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Stellaris Dev Diary #23 - Multiplayer

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.

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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.

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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.
 
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A stable multiplayer in a Paradox game? What is this, christmas in heaven? I hope it turns out to be true, have a large mp game with my friends planned as soon as the game releases.
 
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I'd like the option of joining games in progress, but as a pre-FTL just turned FTL race with the option to customise like you would in a new game.
Also I'm going to miss asymmetric starts, found they've been handy for introducing less experienced friends to games by advising them of a stronger starting position.
 
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I seriously can not wait to jump into this with some friends!!! I gotta find 32 friends though... I gotta find 1 friend though...
 
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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.
 
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By anonymous does that mean you won't be able to even see their score, or can you see the player's score but not who they are?

Edit: Ok, sorry, the images weren't loading when I first read this, but now that they are loading for me it looks as is none of the players have a "player score" that is visable to other empires as an indicator of overall strength. Is this the case that Stellaris won't be using such a staple of the 4x genre?
Don't know why I was expecting a "player score" when it's absent from ck and eu anyway lol

I can't speak as to CK, but EU4 definitely has a player score.

As far as this game goes, I'd prefer it wasn't there. I'd rather find out the hard way if someone I encounter is ripe for conquest, or is thinking the same of me hehe
 
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I really like the change to the UI on the top bar with the faction symbol and how the top bar does't run behind it and the little idents on the side of the screen. Its little details like that that really improve the feel of a game.

Now I just need some friends who would want to play Stallaris MP!

Dude, let's play!
 
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Also I'm going to miss asymmetric starts, found they've been handy for introducing less experienced friends to games by advising them of a stronger starting position.

I'm sure those will be modded in fairly quickly. Or you could let the AI run play for the first century before hopping in. For introducing purposes you can load an old mp save and have the new player hotjoin as a small empire.
 
Not too bothered about MP, but I'll take those screenshots.

*looks at screenshots*
 
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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.
 
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Will it be possible to play as part of a federation with more than one human? Imagine the plotting possibilities.:eek:

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?
 
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Polish translation done in on first page post in spoiler.
 
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Will it be possible to play as part of a federation with more than one human? Imagine the plotting possibilities.:eek:

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?

Goddamn shifty-eyed semi-furless mammals of Sol 3 and their endless plotting.

Anyway, there's no reason that it should be impossible, but frankly I hope any MP campaign bans having more than one or two human factions.
 
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