What if there was a C:S Google Earth?

[AmiPolizeiFunk 446]

What if there was a multiplayer server that had a Cities:Skyline 1:1 representation of the entire planet, a la Google Earth. Some kind of UI could let you zoom in to various 81-tile chunks in your game. You could work on them and submit them back to be shared. A wikipedia-type system could approve and accept updates to the main model. Super freshness would be if you and a mate (or mates) could work on the same chunks at the same time.

 

Oh the future of possibilities. 

[boformer 3,169]

CO decided to support modding. It would be hard to support mods in online mode.

[Linoa06 1,374]

I'd rather have mods than a multiplayer mode no one asked for.

Besides, I use my own world for my cities, so I wouldn't want to be on the CSL map anyway

 

[TekindusT 3,809]

Multiplayer in city simulation games has, since this genre was born, a touchy issue. So far I have read during these years, especially during the launch of SC2013, hardcore players, those who stick around for years, have multiplayer way down their wish list. Technicalities hinder these wishes too.

One thing is sure: if you're going to implement multiplayer, you better get it right and smooth in one shot. There won't be more chances, all your fanbase will run away as soon as the first problem is detected. No one wants to lose their cities, yet alone start one to have it obliterated a couple of days later. SC2013 will be the study case for years to come, as in order to allow these cloud storage cities what would be required to run what @AmiPolizeiFunk proposes, a whole can of worms always opens. For example, you always need the game online, something that, as shown several years ago, bothered most users. Online connection means valuable computing resources wasted, while they could be invested in running the game better. And some others, directly, played the game in isolated computers for safety purposes. 

And I haven't even mentioned mod compatibility, which is for instance the main reason why the STEX never accepted the upload of rendered maps with cities on them. As soon as you have one mod that your other buddy doesn't, things get crazy. In the best of cases, your buddy might get a brown box (SC4) or completely nothing (CSL), but when more complex mods are in the way (NAM for SC4, Traffic++ for CSL) things can get very nasty. The traffic behavior of entire cities and regions would be turned upside down just by the fact that your buddy uses a different traffic mod.

I've played SC4 for almost 10 years and CSL for several months and never felt the need for a multiplayer. Maybe it's not that important after all.

[AmiPolizeiFunk 446]

Wassup fellow Berliner!  @TekindusT

Interesting posts. I'm pretty new to this scene, and I'm coming from bigtime multiplayer scenes (dota2, coh2), so I didn't know there was such a stigma about multiplayer. I understand how mods can be a big issue. For example, I'd love to share my 1:1 Berlin that I've been working on for 3 months now, but the fact that it's so heavily modded (even down to other people's workshop assets being tweaked here or there) that I'm pretty much unable to share it. I wouldn't want to share it in some kind of incomplete form, so I just don't share it at all. 

 

Would be nice if there was a better system to load different sets of mods. It would be a huge boon to be able to share experiences of the game, and I don't see it as so technically infeasible. What we have to do now (make massive collections of mods and assets, adding each object 1 by 1) can definitely be improved.

[Kaschperl 92]

I'm not against multiplayer at all, irrespective of the technical feasability. Some people actually played (or still play?) a sort of SC4 multiplayer where they have a common region stored on a server. That way people could download their map tile, work on it, submit it, view the other player's cities and trade with them. I've also seen multiplayer sessions like that where mods were allowed, everyone simply needed to have the same mods installed.

If I understood @AmiPolizeiFunk correctly then that's pretty close to what he imagined regarding the concept, and it's even closer to what SC5 already has. From my point of view that's a nice form of having something like a multiplayer experience without many dependencies: the only things that need to be done are keeping the maps synced and make sure that everyone has the same mods installed when they play in the multiplayer region. SC4 is very suited for this kind of multiplayer: it has (proper, not the SC5-style) built-in regions and mod packs can easily be switched around (while merely trying to have interchangable mod packs in C:S will most likely make your brain melt).

Of course there would be many things to think about if a region system was to be introduced in CSL too, like traffic connections, trade and what not, so to me it appears to be least suitable for multiplayer out of the three games I mentioned.

[hitzu 139]

Bring the multiplayer above the horizon and a bunch of complex problems arize: cheating, griefing, social harassment, server administrating, mod synchronisation etc

Nah. You'd better either start making an online game from the beginning of development or stick with the single player.