A typical game can even include people from different parts of the world since Entrepreneur isn't slowed down much due to lag and other problems on the Internet.
But even with that in mind, here are some tips to use to get the most
out of Entrepreneur as an Internet experience.
Tip #1:
Try to get the person with the fastest connection to be the one
who creates the game.
The game creator (or server) has to deal with the most internet traffic.
Moreover, a fast machine will help a lot if you have AI players involved.
The game creator needs to remember that the game stop when they leave the
game. So even if the game creator loses the game, they need to stick
around and at least watch what the other people are doing.
Tip #2:
Keep AI players down to a minimum.
AI players use about as much bandwidth as human players do. Moreover,
because of the sophistication level of Entrepreneur's AI, they do use a
considerable amount of CPU cycles. This means that as the server,
you'll want to limit the number. A good game of Entrepreneur has
about 4 players. If you have 4 human players, you should limit the
number of AI players to 1 or 0 unless all of you have very good internet
connections (or are at least on the same continent).
Tip #3:
Don't have background network processes going on while playing.
Downloading the latest Netscape or Internet Explorer or OS/2 Fixpack
or whatever is probably not something you'll want to do while playing an
Internet game. OS/2 users with the InJoy dialer (at least at the
time of this writing -- 7/97) should use the Dial Other Internet
Providers because Entrepreneur is a DIVE game and DIVE games seem to cause
packets not to be sent when InJoy is the dialer (Stardock hopes to resolve
this by release).
Tip #4
Play the game at Fast, Normal, or Slow. Do not play as
Faster or Fastest unless you all have good connections.
If you are the server and things begin to "lock" a bit during play,
SLOW the game down or pause it to let things get caught up. To keep
the players in synch, the server only has a 32K buffer. If people
fall far enough behind from lag or other issues, the game begins to slow
down on the server.
Tip #5
Don't assume the game has "hung" or crash.
If connections are bad enough, sometimes the music will begin to skip.
The game will recover on its own. While this is pretty uncommon,
it has been known to happen during a few Australia-to-United States to
Europe games.