multiplayer real time battles!!?? modable??!!

[Bassilisk]

I would really like the option for multiplayer campaign to have real time battles. I understand that this is now not an option, but would love for it to either be implemented or made to be easily modded into the game. Options to have the rest of the multiplayer campaign pause when players enter battle, or option for the map to continue when players choose to go into battle would be awesome. An idea I have for when a player chooses to go into battle and the map continues is to have the AI/Court take over and select from a set of stances like aggressive, defensive, passive, or other options as to what the AI should do while you are in battle. Also important options can wait till after the battle for you to decide or you choose to let the AI/Court deal with important choices while you are away. Please comment what you think?

[bilbobaggins764]

i thought it was part of the game. 6 player i believe 

[Bassilisk]

Not the actual rts style battles, as it stands now battles in multiplayer are always auto resolve instead of having choice between of auto resolve or personally command troops.

[bilbobaggins764]

On 12/14/2021 at 11:26 AM, Bassilisk said:

Not the actual rts style battles, as it stands now battles in multiplayer are always auto resolve instead of having choice between of auto resolve or personally command troops.

oh i did not know that. It is not a big deal to me i dont think the battles are going to be all that great. 

[Bassilisk]

10 hours ago, bilbobaggins764 said:

oh i did not know that. It is not a big deal to me i dont think the battles are going to be all that great. 

Well they dont have to be incredible, I would be satisfied with a better version of koh1, doesnt have to be groundbreaking, just fun and have some skill to it

[William Blake]

Well, lets think it through:

Problem with tactical battles in multiplayer is variable time in a battle vs global game. If you have more than 2 players you can't have main global game to be paused while some people are fighting in a battle even for 5-10 minutes. And if you think about it, you probably want a battle to be longer than that.

If you allow the global game to proceed while you are fighting everyone else would do so many things on a global scale that you will be totally left behind even if you won the battle to begin with.

If you have only 2 players per game such that they will always be in a battle with each other, you then will have a global game which is whole map just for 2 real people and they will probably fight around 2 maybe 3 major battles before one accepts a defeat (once you loose a major army and enemy keeps his major army it is unlikely that you could recover in a short time and the whole game cannot go for days, it is not a persistent mmo), so the whole thing will be 99% no tactical battles before you meet with a human enemy and then 20 minute major battle with one victor. Very questionable experience to be honest.

Now, ok, lets say we still really want to have a player on player tactical battles, but we want it to be built into the global strategy game with multiple people. I can potentially see a solution to that, but it is too complex to be viable. It goes roughly like this:

 

• Global game goes into "battle season" mode every 10 minutes
• During normal game all battles which are not auto resolving are going into "wait for battle state" mode
• Once battle season mode is on, ALL players have to choose a battle they want to lead in a tactical mode or wait for the battle season be be over
• In a battle season mode global game is put on pause, so there is nothing for you to gain advantage of on a global scale while battles are on and other people are fighting in a tactical mode
• Ideally everyone would have at least 1 major battle in queue from previous 10 minutes of a global play
• Battle season mode also has a time limit, say 15 minutes. If you can't win your tactical battle in 15 minutes you just get pulled out of it into a global map and autoresolve will finish the rest
• If all human players finished a battle faster than 15 minutes, battle season mode ends and global game is going on again
• If there are no battles to fight with human players scheduled battle season is not triggered after 10 minutes so you can play global map uninterrupted until there is a battle to be decided

 

If you do it like that you can basically split a game between global and tactical modes, you will queue battles and start tactical mode for everyone who is going to fight any battle in this time window and you will get out of that back to global map at a predictable time, so people who are not fighting or finished earlier can at least know when it is going to be back to global map game again.

Potentially you can make it work like that, but your experience will be dramatically different. Your global map game will take now way way more time overall r with all the interruptions. You might find that say 15 minutes is too short for a tactical battle to make sense. But you can't extend this time by a lot, since you really want to have an overall gameplay in some manageable time, few people can play for 8 hours straight. You also would need to have some new mechanics added to the movement of armies on a global map, such that you could not exploit the fact that some army has engaged and is in waiting for a battle season mode to start, but you are still free to move other armies on a global map.

But you can see that complexity skyrockets and new issues are piling up out of nowhere just to make direct control over tactical battles available in a global multiplayer.

 

 

 

Edited December 17, 2021 by William Blake

[Bassilisk]

I appreciate your thoughts on the topic William Blake. I do have an idea that would make it plausible if not fun to have tactical battles.

