No, I am not a fan of multiplayer.  Balancing the game becomes to much of an issue.  One of the great things about MoM was how out of balance the game was.  It was truly challenging, if not impossible, to play with some races, i.e. gnolls.  They were just plain awful, which made it fun to try.

Multiplayer games just continually balance, which I think takes some of the fun out of it.

I'd pay for multiplayer, no more than $10. I purchased E:WoM to play multiplayer games with a few buddies of mine. I even convinced those buddies to buy that game. I know that E:WoM's usage stats for the multiplayer were very low (I didn't even attempt it), but I attribute that to very few mentions of it by game reviewers (which says a lot) and comments about the mode made by avid forum posters. I feel privileged that I'm getting FE for free, but I wish that a multiplayer component was available too, even if it isn't as popular or played as much as as the single player sandbox mode. I think going the DLC route would be great.

We are still a long ways from release, will be at least fall.

This is total BS. TBS was made for Multi-player. I never understood how anyone would think the MP does not work for TBS games. Have you people never played boardgames before? Guess what, that is what inspired computer TBS games ....HELLO!!!!!!!!.

AI is never going to be as challanging as a human. And there are TBS games that have woorked quite well as MP. CIV 4 and now CIV 5 (yes I like Civ 5)

AOW:SM, Shogun Total War, just to name a few. The key is to not change the single player expereance for MP. That means don't dumb down the game for either speed or balance. If it can be fun single player then just allow the ability to have a human as well as AI players (see Civ 4 on how to do this or AOW:SM) Also in additon to LAN and Internet have Hotseat so I can play more than one faction at a time.

I'm not calling for servers to be set up to play MP we can use our own PC's to host games.

Number of people in the beta, who read the forums, and felt like commenting.

The number of people playing the beta is a subset of the people with access to it. The number of people reading the forums is a subset of that. The number of people who will then go answer the poll is a subset of that.

The general rule is that the forums are never a good indication of what the audience really wants because the forums are a small, selection-bias skewed group.

The way I see it as one of the guys who was originally interested in MP and highly disappointed with what we got in WoM, scrapping it for FE was the right call. MP can't possibly be fun until SP is fun. But these poll numbers? Considering the open hostility this forum has shown over the years to MP?

41% is a lot higher then you'd expect. If that number could be taken at face value and projected out to the entire playerbase, 41% willing to pay more for MP would be a ringing endorsement. (Shame you can't really do that.)

I want to fund an expansion.  I just would want it to be SP focused because as much as I'd probably enjoy it, I will probably never play FE multiplayer, it is a matter of time.  I have time in 1 hour increments or smaller, and I just won't have the time to dedicate to a game.  It's a shame and I don't begrudge people that want to play FE as a MP game, I just won't be one.   Hopefully, I can make mods that the MP community will like though.  

• Original question is very vague, define MP better.
• Game should have MP COOP mode.
• Lots of people will only buy the game if it has MP.
• I personally think that competitive online multiplayer will be more trouble than it is worth because of the balancing nightmare that will occur.
• LAN COOP mode should be implemented before release to please critics (and me).

I do not see the problems people have with multiplayer, that is the way I see it is if the stardock guys implement multiplayer they do not have to change the fundamentals of the game, only make all the game mechanics work over the distance of the internet, the balance will probably be the same no matter. They do not need to make it super multiplayer focused for it to be able to access the multiplayer parts, just put up code to apply the multiplayer parts.

That said it is true that what focus they could put into coding a whole multiplayer section, they could put into posting probably 3 campaigns, or a major upgrade pack (I have no idea how hard it would be, honestly), also I believe in my heart it will be a fraction of the player base, including myself that will use multiplayer extensively beyond trying it out, but for us players multiplayer is half the experience, for me I really like to find games to play Co - op with my friends, since I cannot really move a lot around.
So when I play with my friends over teamspeak its a way to bring people together, over a nice cup of elemental and some destruction .

I think it should be a choice by the Stardock team exclusively, as another person said, the forum is just a small part of the players that will be playing  the game in the future, a lot of the players are way less hardcore I figure, and depending on stardock, they either make a really hardcore game where they focus the games for the players who spend sheizeloads of time playing each game, probably modding each different part, or finding moderations that was put together by other players, or to put time into making the game into being easyer to player, and easily and quickly modified with a few items to suit each players style.

I do hope for a multiplayer expansion, it does not have to include superior balancing, make the modding section stand for that if you need.
Just a multiplayer section so I can enjoy a nice game with my friends... at some point when I can play again

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

No interest here, I'm so old most of my friends have gone to the other side.

Well we do not agree. While MP is fun in FPS the best MP is in TBS games and has always been that way for centuries (chess, Go, Bul, then later with Risk Diplomancy as well as others.) When playing games on PC's came around it was a no brainer to make TBS games for the PC. TBS 4X games evolved from this and MP go hand in hand with them.

So for many of us MP and TBS 4X games go hand in hand.  Yes Single player is fun but the AI is never really challanging and thowing real players in the mix makes for a challanging game.

For me I do play SP in games most of the time but I do love to MP with Friends and I also like hotseat so I can play more than one faction at a time.

I voted yes on the assumption that hot seat would be included.

If not then a big no.

Yes it can be done I play 4x games with my friends all the time when we do have time. And if we don't then we play the SP version. So yes 4X is great for MP. I would have loved GalCiv2 to have been MP I would have been able to get several of my friends to play if it had been.  And I dis agree with your WOM assessment. That game sucked and the MP (if you want to call it that) was even more poorly done than the SP version.

So I would love some focus to be put into MP as long as it is the whole SP game and not some cut down version of the game

Player matching?  Hell I just want to be able to play between friends either hotseat, Lan or TCP/IP  I could care less about player matching.

Statistics have also shown that 90% of statictics quoted by 78% of the people who 65% of the time pull 89% of the data out of 58% of their buttox have shown that 100% are made up to boulster their side of an argument 98% of the time.  

This is true.  I read that same report.