Direct-connection problem: Most people don't have ten hours at a stretch to play games. It's hard to match schedules for 4+ players to actually complete a game.

PBEM problem: It takes far too long to play a game. One player can easily delay a turn for an extended period of time. Even with dedicated players, it is difficult to finish games.

Have you considered server-based asynchronous multiplayer? The game is hosted on a server which adjudicates turns on a schedule. Between adjudications, each player connects to the server and submits orders for the upcoming turn. If a player misses a turn, the AI plays it. With this model, it would be easy to run multiplayer games with as many as four turns per day.

There are, of course, lots of implementation issues to be worked out - for example, would players download a complete turn file, play offline, and upload orders, or would they use a client-server connection and play the turn completely online?

So from the user's point of view, he would log in and get the previous turn's orders. Those orders would modify his local save game. Then he could log off and play the turn (or stay connected) and then log back on and upload his orders.

Server space isn't that hard to come by these days. One person could easily host dozens of games on a single server. Games like Galaxy galaxy.pbem.net prove that the server based system works.

Welcome to the forum!

What you request is possible, but our efforts right now are on single player anyway. If you want this to stay in the 'instituional memory' you should put it in the multiplayer thread. Otherwise it is likely to be long forgotten by the time we get back to multiplayer stuff...

I hope you keep multiplayer on the list of things 'to-do' later though. The SMAC games I've had the most fun playing are scenarios with 2-4 humans teamed up against an 'inflated' AI. One example - 4 humans with normal start vs. 3 pacted AI starting at 3x the power of the humans.