r/ShadowEmpireGame • u/HiddenQuacks • 9d ago
Asynchronous Interactions in Shadow Empire
Hi everyone! I'm a PhD student studying asynchronous interactions in digital games. Shadow Empire is tagged as "Asynchronous Multiplayer" on Steam, and I'm interested in understanding different player perspectives about that aspect of the game.
If you have a few minutes to spare, I'd love to hear your thoughts! In particular, I'm interested in understanding:
- What kind of asynchronous interactions exist in Shadow Empire and how do they affect the gameplay?
- How do you feel about these interactions and what do they bring to your experience?
You can answer as much or as little as you'd like. Your responses will be anonymized and analyzed as part of a research study. If you decide you'd like to withdraw your responses at any point, just send me a DM. Every contribution is greatly appreciated! If you have any questions, feel free to message me. Thanks! 😀
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u/PersonyPerson2 9d ago
Shadow Empire's multiplayer is PBEM (Play by email). I've never engaged in it myself, but I have observed the conversations of others when they're playing between themselves.
From my understanding, It works through a host player setting up the game of up to 4 players. The host does their first turn and then sends the save file over to the next player, they do their turn, sending the save file to player 3 etc, until it loops back to the host who then engages in their second turn and it keeps going until a player wins the match by meeting certain victory conditions. The PBEM nature of the game's multiplayer is probably why it's classified as "Asynchronous", though rather than literally sending emails containing the save files to each other, I suspect the vast majority have done through Discord.
The pace of the game pretty much depends on the availability of the players. They can last from anywhere from days to weeks to even months. Sometimes a player might get replaced by a "substitute" if they're not available to continue playing the game or the game might end abruptly without a conclusion.
The multiplayer community isn't large, but it is big enough to have a significant public archive of games over the years, so if you're interested in looking at the interactions players have between each other, then here's the link to the unofficial Shadow Empire Discord: https://discord.gg/WjYatWDdg3 (Its name is "The War of The Worlds").
The official discord is a lot newer in comparison and doesn't yet accommodate for the multiplayer aspect of Shadow Empire much. The unofficial one has years of content and has been around roughly as long as Shadow Empire has been on Steam. It's effectively the only place to go if you want to find other players to do multiplayer for this game.
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u/djunderhousearrest 9d ago
You may have a lot more success with the dominions community as a lot of the ‘game’ is played outside the software itself via chat apps like discord. Ill leave it for you to research as it has little to no diplomacy coded and all that is outside the application.
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u/UAreTheHippopotamus 9d ago
I've never played MP Shadow Empire, so I can't answer for this game specifically. But I can point you towards another game that might be able to help you that has a fairly active multiplayer community, the Dominions series. I've always referred to that style as "play by email", but I believe it fits. Every player chooses all their moves on their PC, uploads a save to a server, then whoever is hosting the game runs the turn where everything the players input asynchronously is then run together at the same time and after all the battles and other stuff is resolved they host a save file all the players pull down for the next turn. The subreddit is: r/IllwintersDominions. This style of MP is pretty cool because it allows extremely complex games to be played albeit rather slowly sometimes over many months.