For what it's worth, I vote single player to be the primary focus because that's what I'll play 90% of the time. Occasionally I'll play on a LAN so that should get some attention too. Personally, I don't do too many random online games as far as turn based strategy games go (and neither do most of my gaming friends) so I say if you have to make cuts somewhere make it in online multiplayer. I'd love for all 3 experiences to be wonderful, but chances are necessity will dictate that something's gotta give.

Mods/user created scenarios are usually very important for any game's longevity and therefore I think support for them is crucial. However, in order to make the single player experience the best it can be, some Stardock created campaign/scenarios are a necessity. They don't necessarily have to be numerous or even very long, but they do have to be good at least. It's a tough call as to which to make the priority. I think both are needed to make the single player game a true gem and that's important because I believe the vast majority of players will spend the vast majority of their time playing single player.

If I were in charge of making this game (and I've never made a real game before in my life) I'd break the resources down like this:

Single player - 70% (35% into both mod support and Stardock created campaign/scenarios each)

Multiplayer 30%

I might consider making it a 60/40 split if there was a strong outcry for multiplayer first, but I don't see that happening with this kind of game outside a very vocal minority.

**Edited for clarity and typos**

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Balance is pretty important in single player too. Without it, you get fun things like the "play this if you want to win" faction and the "sorry, you're totally screwed" faction.

1. SP, 2. LAN/private-server, 3. Online MP.

The campaign is sort of a 4th item that I'd rank second after SP and before LAN/private-server.

I'm also one of the folks who's still occasionally worried that the game might suffer if the devs pay too much mind to massive-multi-whatever. I very much want them to stand firm by the general goal of not sacrificing a single SP game element for MP reasons, but that leaves plenty of room for compromise and there's no telling how a given compromise will work until we're playing the build.

yea the 32 player part is a bit stupid if they spend to much time on it.

32 players also means 32 players in a single player game, which means 31 AIs. For single player folks wanting huge campaigns and for mod writers, that is a useful number.

And since the MP is client/server based, it should scale up player wise a lot more easily then Demigod did.

Well, there is "what I prefer" and then there is "what I think they should do."  After all, what I prefer isn't what it going to help Stardock sell units of their game.  I think the strategy Stardock is pursuing right now is what will sell the most games, because they are the professional programmers and publishers, thus they know better than I do on these matters.  That being said...

I would prefer to see single player consume the vast majority of resources, then have the single player experience preserved as much as possible in multiplayer.  What implications does that have?  Well, it would be an outstanding and epic game to play at LAN parties with your friends/brothers/wife (in my case, all of them together!)  Unfortunately, trying to preserve the single player experience in multiplayer, I infer, would make for a terrible mass-multiplayer experience (the kind where you link up with random people on the net for a quickie).

But like I said, I'm not going to demand that Stardock sell any fewer games for my personal sake.   

That is actually the reason why I prefer a game to be unbalanced, it adds a layer of difficulty/diversity, unfortunately I find that is precisely the sacrifice when multi is in the mix...not always, but often. It's very satisfying to play with a team that has a tough period on account of their specific traits and come out on top.

Except when it doesn't. "Balance" doesn't have to mean everything is the same, it means the factions all have effective ways of winning. Imbalance is when one faction has an unkillable unit. So you play that faction, spam that unit, and you win. That is not healthy for any game, single player or otherwise.

is it just me, or has every single person thus far said single player is by far the most important... some of which would also like lan.

Yep. But the forum is a tiny and absolutely non-random sampling of the market. Taking what 15 people here say as an indication of anything is a bad idea. A friend of mine bought the game entirely because it has multiplayer, but he doesn't post here. The overwhelming majority of customers don't post here.

