I'm a bit late to this train, and I didn't went through all pages, but here's my two cents anyway...

Excellent. Depending on peer-to-peer for multiplaying sucks an awful lot for someone that lives far away from where the action is. I wouldn't have bought Demigod if it hadn't come from Stardock and the extraordinary communicative reaction you had when things became FUBAR. I have been able to play MMO's well with servers based in the US, so I would expect a similar experience.

Bad Demigod!

Reconsider this, please... First for Demigod, I really hope that's not a decision based on a really loud minority of hardcore gamers. Multiplayer games are often riddled with these kind of complaints.

Secondly, Demigod and Elemental are completely different games. I think that bots, especially with the kind of AI that Stardock can make, would have a lot more space to shine here. 

- It would work just fine for a non fast-paced and/or complex multiplayer experience. It's cool to go after the AI first or use it as a buffer to your main opponent(s) - in Demigod, the players are moving all over in a rather confined/non-random place.

- It adds strategic depth for such a game to have more factions involved (instead of just two real players).

- A real player could actually join/re-join (on lost connection) an on-going game by replacing the AI (with the other player's consent or by right of play); or if a player quits/loses connection the AI could take over (and maybe even do a better job), helping to retain the experience.

For example: It's not good to be playing a game for hours then to see players leave because they rage-quit or lost connection. It's also not good for the player that was doing a great game to get disconnected and then being unable to re-join.

These are actual advantages for the kind of game in development, and a similar implementation has been working just fine with Civ IV. The game could even have more multiplayer depth by giving options for the host player / clans to choose the rules by which bots could be used. Stardock could then make a much better decision on the subject of bots for this and any other future games.

Please, give it another go at this...

Thank you Demigod!

Economy: keeping it simple and fun without dumbing it down too much has always been a winning combination.

Epic story on sandbox: Wow... No one has been able to pull that off yet. Epic story immersion in a non-linear/randomized sandbox game would be the stuff of gaming legend! Please, please make it so!

*Raises hands to show interest in the Alpha; crosses fingers for lottery*

That's what you get for not being on top of things. I had just read the other thread showing that the game starts with only the player, so "bots" would be the AI starting in a similar way. Being not the case, thanks for clearing things up.

I did some further research, and I think that Frogboy was talking about this?

Still, these are different games. The AI (as in bot, bots) could be there to balance the scale on the number of players from both sides. Maybe even giving way for real players to join on-the-fly and replace the AI. Maybe this is still the type of game where well-made bots could shine. That might be fun. But then again, I needed to see the different variables at play to make a better judgement, instead of just conjecturing about it...

Sigh. Bot != AI. There will be AI in this game. Of course there will be AI. This is primarily a single-player game, how would you expect that to work out with no AI? Really, use your head

A couple posts back someone else said more or less the same as you just did, so I guess I'll repeat my response... The bots he was talking about were the proposed persistent bots that would have their own stats, and join games like people would. Apparently they were hated in Demigod, so they've been axed for Elemental.

The game creator acts as host in Battle.net games (except for Diablo 2 "closed" games, where more things are done server-side to reduce cheating, and obviously World of Warcraft). Battle.net is actually an IRC/matchmaking service more then it is a game host.

That is the model I want them to use for Elemental. TBS games are MUCH less stressful on connections to host then RTS games are, and it's a lot more flexible for players then having Stardock host every game.

And I suggest you re-read both the original post and my own. You obviously didn't.

The original post CLEARLY states that multiplayer games will only be hosted on the Stardock servers. No ports, no proxies, not even on the same box. Read that last bit there? It means NO HOTSEAT and NO PLAY BY EMAIL.The post clearly states that ALL multiplayer will be hosted on their servers, period. You will like it or you will die.

This is on par with forcing users to install viruses along with the game, like so many publishers do, or not releasing any editing tools for the game. It's that stupid. Given that a hotseat game only requires the capability to set two or more factions to human control when setting up a game, it's even more ridiculous that it's not allowed. PBEM, again, is hotseat with forced saves between turns; the users then email the save file to the next player.

Hotseat and PBEM have no servers, proxies, or ports to deal with. At the worst, you have to support whatever obscure email client someone may be using. Or make sure the save files end up in a easily located folder, like MyDocuments.

For that matter, the P2P must have been fundamentatally flawed from the start in Demigod if there were issues. Games as far back as the original Call of Duty have no issues with P2P connections; I know this for a fact.

PBEM and Hotseat has been a basic facet of turn based strategy pretty much since the internet and email accounts became widespread enough for people to find other players and coordinate games. I played PBEM in Heroes of Might and Magic I, Steel Panthers: World at War, and Age of Wonders. Any TBS without it is not worth consideration for purchase, period.

