Pogo wrote:Sid Meier's Railroads offered LAN/network multiplayer. Can't remember if you could do it over the Internet easily or not. But the thing is... the multiplayer game mode was identical to the single player game mode, just you were playing against a human instead of the AI. You each control individual railroad companies and build up your own company, trying to drive the other companies out of business.
Same for Railroad Tycoon2 multiplayer and I actually *really enjoy* that type of multiplayer. In fact, I am planning to do a RT2 session with a friend later this week.
Pogo wrote:Can't really do this with Prison Architect. Prisons don't really open up across the street from each other and try driving one another out of business... there's not much of a competitive aspect to prison building.
Some people are already competing in a way, by uploading their prison saves, so you can see their handiwork and how awesome they are. I think this means there is at least a *little* bit of a competetive nature going around.
Even so, a multiplayer version of a game doesn't necessarily have to be competing directly against each other in a real life sense, either. It could be for ratings and score on who's prison is better equipped and maintained, who has better turn-out, do prisoners keep coming back, are they reintegrated into society? Basically, playing a single player game at the same time and seeing who gets a better score. This could be with or without vying for government attention.
Pogo wrote:The only competitive part about it might be bidding for the initial grants.
But then again, I really like the idea of vying for government attention. No, they don't pop up across the street from each other like gas stations, but they do have multiple prisons in states and countries that vye for funding and contracts and even prisoners themselves. They have rating systems for whether or not a repeat prisoner is sent back to that prison or another one with better facilities and rehabilitation programs that might actually help that prisoner. The players would compete for number of prisoners, risk level of prisoners, and overall making a better prison compared the other player's prison.
If that seems too happy for prison competition, harsher wardens would have to try to keep their underhanded dealings and evil actions secret and get a good system going for keeping things under wraps. The other player could then try to out him through politics, personal rights organizations, gang wars, spies, government bribes, guard corruption, and suggesting they send quality inspectors at the most inopportune of times---Busted!
ghostly_smoke wrote: I see some of you are taking as a good idea and would love to see it in a mod, but what's the point of me wasting my time when IV doesn't even wanna pop in with an opinion. If they say nope, then I'll stop talking about it as a expansion and more as asking for someone to make a mod. At that point I'll pay the designer to make the mod.
Sorry to see ya go. If you happen to see this, I know exactly how you feel. The devs are most likely busy working on stuff, but they really should have a moderator/PR rep here to let us know what's going on, instead of always having to hear it second hand. And at this point, I'm pretty sure we're just enjoying talking about the possibilities and ideas for a fan-made mod, and that shouldn't be so much of an upset, but for some odd reason it is.
CriticalRocket wrote:2 players are building a prison in real time, but you'd be able to save and stop at any time and continue later. Both players would have to be online then ofcourse, so it'd be the easiest to play with friends.
The objective would be becomming the best prison in the country, or world. Build a better prison than the competition, a prison with a higher prisoner capacity, better health care(wounded persons healed faster/better), less injuries, less riots etc etc.
People from the government would visit your prison every now and then to inspect it, and after a certain amount of time a grand winner would be chosen. You could be able to influence the other players prison by giving gifts to 'a person high up'(NPC) who decides which prison gets money from the government, which prison gets more prisoners each day etc etc. You could ask a gang to attack the other prison and let prisoners escape, bribe the other prisons guards, send gifts (cake with a knife or smthing :p) to the prisoners in the other prison.. stuff like that, IDK.
That would focus much more on the Building Sim aspect of the game.
Yes! You read my mind! I had my piece in a notepad!
MAdMaN wrote:Prisons are created to house people who have broken the law. They aren't (or at least shouldn't be) run in order to compete with other prisons.
Except, they kind of are in a sense, as CriticalRocket and I have now explained, and even if it wasn't, this is more about the players competing for best prison from a gaming perspective of wanting to have a higher score and that's about it. It doesn't matter if there's no such thing as an ultimate competition of prisons in real life. That does not concern us in the least.