Elemental Forums
I assume these games can take 10 to 50 hrs to play depending on how many people you have playing and how big your map is. Sins of a solar empire had this option so is it safe to assume that this option will be here too? (whether its store on a server somewhere or locally).
It's more likely to be quite a bit longer than a few hours to complete.
Sins has online saves, don't see why they wouldn't give it to Elemental 
Same is true for Dominions_3... in fact I can't even recall anyone who's reported winning a game over 750 provinces without some type of victory condition.
Ok for a online savegame, but it would be very hard to get the same 32 players at the same time to continu the game...
Just schedule it, make a weekly plan, games played for 2 hours on x days over a period of a month all planned in advance, if you fail to show up on a date the game goes on without you.
By signing up you commit to the plan and an understanding that you will make time so you can play, easy.
Most games allow you to just sub in an ai player. I would assume the same would hold for this one.
Or they could use a method where everyone does their turn, and then it executes. You'll probably get a turn every few days done, and there might be a few players passing turns.
IE, every turn it saves, and everyone logs into the server to play their next turn.
Be tricky for the pause battles, though, but that's really a single player feature.
While there can be 32 players max in a game, it would be suicidal IMO to have 32 people playing a multiplayer game. A bit of maths - even if all battles are auto resolved, it will take say an average of 5 minutes per turn later in the game x 32 means you would be waiting over 2 and a half hours between turns. And the game will last hundreds of turns. Netaddict's idea might work though.
It was stated at PAX that multiplayer games will be able to be saved. (its speculated some of the biggest maps may take months to play, so how could they not be savable)
It was suggested that the saved game should be held on the Stardock servers (at least for SD hosted ones) so that players can hop back in when ready, without having to deal with some of the hesting a save troubles that other games sometimes experiance.
So I'm guessing the way the system is going to work is that we queue up what we want to do for the turn and when done we press ready. When everyone has hit ready, then all the turns are excuted simutaneously so that no can just delay and wait to see what everybody else does and then make his or her move.
Any chance of sub'ing a live player for an AI? I can see in long games where some players may miss some evenings. Being able to have an AI act for them in their absence and allow them or another human to rejoin would be nice.
As mentioned by Robbie.Price the game will have simultaneous turns... the same as seen within AgeofWonders:ShadowMagic. This means each turn only as long as the slowest player and hopefully a game timer will also be setup to automatically begin the next turn as seen within Heroes_3 and AoW:SM. The game timer should be adjustable before loading a save game since the late game turns will take longer.
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