Stellaris Dev Diary #23 - Multiplayer

[Alexivan]

Good news everyone!

Today’s Dev Diary will be about Multiplayer and what makes it so great in Stellaris.

Let's start with the basics. Players are able to host games with 32 player designed empires and optionally, several extra randomized AI empires. If you have a new person who would like to join an ongoing campaign they can hotjoin into an already existing empire. This also allows the players to leave or take a break from the ongoing multiplayer campaign and leave their empire in the capable hands of the AI. The host may also choose to host a multiplayer game from a save game allowing players to play grand campaigns lasting several weeks.

One of our longstanding issues with multiplayer is that clients desynchronize, which is usually solved by having the host rehost the game, but this can be quite a menace when playing multiplayer with 20+ people, so we’ve decided that this is an issue we should prioritize higher in Stellaris. Thanks to persistent testing and fixing of out-of-syncs as soon as they happen, we’ve managed to make Stellaris our most stable multiplayer experience yet, allowing us to run stable multiplayer with up to and probably more than 32 players. We test our multiplayer stability weekly by playing multiplayer with our betas and the developers on the project, and it’s loads of fun.

We’ve designed Stellaris with a couple of things which affects the multiplayer experience which you might want to know.

One of them is that empires have a relationship value of other empires, but the value doesn’t decide the options a player can take against another empire but decides the responses AI controlled countries gives to your requests, demands and offers.

Another thing which Stellaris has that our other grand strategy games don’t is a symmetrical and randomized start, this means that in a multiplayer game everyone starts on more or less equal terms. This makes the game, in our experience, more competitive and a lot of fun. Will you be able to claim ownership of that specifically resource rich system before your neighbor? Or should you enter an alliance to stop a specific neighbor from expanding in your direction?

One more thing which affects the multiplayer experience on an early stage is that players are anonymous until you have established communications with their empires, making you unable to know whether the first aliens you meet will be your greatest allies or your worst enemies.

Next week is all about the AI.

 

[Wizzington]

Wait, wasnt it confirmed Wiz started working on the AI only recently? theirs already going to be a dev diary about it?

I'm not the only person who has been working on Stellaris AI.

 

[Jormungandur]

Is the MP testing all done between people in the same building, or have you been doing tests with players scattered around the country/continent/planet, with varying connection speeds as well? IIRC, the initial EU4 MP was planned to do what you describe, and did so in the dev MP games, but failed when players tried to do those sorts of big games and hotjoin over the open internet.

We've had some pretty large MP-games where we've mixed players from our office and people from outside Sweden/Europe, working fine.

 

[Jormungandur]

Will it be possible to play as part of a federation with more than one human? Imagine the plotting possibilities.

And if you lose a war and become a vassal, you can remain in the game as long as you're not annexed, I guess?

Yes, and yes.

 

[Alexivan]

Since wargoals are chosen before the war starts, do we also have some kind of surrender rule?

Can the defender give up 100% of the wargoal and stop the war immediately?

Both sides of a war can surrender and end the war instantly by agreeing to all the demands of the opponent side.

I often play EU games with only one friend. Kind of SP experience mixed with skype talking and stuff. Will we have the possibility to force a start close to each other? Because you mentioned it is possible to not see the whole galaxy when the game ends I guess it would also be possible to have next to no interaction with some other empires and it would be sad if that is my friends empire ^^ Ok, 2 player Games might not be a high priority but 4-6 player games could be more common (if you like to play with non strangers that is) and in a vast galaxy that could still feel a little SP like. Of course you always could choose a smaller galaxy size but... just no! ^^

Good point, It's currently random, but we might add an option for clustering players together

 

[Jormungandur]

@Jormungandur Since you are here, is it possible for 2 (or more) players to manage the same nation, like in EU4?

Can't wait to play multiplayer now.

It is not, no.

Is the fire icon next to fleet number/cap means firepower points or something? How would the game measure it? The one in distant worlds don't work at all, as their "firepower" based on weapon type are far from real dps.

It's the estimated power-value of the fleet, yes. It uses some pretty arcane math, taking in to account both defensive and offensive stats.

 

[Wizzington]

I'm skeptical of this fixing out desynchronization. Sure you guys test it, but you guys are in an office where you develop the game and I assume logically that this is the same place where you test synchronization for multiplayer. But how do you know your solutions will actutally work when you got people from Europe, USA, Asia, etc all playing in one game with various internet connections as opposed to the testing in the office.

The betas we test with are all over the world.

 

[Jormungandur]

two quick questions: One, is it always correct?
and two: Does it always determine the winner of a battle or is it just a suggestion?

There is no way for one number to be "correct". Say fleet A is rated 100 and fleet B is rated 80. Perhaps in most cases, fleet A is superior, but you can't rule out that fleet B was designed to take advantage of A's weaknesses. Like A has a lot of small craft with light weapons that have a hard time penetrating B's heavy armor. In Stellaris, every shot is simulated and shown in the graphics. It's not just a meaningless light show.

EntropyAvatar is pretty much spot on. Beyond the strengths/weaknesses between the fleets there's also a fair amount of random-rolls that go on (hits, misses, damage-rolls etc), plenty enough to make sure the "correct" fleet wins most of the time but if a few critical rolls miss the combat can sway to unexpected results.

 

[Mrop]

I hope the problems with using different OS will be fixed.
It sux that I can play EU4 with only half of my friends.

When we play in the office, there are about 2-3 Linux players and I think 1 Mac player. Linux/Mac usually have the same OOS issues due to being compiled by the same compiler.

 

[Alexivan]

How does multiplayer handle the pausing? This is a huge concern!

Things which would autopause the game in singleplayer don't, anyone can pause/unpause, only host can change the speed.

 

[Jormungandur]

Is 32 the fixed max player or just recommended?

It's the amount of players we've been able to test with. It's not a max cap.