Hotseat would actually be a good idea. My gf and I play Civ4 together in hotseat whenever we get a chance. It's really not that bad. Although I wouldn't consider it an absolutely necessary feature, if you could add hotseat to Elemental that would be great!

Since Elemental is old school, you mind as well have old school hotseat mode thrown in there.

I'm not really seeing what you problem is. No matter what, everyone has to be able to connect to the game host. For Internet games, the game host is Stardock. For LAN games, the game host is someone on the LAN.

It's generally safe to assume everyone can connect to the host on a LAN. It's also generally safe to assume everyone can connect to a dedicated server environment.

It's NOT safe to assume that everyone can connect to <random user> across the Internet. Demigod showed us that pretty quickly, and for years we've seen games where some players have the "I can join but not host" problem.

Being skeptical at this point is more like paranoia.

Someone said that it was simply easier for Stardock to do it that way, instead of allowing Direct IP or LAN support. Now, we're getting somewhat conflicting reports that they somehow want to allow both.

Hence the question as to why they'd bother with the idea of "all should go through us". Why say that "I’m convinced that the only sure-fire way of totally making these games 100% reliable online is for us to just host the games" and then say "LAN almost certainly".

"LAN almost certainly" almost sounds like a way to say "Yeah, we know you want it, but it's not going to happen, but for some peace and quiet, we'll say maybe, awwright?".

Will we or will we not be able to play E:WoM multiplayer games outside the confines of dedicated Stardock servers?

If not a traditional Hot seat how about letting us run two instances of Elemental on one PC, one for each player (How Conquest! allows Hot Seat).

Sammual

Thanks for the info, Brad.  Particularly thank you for answering the LAN question, as we hope to play some in-house multiplayer and it would be a little silly for all our packets to be running halfway across the country to your servers and then all the way back to our house (through the same network drop they went out) and into a different computer.

You didn't own Demigod for the first 3 weeks, did you? I couldn't play, at all, except using Hamachi (which fakes a LAN). The connection stuff was a total fiasco. A lot of that is because of the issues the modern Internet has with two users trying to connect to each other.

Elemental's beta 0 got delayed because they took a lot of people off it to go work on Demigod. There was stuff like 108 hour work weeks. Lots of unhappy users. It's been fixed since then, but it was a huge mess.

This "extreme urge" is a knee-jerk reaction to that. Having everyone connect to Stardock eliminates the problems Demigod had, because everybody *can* connect to Stardock. No reconfiguring routers to open ports to host games.

Well, LAN and Internet connections aren't the same thing in reliability. LANs are generally as simple as it gets. There's no NAT. Usually no firewalls that actually block stuff (LAN traffic is typically let through fairly easily). No broken home router hardware with flaky SPI stuff. No ports to forward. No weird ISP configurations that give the same DSL modem multiple IPs. No traffic shaping. No backhoe in Ohio cutting fiber.

Frogboy doesn't consider them the same thing, hence "reliable online". Online in this case means "Internet". If you're just playing on a LAN, the connection will work without problems 99.99999% of the time. All the problems above can screw up connections across the Internet, and they just want it to work with as little fuss as possible.

Yes, if you're playing with people on a LAN (or use Hamachi to fake a LAN). No, if you're playing across the Internet.

In regards of LAN? I don't see the problem of being outside of it. As for anything WAN, you can get SD's servers to facilitate all kinds of different online playing experiences.

Yes, you could fake it, but then latency could be even more of an issue. Good luck with that. Messy, messy stuff...

Latency worries in a turn based game?

Latency in a turn based game isn't really an issue to begin with, unless you're talking about numbers in the thousands. I played Demigod for 3 weeks using Hamachi, and it works pretty well.

Another great update,

I for one will enjoy multiplayer on occasion if it can be finished quickly,

I wonder also if there will be a ranking system so I can pick people that are close to my level. I don't want to be trashed because I am playing with somebody that is a total killer

PBEM PLEASE!

Best option for multiplayer in my humble opinion.

This is good news...  thank  you.

I am a latency-traumatized gamer.

Latency due do network issues, 1 second.

Latency due to the guy that went to make a PB&J when it wasn't his turn and didn't tell anybody, 10 mins.

Although now that I think about it, it does bring up a question as to how MP tactical battles will be fought if not set to auto-resolve.  I.e. will only the attacking channeler be able to cast spells etc during the battle? Or would it be in real time for both sides.  Or like MOM I guess the battle could also be fought turn-based.

PBEM is a must for large games. It also eliminates the need for all player to be online at the same time and you don’t need a server. Best thing of all I could have 5 games going at the same time.

The only con I see is your opponent quits and never tells you.