To me one of the key points in MP is game duration. Civ IV has different speeds, for instance, but even then I feel the fast speed is too slow (you may spend one evening of play mostly hitting end turn).

How long would a MP game last? Are the turns continuous a la Dom3 or a la Civ IV or are they more Galciv like (which means much slower games)?

What does the Empire vs. Kingdom mean? If I play a session that is not finished, next time I connect, can I play the same session or am I joining the current game in which some other Empire players kept playing since last I logged and find an evolved game situation?

I guess there will be an option for simultanious turns.

One thing to comment here. I do love the way it works in CIV4 with take over AI's for people quitting, but one thing irritates me. In CIV4 multiplayer most mp games starts out with prince (medium) difficult level per player. When an AI comes inn for a player the AI is pretty easy match. It would be great if the AI that undertook a human player could have greater benefits (be better) then on the difficultsetting in the start of the game (when it's often only human players).

One more example: In CIV 4 if you like to make a game with 6 humans and 6 AI's, and want the AI's to make it a bit better you may for instance choose that the human players play on monarch, and the AIs on prince (easier). It works fine until another human player joins in for one of the AI's and also benefits from the prince level. We should have a system to prevent this.....

Joining humans should play on the same difficulty as the starting humans. And joining AI's should optionally (in the setup of the game) have it easier.

Any CIV-players here understanding what I mean?

Another thing I'd like to add. Plaese don't have a score system where you can see each of the players total score from early in the game, like in Civ4 or Heroes 4. It makes people too focused on that score, and quitting when they feel they're to far behind.

Hopefully you will have to make alot of effort in Elemental to collect that kind of info about your opponents.

Oh, does that mean we get an AI that remembers stuff from game to game?

Meaning that if I usually play as a relentless backstabber it won't trust me so much (or at all) in other games?

That would be really nice.

I allways thought the Altarians should never trade with me after so many games in which my only goal was to destroy those Terran impersonators. Would be fun if that would happen.

Just imagine:

You've started a new game and after some time encounter the AI you've utterly annihilated in the last game, which is now hellbent on revenge and tries to destroy you, while cursing you for it's loss in the last game.

That's kind of what I'm hoping, especially if what it remembers is not as much about drama details as it is about a given players habits and the potential strategic weak spots they tend to create.

Also, if the 'persistent' stuff works well for the single-player opponent instances, maybe a similar code chunk could provide a pool of trainable hero units, so you would eventually have different lineages that spawned heroes who understand and apply the human player's typical settings for both logistics duty and when given the reins in a tactical fight.

This persistent world idea sounds really interesting, but to echo what someone above posted, please don't let this kind of development interfere with the single player game.  I read somewhere, and hopefully the developers have numbers, that in games that include both single player and multiplayer, the percentage of people that play single player is much higher then the percentage of people that play multiplayer.  This means that the single players are really the target market for the game.  If you can do both well, great, but if the single player game doesn't work well that's much more important then the multiplayer game not working well.  When you look at a forum like this one, you will see an unbalenced representation of people talking about multiplayer, and I think that is because the people who play multiplayer are more likely to be the people who are vocal on forums like this. 

[quote quoting="Frogboy"]I love multiplayer games. But I am not an advocate of them in terms of taking resources up from the single player game for most types of PC games.  That's because, as a practical matter, relatively few people play on-line.  Not because they can't but because it's just usually not worth the hassle.[/quote]

I often wonder why people don't read what is allready written...

Can we choose not to fight on the border regions of our lands of the larger "empire"?

I want my Kingdom to be deep in Empire territory, focusing on economic backbone support!

Just a pesky interface question:

How will user-supplied 'mod' content interface with MP mode?  Are we looking at something like Battle for Wesnoth, where all players need to hunt down the most recent version of the mods being used to play the game?  Or will there be some manner of automated mod gathering tool?  But the main gist of this question is 'can we MP with mods'?

That's a very important question. In Galciv you could not play the metaverse if you had mods. It would be nice to know how that will work. I could not be bothered to try adn find out which mod is necessary to play a given game. If it works with mod online it would be nice to have a pop up saying  mod 1 2 3 are needed press ok to download them. And the the game would load. That would be great.