The idea is that when you choose to fight a battle in person, you have one of your royal court make strategic decisions for you on the main map whilst you battle. You could have options like "focus on economy", "focus on military", "conquer this terrirtory", "focus on defense", and other options that would let the AI royal court/royal court member take command of the main map while you go into battle. This would give another depth to the game and would make it so you have to choose wisely which battles you fight personally and would also make it more realistic that while you are away at battle, someone else (AI) would take over court for you while you are in battle.

I think this idea  would work very well. Yes the AI would do some things you might not like, or they may not play just like you would, but it would give the options for real time battles for the players to personally engage in whilst AI is playing the main map for you. Tell me what you think, open to hear from lots of people on this idea 

[William Blake]

Ok, how long do you think a tactical battle should take? 15 minutes? More, less?

[Bassilisk]

I think somewhere between 5-20 mins, depending on the size of the armies, the play style, and if it is a siege or not. I also think that there should be a way to leave the battle at any time, say if you are winning significantly and you want the AI to auto resolve/take over command of the battle. Also it would be cool if while in battle, in like one of the corners of the screen, significant campaign information come up. Like if in the battle, someone attacks, it would show up in the top right corner that you are under attack. Then you could leave the battle to computer and go back to main map. Or if any other major options come up. Again though, it would be fun to be in battle and someone offer you a ally pact. They would have to wait till the battle is over for your reply and it would say something like "the ruler is engaged in combat and will give an answer after the battle"...or the dubious AI that you let take over while in battle would make the decision for you depending on what preset you set it to. 🙂 i think it would be awesome to give AI directives while you go into a very important battle and then you emerge to see what happened, what you need to do now, what you need to fix, or what routes you need to go after the AI did some decisons or lack of decisions.

[William Blake]

Alright, lets say you will leave the battle after 10 minutes. What can happen in 10 minutes while you ware away from a global map?

Lets look at https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1228675689
skip to 20 minute mark and look at the gameplay on the background.

Event notifications (icons dropping down on the left of the screen) are coming in at around 10 seconds? Say 20 seconds average. An army on a global map can go across a province in around 20 seconds on a normal speed. 

So you are back from you 10 minute battle and you have 30 notifications you didn't see and an enemy army could get to you from around 9 province radius.

Lets say we are going to play for 2 hours non stop. Let's say you have an average battle for 15 minutes if you lead it manually.  If you do NOTHING but battles over and over again the whole game will only fit 8 battles. Obviously you can't just be in a battle all the time, so lets say it is 3 battles per 2 hours. Do you really think it is worth to make your global gameplay so weak so you could just have 3 tactical battles?

 

[Bassilisk]

Glad you are thinking about this, makes for good discussion. That is why I say have the option for AI to take over while you are at battle, solves a lot of problems. Also it makes picking the battles you go into super important. With AI royal court able to control your campaign while in battle it makes you able to do as many or as few real battles as you want. Pick their stances right before you go into battle (option to fight real battle, then 10 seconds to pick what stances AI should take). Also this option to do real battles in multiplayer should be an option to turn on and off, that way you would get it how you like, and I and others would get the option to have the option of fighting real time battles if we desire. AI does the map organically already, why not let them get a 10-20 minute window for you with preselected stances on how they should approach the campaign? I am sure modders would make this even more in depth and give more options for the AI and better AI options. I kind of see myself only picking a few battles, like your suggested 3 or so tactical battles. If i have a major fight with a country of equal power and armies then I might want to personally control the battle plans and let the AI take over the map for a bit. Or maybe there is a huge battle of 4 or 5 countries and armies and I want to indulge in the chaos, then again i might let the AI control the map for a bit. But yes I would often auto-resolve if I need to be looking at the bigger picture of the campaign at the moment, or if I see i have a huge battle advantage.

For fun though, could you imagine getting into a fight with another player and having a huge advantage, so you auto resolve, but they choose to battle and win? Maybe the AI does decent on the map for them and you lose a huge battle to a army half the size (or something like that)? Or role reverse and you take to the battlefield and win a huge upset that turns the tides of war? Again AI controlling your campaign map could do you justice....or they could fail miserably on your plane...risk? reward? it should (hopefully) be in your hands to decide

[William Blake]

I doubt you really want your game being handled by an AI. So lets say an enemy army invades while you are away - should your AI engage or not? You came out of a battle and your other marshal is not only already in a battle, but he is losing badly because another player tricked AI to attack a small army and reinforced with a bigger army? Or your AI being tricked to attack a small army and left province capital open and so on.

