardock's choice of focusing on SP with a background story/plot rather than trying to please everyone, make a less good SP and a so-so MP as too much games are actually...

I for one would support a MP version of the game at some later date, but I'm certainly not going to hold my breath for it. GC looks like it can devliver on its promises well enough as a SP game. Too many games make too many promises these days.

GCMP sounds like an excellent future project, however, and one I would be very interested in!

I bet 90% of the players here would never even play the game multiplayer. And regular players would be even less likely.

People desperate for a 4X MP game can go play Civ play the world. Gee that game turned out swell too. Or try HOMM 4 multiplayer...

Do you know HOW much people disliked HOMM4 in compare to HOMM3? I'm one of them.

Solitair... EU and EU2 AI is horrible.

Jythier,
AI in EU is very subjective depending on how you play. Remember that the AI is designed to behave like a 13th-18th century ruler. If you go for world domination then the AI just can't handle it and is unable to stop you. It's not designed to! It's not a very intelligent AI because there are often 100+ AI's within the game. Imagine the CPU power needed to add lots of intelligence. The game would not play real time. If only 5 countries existed then I would expect a far superior AI.

That said there are some improvements which would be nice. An upper level alliance AI which monitored the human players and created alliances of groups of AI countries to contain them would be very very good. At the moment the human player can easily divide and conquer. Groups of AI's should behave more like a single AI with coordinated attacks, and should have a larger fraction of time to work out strategies.

Paul.

I always wonder why AI's do silly things like putting their troops in provinces that can't hope to support that many, or walking back and forth, or in MoO3, the building lots of tranports... wish I was a better programmer that I could figure it out.

One of the problems with AI's is that to be intelligent they have to perform lots of possibilities. We do it automatically and take it for granted. The more AI players the worse the problem gets. Sure, there are often stupid AI mistakes that usually get rectified in patches (EU2 1.08 patch should stop most of the sitting troops in provinces which kill them - but this did happen in history! Think Napoleon!), but in general most weak AI's are weak because the developer needed to decide between priorities. Many developers just go for multi player. Thankfully Stardock have decided that a decent AI is a major priority and focussed lots of effort on this. Multi threading also helps greatly allowing the AI to consider far more possibilities before it needs to act.

Paul.

Multiplayer is great except for the other people.

hey frogboy!
Why don't you invent an artifical human playerwho is samrt, you could call him a.i. LOL hehe

I'm very glad galciv is single player, i think you would have had to cripple the game a lot to be multi-player.

a bit of history, my first multiplayer game was at 300baud, there were no checks to see if people could hit keys faster than others, i would be cruising around in my battleship, and somebody in the computer center with a 9600baud terminal would kill me before i had even noticed he was there...

rich

That's really what the GalCiv AI is designed for. To simulate real human beings in gameplay.

Minus the disconnects and profanity that is.

he he

did you see the jpeg i sent cari?

'Minus the disconnects and profanity that is.'

And general immaturity. I find it moderately amusing that children are frequently more mature than their parents (IME)....

It could be funny to make one on the AI's in the game child like! Every so often you receive a message from the Dregin cursing you and profaning about how your starbase refuses to die when he attacks it!

Paul.

An AI that screams CHEATER when you lose, even if you didn't cheat...

I love turn-based space strategy games like BOTF. And I'm very glad that the AI is so great, but ... I would really enjoy playing this with a friend. Now you are saying that everyone voted for no mp and better AI. ok but I really can't understand why you can't do both, it's not like you have to do more if you add mp, you're CPU would just have less to do. And implementing mp
isn't that hard either, even if the game drops out somethimes, you can (like botf does) implement a auto-save function that's saves every few turns. Not that you can use this as an excuse for louse netcode. And I love the fact that the game takes so long, even in mp, it doesn't matter that you play a few hours everyday. Anyway it looks like a lot of fun to play, adding the mp option would only make me more eager to buy it...
greetz
ps when will we see botf with some descent AI?????

...and without MP, once this game comes out, how am I going to explain to my friends where I've gone???

Pursuade them all to buy the game and see for themselves.