On top of that, TBS is traditionally a single player oriented niche of games. So it's not really surprising that you'll see people saying that they want to play single player and don't want anything done differently to accomodate multiplayer. Not that we've actually seen any evidence that anything IS being changed for that, aside from a few people who think a wildly imbalanced game is a good thing. Which of course is something that I don't agree with. Wild imbalance is unhealthy for a game, just as much as all factions being identical is.

(I'm also not sure why LAN is split off from multiplayer. LAN these days is based on TCP/IP, and there is no technical difference between a LAN game and an Internet game where one of the players is hosting.)

Unless  they add PBEM support sometime down the road, I will probably never play multiplayer. So SP is more important for me in this game.

Of course you are right about that Tridus, mind you, your addition of the term "wild" to your immediate assessment is misrepresentative to say the least, but given you are a cat man I will overlook this and endeavour to be as constructive as possible.

"Wild imbalance" bad... all teams the same bad... totally agree. What you want is this...

On some map conditions (all player adjustable), certain play styles are favoured...as are certain factions...certain traits...certain research streams etc...

How impassable is the terrain, how populated, how many recourses are at one end of the map? (GC2 did this incredibly well...think sparse immense versus tiny busy and how that changed the main players...imo it was gc2's greatest triumph)

In the end what you get is a spectrum that favours some teams on some days, some teams on others...is it balanced? Absolutely.

Sadly...it is also the type of layout which upset people who extract meaning from multiplayer performance (esp. win/loss ratios) and often leads to a campaign to mash everything into bland sameness. Am I worried about this scenario occuring with Elemental? Not really, I only have to look at Twilight to know Stardock know what they're doing.

As for this spam a single unit scenario, I would suggest an option with a standard tech tree and mirror maps, so competitive people can be absolutely certain that they are better than someone at something.

well, as small a sample as it is, I still think its telling.

People often suck, random faceless strangers who don't know you most definitely suck, playing in the internet with them is masochism. The only ones I could ever stomach playing with are close friends.

I'm only planning on playing with friends or some people around here. I hate playing with what I call "random asshats". I still want MP in the game though, playing Civ 4 with a friend of mine is the reason I bought the game (and the reason he bought Elemental).

But the sample here is meaningless. You see the same thing on the World of Warcraft forums. To hear it there, everybody is a hardcore raider, knows all the mechanics inside out, and wants serious PvP with consequences.

In actual fact, the overwhelming majority (according to the real statistics) are casual players who don't raid at the high end (if they raid at all) and loathe the idea of losing gear or XP if they die in PvP. The forum is skewed to the more hardcore crowd, where they dominate. In the actual game, the high end hardcore raider types are measured by the thousands, and the casuals not represented on the forums are measured by the millions.  (Other companies have actually tried to make games to cater to what the forum crowd wants, thinking its a viable market. They do badly, because you need those other people in order to be successful in the market.)

This forum is the same thing, on a smaller scale. Taking any stats from here as a measure of anything other then what the forums want is meaningless and in no way follows the rules of statistical polling.

  Heya Tridus, and everyone.  Good responces, thank you.  To your question-

"(I'm also not sure why LAN is split off from multiplayer. LAN these days is based on TCP/IP, and there is no technical difference between a LAN game and an Internet game where one of the players is hosting.)"

  I consider LAN split into categories.  Mostly because of reponse times.  When you connect to a hub in the same room as your pc and other pcs are connected to same hub it is synced.  So when you play rts's or fps's it really makes a difference.  Vs. if you are connected via phone line/modem you have delay and so games tend to become inbalanced, unless the delay is the same.  Also, if you have direct connect/dedicated pipe, then your connect will be better than your typical phone connection.  I don't even know of all the different LAN permutations that are currently possible.  Also, most games tend not play well over wireless connects.  I guess what I'm trying to say is that I see LAN as broken into several components or subsets.  They all have problems based on delivery of packets.  Some are just faster than others, but it does affect who you play with. 

  I was also kind of curious, since I haven't played in the same room/synced hub for quite a while, as to how many others are still doing this.  Same with hot seat play.  Maybe someone could break give a breakdown on the current state of affairs in LAN gaming?  I'm outta the loop.