Event comes in - "join crusade", should AI join for you or not? Diplomacy event came in - what AI should do to make your happy? If you are so happy with AI playing a game for you, why would you even play at all - let AI drive your kingdom. Moreover, if you think AI is that good, what makes you think that your direct control over units will be better than AI control? You, in fact, implicitly expect your own control to be much better than opposing AI so you could win with less forces than a auto resolve. What if AI is in fact stronger or on a same level as a human. Lets take out the part of "it is fun" for now, just from a pure value perspective for a grand strategy you only want to directly control major battle so you could be better than your own AI.

I'm not saying there is no value in direct tactical battle control, but so far I don't see how to make it all come together for multiple people if you want to have major focus on a global grand strategy game first.

 

 

[Bassilisk]

To go against your point, who is to say that the AI isn't as good or stronger than a human on the grand strategy aspect, so AI control of your map campaign would be the same as AI controlling battles. It is to a say, a mute point. That is why I propose options, options my friend 🙂. If you don't want AI to control grand campaign map, then by God never let them! lol. But if someone desires to let them control the map for a second, even the entire game, let them! I think the option (or at least making it easy to mod into the game) is what counts. It would be fun to see if someone lets the AI control all the campaign map for them, while they do every battle, or vise versa. I think it should (could) be an option before the multiplayer campaign starts to let players decide if they want the option at the beginning. Example is game mode at beginning has option to turn off or on player direct battles, that way both sides win. You win because you could have the whole game without this option, others win because they can turn this option on or off. Even in game you could have it turned on and you never use it. I understand the devs not wanting (or people waiting for the game) to delay the game for this because it could take some work, but I would be happy if it was a dlc even, or even it the tools were left open for someone to mod it in. Having it at some point would not detract at all from your experience of the game, it would only be helpful to add to others gameplay. 

[Bassilisk]

I would love to hear the devs thought on this subject and my proposition 

[William Blake]

I'm only making arguments to have a discussion. We don't know how tactical battles work, we don't know how multiplayer works, so for us its all imaginary right now based on original game and gameplay we saw on dev streams.

If we can talk different game modes, well yeah, I can see plenty - for instance 1 on 1 with tactical battles on if player's armies meet. Or for instance a global map which goes for a fixed time, say 1 hour and then you have a "crusade" event when every player selects 1 marshal and a side they want to join and they are all taken into a final tactical battle right away, so it like 1 tactical battle per game, but it is ultimate end game and every player will join it at the same time to switch game mode.

In fact if we are talking options, you could do variable global game speed, such that if any player goes into tactical battle the global game is set to slowest speed, but for instance every player has limited number of tactical battles per game so you could only slow down other people game for a few times for important battles you want.

Or you can have a variable global game speed based on overall player selection, so if everyone selects speed 1x the game is 1x, if someone selects .5x and some one 10x the game is set to an average speed setting of all players, such that if you want to slow down and everyone else wants to slow down you can have a game on very slow and do your tactical battles, but if you are the only one who wants its slow other people will kick the speed up but not to the max.

The problem with all these options is that we don't know how KoH2 works and most importantly what is the goal in terms of player experience. Because if tactical battles are so cool and deep that you want them to be in a multiplayer you can think of half a dozen mechanics to make them available. But we don't know that at all.

 

[Bassilisk]

On 12/15/2021 at 10:07 AM, bilbobaggins764 said:

 

I appreciate the discussion, and now your coming up with some good ideas! I am asking and hoping that they make this kind of stuff very moveable and give the tools for creating this stuff if they dont include it

[bilbobaggins764]

On 12/11/2021 at 1:16 PM, Bassilisk said:

I would really like the option for multiplayer campaign to have real time battles. I understand that this is now not an option, but would love for it to either be implemented or made to be easily modded into the game. Options to have the rest of the multiplayer campaign pause when players enter battle, or option for the map to continue when players choose to go into battle would be awesome. An idea I have for when a player chooses to go into battle and the map continues is to have the AI/Court take over and select from a set of stances like aggressive, defensive, passive, or other options as to what the AI should do while you are in battle. Also important options can wait till after the battle for you to decide or you choose to let the AI/Court deal with important choices while you are away. Please comment what you think?

Let me say this, if the battles are like manor lords looks to be then yes I would love mp battles as well. 

[Jack]

Is there a good mod that makes multiplayer rts battles in Knights of Honor 2? 

[Jack]

Or are the devs planning to add custom rts battles in multiplayer to the game? 

[zwem]

On 5/27/2023 at 9:58 PM, Jack said:

Or are the devs planning to add custom rts battles in multiplayer to the game? 

I fear that the team is mainly gone. It currently doesn't progress at the speed it would if there was 1 whole team behind (My personnal feeling about the situation).

Still I would also have love to get Tactical Battles in Multi (even independently of Campaigns). But the battle itself would need A LOT of Fix/Balance.

Edited June 11, 2023 by zwem