I prefer to play with myself.

Ooooh, must...resist...smartass...quote. AHHHH!

Whew, ok. I, too, prefer to play BY myself . There are droves of MP games on the market. If that's your "thing", then play'em. For me, gaming is not a social event (trust me, just ask my wife ). As for challenging opponents, I've been playing 4x games since Civ I and I've yet to beat any of them consistently on the hardest levels. That's plenty o' challenge for me.

Stardock: Please invest your scarce resources -- people and financial -- on improving GalCiv II. In pure business terms, you have a niche market already. Now capitalize on it. IMO, trying to attract the MP crowd is out of scope for this project.

Okay, so you're saying that making the GC2 able to run multiplayer is not the difficulty at all, but rather the task is about tweaking the game so that the multiplayer experience is interesting, balanced, dynamic, etc etc. I hope that's the truth, because I really wasn't seeing how merely giving the game multiplayer abilities was such a programming challenge, in and of itself.

So if that is the situation, I am surprised they didn't offer some rudimentary multiplayer, by email or something, just to satisfy those who are just *dying* to play their friends. Is it just a given that without significant effort it would be so tedious and unbalanced that it would only give GC2 a bad name (and, if so, does anyone remember the "realtime" option for the OS/2 GC2)? Even so, don't you guys think the game could be at least worth a multiplayer try with a few noteworthy fixes? For example,

a) you would have to put a time limit on turns. They would be real short to start off with, a few minutes, and then the game would extend the time as it gets larger (based on total population, ship count, whatever).

no ship designing. Everyone goes in with their own library of ships, which should be quite extensive if you've played the game enough.

c) everything would have to be highly organized. Basically, have to cut time everywhere. You wouldn't be allowed to select individual social programs for planets. You have four or five social project lists, and you choose for each planet which list you want for it, depending on what you're going to use that planet for. Maybe even you can micromanage if you really want to, but the time constraints would make this unattractive.

Okay, so maybe i'm starting to see from my brainstorm that MP could actually be kinda tuff. It's obviously going to be a different type of game than single player, where you are appreciating the fine details. It's more like timed chess-the games aren't perfect but they aren't supposed to be either.