Multiplayer

Multiplayer games can be very different from singleplayer games; this article should help you find multiplayer games, learn common practices, and how to handle problems.

Finding games

You have three options for finding games: BattleGoat Studios' "Multiplayer Games" forum, the Supreme Ruler 2010 Gamespy Arcade lobby, and the #sr2010 IRC channel. There are usually few or no people just loitering in Gamespy and IRC, but they can be used to meet for a game posted on the forum. If you post on the forum, you may want to do so at least a day or two before the game.

Tips

These are some common practices in multiplayer:

• Usually there is a setup period of a few minutes at the beginning of each game; the game begins when all say they are ready.
• Look out for yourself first. Allies can be useful, but the game's purpose is to have a single ruler--expect to be backstabbed.
• Be aware that multiplayer games are often fairly short. Long-term items such as large military bases, many aircraft, and so on might be completed only near the end of a game.
• To keep an alliance secret, you can agree to everything but Formal Alliance itself. Line-of-sight, transit, and mutual defense treaties come close in function while keeping the agreements concealed.
• Be careful who you sign transit treaties with, because a human will probably declare war on you if someone attacks them from your territory.

Connections

To rejoin a player who has disconnected, you must distribute a savegame to all players and restart from the multiplayer lobby using this savegame. Savegames can be over 5MBs in size uncompressed, but in a ZIP archive they will be only a few hundred kilobytes. All players should have the uncompressed .SAV file in their "Supreme Ruler 2010\Savegame" folder.

Repeated sync errors can have no apparent effect, or put players on very different versions of the same game. Wish we knew how to tell. If you think the sync errors are trivial, then having everyone press CTRL+S will turn off the default pause. Otherwise, try loading from a savegame.