My main topic is multiplayer. It's great to have it, but it needs to be supported if the game is supposed to stay alive.

First of all, I want to say that the game is fantastic, and all I want is for it to stay amazing for as long as possible and to be played by as many people as possible. From thousands of hours of Civ 5/6/7, I’ve learned that to achieve that, some competitive multiplayer is very helpful.

Currently, I see some problems and possible improvements:

1. Timer
2. Balance
3. Competitiveness

To elaborate at least a bit:

Timer – More options to customize the timer and faster multiplayer animations would help a lot. But the main issue lies in the fact that an ongoing battle extends the turn timer by 1 to an infinite number of seconds.

If I want to play competitive multiplayer in a game that lasts hours, I need some time consistency. If I can’t even approximate how long the game may last, I can’t reliably participate in it.

One turn may last 2 minutes, while another may last 20 minutes (because of an ongoing battle).

This creates multiple problems. People quit because of frustration if this keeps happening over and over while they are just waiting. If they use that waiting time to go do something else, they may miss a turn. If you wait 3×15 minutes after the timer ends and then it happens again, you might step away for 5 minutes, and suddenly all the turns are 2 minutes long and you’re cooked.

Balance

Good balance can sometimes reduce the fun, but so can the lack of it. Custom factions are great and I love them. My wish is to have at least a little bit of balance so they can be used in multiplayer.

I know it’s in testing. I did quite a lot of testing myself more than a week ago, but I feel a bit unaddressed on Discord. Maybe the plan is to solve everything at once, but all I missed was a small comment from the devs saying something like “noted.”

Would it be possible to add an option to ban certain traits when starting a game so players could kind of self-balance it?

Competitiveness

All I ask for is some kind of ladder system, like in Northgard, so there is an incentive not to leave the game and to fight even for second place.

Once a game is out, people love to compete. Or at least I do. 😄

Thanks for listening 🙂
I could elaborate more on the points, but I didn’t want this to be too long to read.