Too many players on a keyboard doesn't work because keyboards tend to fail when many keys are mashed at once.

I think the reason you have the apparent ability to do more is purely due to the way movement and timing is slightly different, and generally faster.

If you cannot even connect to your own game on localhost, then your router isn't even in the picture yet. Routers only control connections to the outside world. If you cannot connect to your own computer at localhost, then your problem is coming from inside your computer somewhere.

A more faithful reimplementation of the original gameplay for dealing with a quitter is that all of the quitter's stuff is put up for auction and he ceases to participate in the game, just like in the original. In the original Atari/C64 Mule, should a player quit, the other players would take his joystick and sell all of his stuff.

I have noticed people speak of the dreaded Collusion which I was very pleased to see completely missing.

I disagree that collusion shouldn't be in the game, because collusion DOES add a very important element to the game. Additionally, is *IS* part of the game, and a reimplementation of Mule should not be a pick and choose of what features you want to have in the game, it should be a faithful reimplementation of the original, with the only compromises being what is strictly necessary to make it function in a modern environment.

I have been playing this game on the C64 for the past 20 years, at least once or twice a year (for 3 or 4 games each), we have literally played 100s and maybe even more than a 1000 games.  We banned Collusion from our games a long time ago, deciding that it was simply a form of cheating and added nothing to the "game".

If you've been playing it on C64, I'd be surprised you would BAN collusion, since a C64 has only two joystick ports, meaning there would normally only be two players in the game...who would collude with each other, against the AIs, who tend to sabotage the colony by virtue of being AIs.

The guy in first shouldn't get to buy anything if the guys behind him have the money and the desire... even if its just one of those guys who actually wants/needs to stop him.

This is actually sort of stupid, but it's faithful to the original game. Yet it will produce exactly the same kind of irritation and loss of interest in the game that being colluded against would. In fact, collusion is the COUNTERMOVE to this sort of thing. It seems more to me that you want your favorite toy to be without the countermove that balances against it.

No arguments about the timing step thing. Anything that brings the game closer to the original is considered a good thing.

If you really want to see tons of different kinds of AI, just make the AI modular, and we can write our own. BOT WARS! Who can write the meanest AI?

But this isn't then anymore. If we displayed that message, it would last about half a frame before disappearing, because we don't have long load times.

But then we may have people who always want to be player #3, then mass confusion might reign again! atch! 

Well, duh. Everyone wants to be player #3, at least until late in the game. Nothing horrible ever happens to player #3. Being player #1 sucks!

I am pretty sure that making all color perception in the game subjective would actually cause more confusion. If color perception of players became entirely subjective, so each player perceives other players as a possibly different color, and thus no one knew what anyone was talking about, anarchy and rioting would break out in the streets and civilization as we know it would collapse.

If there is zero supply, that means no one has any food/energy and there is none in the store. I do not think you can reach round 12 under these conditions because the colony would have prematurely failed because of them.

My suggestion? Toss the ranking system entirely. Even HAVING a ranking system only introduces a system that detracts from the actual playing of the game for FUN, as people quickly aim to game the ranking system rather than playing the game. You can continue to track individual games, but without a global ranking system, people don't have anywhere they can really paint their name on, or plaster themselves with a flashy number to make themselves look good, so meh.

I don't think Kipley is evil in this case, and I'm good with spotting evil behavior, so...

A game designer must always assume that players are, to some degree, evil. If you're going to meaningfully analyze the integrity of a system, you have to operate from the position that everyone, hosts and otherwise, are evil, and nothing you receive from the client can be accepted without validation.

I don't think that any player which is WINNING would bail by choice, so this argument is a non-issue. There is little that would encourage a winning player to bail and leave his empire up to the vagaries of the AI, jokes about this notwithstanding. It seems more likely that a host would boot a winning player in an attempt to deprive that player of a win, or that a winning player is disconnected from a game due to network issues.

If anything, the opposite applies: Since it follows that if a player wins while substituted by an AI, the score is presently counted anyway, if the player LOSES while substituted by an AI, his score is ALSO counted, meaning he cannot avoid defeat by abandoning the game: It will just give him a defeat AND an abandonment. Clearly, no one is seriously suggesting that intentionally abandoning a game so that the AI will play for you represents an advantage, and if Collusion is ever finally implemented, players can engage in deliberately AI-hostile behaviors which an AI cannot respond to even more effectively.

It seems more that in this particular case, a player, who already had a relatively strong position, playing with players who are not exceptionally skilled, was disconnected from laggingness and was able to retain his position under the AI through luck and a decent foundation.

On the other hand, perhaps the mechanics of how a player is handled when he is disconnected are poor and promote this problem: In C64/Atari, a player who quits becomes inert and does nothing for the rest of the game, and the other players grab his joystick and steal his stuff. Implementing AI takeover of such a player is not really true to form, as this can never happen in the original.

Hmm, I wonder: If the host is a Visitor and does not play, can the game continue after everyone abandons to a conclusion without any of the players? I think the abandoned player victory is a good thing, though: If the player manages to lay the groundwork such that even an AI can direct his empire to victory, he should be allowed to keep it, so that it will be harder for a crooked host to kick him and steal the win.