errr... completely wrong. Firstly, 67% of people voted that they didn't want multiplayer, and secondly the Dev's have said the plumbing is laid. It could be done, but would take an entire expansion pack of work to do. In fact, Brad said in the Journals yesterday, (as well as saying people don't want it) that if an expansion has 5 slots, multiplayer is 4.

It's not necessary, and most people don't want it. Galciv is a good enough game without it, and msot just want better AI, mroe features etc.

Multiplayer is sort of a necessity.

Like, seriously, can people stop making threads about this?

No? Well, can they at least stop pretending to speak for everyone?

Im not sure that 67% dont want multiplayer.
The question was would you pay 20 bucks for amultiplayer only expansion.
I for example would like multiplayer but I would not pay 20 bucks for a multiplayer only expansion because I would not play it often/ long enough multiplayer to make 20 bucks reasonable.
5 to 10 bucks maybe but surely not 20.
why?
because i would not play it online against random people (that would simply take forever), only in lan against/ with friends that isnt possible very often

if you wont play 20 dollars worth of multiplayer then the galciv team needs to focus on more important items

Speaking as one of the 67%, I can say that I couldn't care less about multiplayer capability. I've just never gotten into that part of gaming, and have no desire to do so. I prefer to play with myself.

It seems to me that if GalCiv2 is this succesful, and a single player only expansion pack is also succesful other game companies might sit up and take notice, pulling the gaming world back from the brink of its multiplayer ghetto. Stardock did not just make an amazing game, they struck a major blow for the side of right and goodness in a war which seemed all but lost.

Personally I'm in that Solo-Player camp myself. The AI is challenging enough and I like the convience of always having opponments to play no matter the time of day/night. So I am also in that no catagory. Personally I am turned off by most multi-player games.

I'm curious - when they talk about multiplayer taking 4 of 5 slots, are they talking about LAN only multiplayer or a battle.net style multiplayer? I have no interest in a battle.net scenario, but LAN only would be a nice addition.

I think that multiplayer, in the form of LAN\hot seat would be the only way I would go with a game like this. I take my time in games, so on a huge map I will be playing the game for a solid week, depending on how it goes.

However, I think that more attention should be paid polishing the last bits of the game and then adding new features etc so that we have a great game to play. Besides, there IS going to be a sequel so they can add multiplayer into that from the start, and I will be happy.

for the record, i am illiterate when it comes to programming

You didn't need to say that; you proved it in what you said. Only a non-programmer can consider such a monumental task to be trivial.

What about play by e-mail multiplayer option? I admit it could take a while to play a game but you could at least take your time with ship design etc.

Okay, so I'm understanding that the reason multiplayer is hard to program is because GC2 is a turn based game, but I still don't get it. The players take their turns one at a time, then when they are done the information needs to be sent to the other players' cpus. I still don't see how that is much different than the game keeping track of what the AIs are doing each turn. There obviously is some large difficulty that I am not seeing. Alfonse seems to know, if anyone else does feel free to offer some sort of explanation.

There should be a poll on what, of the features on the "long list", people want the most. It would certainly settle once and for all what the devs should be concentrating on.

Edit: P.S.: Programming multiplayer is not really all that hard, the hard part is in maintaining the connections, preventing cheating and so on. The reason why GC2 is not suited to multiplayer is that it is turn-based, and each player can take as long as they want to make their moves, so there is no "simultaneous action", you have to each make your moves one at a time and then deal with the changes each player has made. It would take forever to get through each turn. If you've ever played a Civ IV multiplayer game, it is bloody BORING waiting for everyone to figure out what the heck they want to do. Turn-based games simply do not make good multiplayer games, whereas FPS and RTS games do, because you don't sit around waiitng for each person to make their decisions and move, according to the "you snooze, you lose" rule.