Also, save for the mentions of an editor, and user-made content, I didn't mention any official content whatsoever being hosted only on their servers. Again, read the posts in question.

And I suggest you learn that people, especially when frustrated, don't always use the best phrasing. The post says that there won't be hosting on the user's box. Hotseat requires no hosting, as there is nothing to host, and thus jumping to the conclusion that Stardock intends to nix hotseat for no reason whatsoever (and then behaving as if the sky is falling) is, quite frankly, childish.

Whether Brad intends to cut out LAN/PBEM multiplayer is also not entirely certain. It would definitely be a mistake, and I hope both make it in.

My point is, Brad made a somewhat vague statement in a post born out of frustration and you are acting like a spoiled little child in response. Before you go threatening that the game is worthless and may as well not exist if it doesn't have PBEM in response to vague frustrated remarks, find out if the worst case scenario is really intended. We haven't had any clarifications, so we don't really know anything besides that direct IP multiplayer is likely out of the equation. Tremendous support has already been shown for the inclusion of LAN/PBEM (and even direct IP) multiplayer, and childish apocalyptic rants aren't going to help our case.

I really cannot wait for the beta. And not just to be able to play it but to really start seeing what Stardock is trying to make and in which way we can offer the best feedback.

<--- needs Hotseat even if it's just to test the new races for a personal mod

I take Stardock's silences as "We are working. We will let you know something as soon as we have something to tell you.".

They have learned some lessons/tricks from Demigod so surely they are also trying to take them into account for Elemental (about design of features, not about p2p multiplayer)

I've started a new post at the linkbelow which discusses some options for some of the concerns expressed here.  Thoughts and feedback welcome as always.

https://forums.elementalgame.com/354396

It's the weekend, their silence has a definite pattern regarding weekends.

Hotseat, can't really see it working with what we've heard on the combat system.  If it's implemented, it would have to be a restricted form, much like you can't do tactical combat in pbem at all without a huge amount of delay from playing out all the combat moves in individual battles.  You just can't do simultaneous turn systems on one computer.  They'd need to either cut it entirely, or include a desyncronized system for use with it.

Context is your friend.  Use it.  You have jumped to a conclusion without a clear train of information to reach it.  It is one of many possible conclusions, the one I listed being much more likely than the totality of your rant.  Context leads not towards an absolutist position on content control and such.  It's possible Stardock has decided to go copyright nazi on us, but the probability of that is more along the lines of the sun going nova tomorrow than anything resembling certainty.

Going crazy and screaming about corporate conspiracies is something you should reserve for after you get clarification.  Being an ignorant moron on networking issues doesn't help either.  Sorry, anyone that thinks he's using a P2P connection method in a first person shooter has absolutely zero clue.  When your PS3 brochure tells you it's P2P, it's not talking about the game connections.  They have a P2P network with the developers servers so that the entire bloody thing doesn't go down if their connection is lost.  People that aren't morons and know how to configure their own networks.  When you go to play Call of Duty, you're connecting to a server, as a client.

In turn based games, in multiplayer, 75-90% of games will have AI.

That 25 - 10% situations without in-game AI are when a large group of people together, or usually quicker games on smaller maps.

saying only stardock/impulse and what-not hosting games does indeed off-place me somewhat, although only because using one massive server never really seems like a good idea to me, or rather its what I spend most of my multiplayer days to avoid doing.

Never played Demigod, probably never will. Although I am sure that both are very different games.

That being said, I will now extrapolate what I think bots are/ ect. Hopefully bots aren't another name for any in-game nation AI, as alot of what helps games is having more nations in-play than the number of people currently gathered for a game. I think at any point during an elemental game, a human player should be able to take over ANY AI nation in-game. AI would also take over a team if the human player leaves. In this way the AI would be a prevalent default form whenever the human is not present. This sort of AI is primarily a place-holder, although is a necessary, NECESSARY evil in a turn based, massive empire style of strategy game.

That being said, I hope its fun to play on the Stardock server. I don't see the motivations for such a move, but then again I have not played Demi-god, so maybe that is a pre-req.

EDIT: should I make some sort of sentence about Thread Necromancy here?

thats what I was wondering too ... hopefully a "bot" is separate from a normal AI, in that its a lurker of the server lobby as opposed to an actor added to the game by the game "host." In that case, it would probably only be necessary if a nation in Elemental could not easily switch between AI control and human control, but rather a separate "bot" function would have to control AI's you might think a human would join as at a later date.

Of course, if "bot" merely meant any and all AI ... then elemental multiplayer would sadly be about a fourth of its potential.

You guy also missed that they aren't implementing said bots and that this thread is 5months old