  I will be playing the game solo.  However, I would love to take on other players if given the opportunity.  I would also consider the multiplayer game would take some time to play vs. short rts games.  I don't mind. 

  My experience from online gaming is that there are many different maturity/difficulty/knowledge levels for gamers.  However, I have never had more fun in a pc game than those that I played multiplayer in.  I've enjoyed many single player games.  My hope is I will enjoy a fantastic single player experience and have an extended gameplay experience because of the multiplayer(and the options that control gameplay at the beginning; as well as the mods that will be created).

  I also echo the thoughts posted by Wirespeed91, GW Swicord and Demiansky.

Le sigh ... if I was able to play a LAN game of FFH so that we don't have to worry about OOS ... I would be in paradise.

I mean, just 6 or 7 pure days of playing through all the mods and modmods (or at least the good ones) and playing with long games, lots of AI, ect ... not having to worry about OOS. I wonder if the Hyborem switch would still OOS?

And also ... no LAG!!! oh the glory, oh the celebration. And the person in the rage-quit position (or outright killed) can take a sleep shift or go get pizza. Ah the life ...

OOS is caused by two clients making the same calculation and coming to different results. It's not caused by being on a LAN vs the Internet. There's a great SoaSE developer journal on the subject. A proper client/server model can fix OOS errors pretty easily, because only one machine is the authority on what state something is in. So a Stardock hosted game of Elemental for example should never be capable of having an OOS error, because there's no case where a client determines state. (In Civ 4, every player's computer determines state. Usually they come to the same conclusion about what it should be. When they don't, you see the OOS error and whoever has the different number flashing is the one whose computer disagreed with the others. Sins works the same way.)

And really, Internet lag in a TBS game is totally insignificant.

You listed FPS and RTS, both of which are twitchy time-sensitive games. Speed matters in a game like that. 300ms latency in a FPS is pretty painful. For the opposite side of the spectrum, 300ms latency in Chess would be unnoticeable because you spend so much longer waiting for the other person to move.

A TBS game like Elemental is closer to Chess then to Unreal Tournament. A bit of latency basically never matters (it can matter a bit with synchronous turns, but even then its very rarely an issue). People for example played Age of Wonders by email, which has a latency measured in hours or days depending on how fast the other player is.

For a game like this, there is no practical difference between LAN or Internet, and wired or wireless (wireless is bad for a twitchy game because the latency is higher then on ethernet).

As for the state of LAN play... its actually in decline. Some new games don't really have it. Starcraft 2 for example does LAN play only over Battle.net, which means everyone needs an Internet connection. According to the information we've seen, Elemental won't require that.

SP-95%

MP-5%

Maybe more MP if it is easy to find a game, and to finish it in about 2  hours.

Mike

I will probably never play multiplayer.  As I think someone else has mentioned on this thread, some very large percentage of the buyers of this kind of game will fall into this category.  (I think it's more then 70%.)  What is surprising to me is that most of the posters here are also saying the same thing, as I would think that the posters on the forum would be biased in the direction of being more likely to be multiplayers.

Definitely SP.

Only games I play nowadays as MP are MMOs.  Otherwise I game alone.  Yeah, I miss the banter of an MMO but if I'm playing something like this I want to do it at my pace, my own speed... not feeling rushed or restricted to someone else's schedule.

I'll play the SP once or twice. If I like the campaign, I'll probably play 2/3rds of it before getting bored (that happens a lot with me.)

Lan > SP > MP for this game. I like playing games with friends, life is too short to spend it by yourself.

Guess I'm not playing Starcraft 2 then! I can try and fit ten computers in the same room on one dialup line, and see how that goes. It's a shame people seem to forget rural and smalltown folks don't always have highspeed, or if we do, it's actually a saturated 128 kbs line.