Russian Designers ? ?

[Skirmisher]

Originally Posted by DRG

Here's what I don't understand about the "allure" of live on line play.

Even on this thread it was mentioned that getting players to commit to a PBEM is hard and a stock PBEM allows players to pick the time they have to play a turn. On line co-ordination would seem to me to be a few orders of magnitude more difficult to keep on track especially with a large game.

Don

I can totally understand this perspective. It would probably be very hard to find opponents that were willing to sit down for 3-6 hours and PLAY a TCP-IP game.

I ask people if they want to play SP3 Online and there's really NO interest.

I've even copied the CD several times and sent it out to some people,hoping to pick up a game. It hasn't happened.

[Mobhack]

Originally Posted by Skirmisher

I can totally understand this perspective. It would probably be very hard to find opponents that were willing to sit down for 3-6 hours and PLAY a TCP-IP game.

I ask people if they want to play SP3 Online and there's really NO interest.

I've even copied the CD several times and sent it out to some people,hoping to pick up a game. It hasn't happened.

Most players of these games live in different time zones. Even in the same time zone, some may work shifts etc.

So as well as getting someone to commit to probably a 4 or more hours solid chunk of time to play an involved game - you need to be on the same clock cycle. Or someone in say Finland has to play in his wee hours of the morning with his eyelids propped up by matchsticks against someone wide awake and fresh on the other side of the world.

PBEM totally rules out the problem of having to commit to any large single block of time, plus it completely removes the time zone problem.

Andy

[Double_Deuce]

I used to be a hard core SPWaWH2H player. Something about that version just clicked with me. Its the only SPWAW version I played for many, many years. I think the last time played any SPWaW was about 4-5 years ago if not longer. From what I understand very few play the vanilla SPWaW. They are playing one of many modified versions so that may give the appearance of a larger player base when you combine SPWaW, SPWaWH2H, SPWaW Enhanced. I don't even really know who plays what version of that game anymore other than a few regulars.

Another thing with SPWaW players is that most of them have played the game since it first came out and are real life friends and not just contacts on on the web. Maybe since Matrix had the 1st dedicated SP forums (that were not on Yahoo) it allowed them to pull the majority of SP players to their flag. For me, I regularly visit the SPWaW Depot forums even though I never play SPWaW because many of them are more what I would call friends rather than fellow SP players.

It having been so long since I played SPWaW, I hardly remember most of the differences but there are a couple things about SPWaW I do like better. One of those is abundance of extra building graphics (even though they are only just eyecandy) and the 2nd is the inclusion of the special type victory hexes. Just like TCP/IP capability might be "the thing" for some, the above 2 features are "my thing" especially since I prefer to concentrate on designing and not necessarily playing.

[Skirmisher]

Originally Posted by Mobhack

Most players of these games live in different time zones. Even in the same time zone, some may work shifts etc.

So as well as getting someone to commit to probably a 4 or more hours solid chunk of time to play an involved game - you need to be on the same clock cycle. Or someone in say Finland has to play in his wee hours of the morning with his eyelids propped up by matchsticks against someone wide awake and fresh on the other side of the world.

Andy

Back in 1999 we all used to go the a Steel Panthers 3 chat room on MPlayer.com

There you would work out the details. Surprizingly most of the games played where multinational in nature. It would be like US vs GB usually, but you could purchase from any army.

I played three online games back to back in one night once.(8 hr's) My dreams were filled with troops moving around on a hex grid that night.

But there were bugs. Airmoblie was illegal because anti air units didn't fire at the helicopters. Sometimes a unit would die,but still be left on the map. It would show (0) men,but still could move. And it couldn't be killed.