No multiplayer?

Correct.

well yes and no ...

If you read up on the proposals for the Metaverse I think it sounds very interesting and novel. There are the Metaverse leagues - which are competitive in a sense. Secondly, what Stardock proposes to do is allow people to upload successful saved games and the Metaverse will store the successful Human's strategy as an AI player. You can then download the 'recorded' high performance AI and play against it.

As Brad said, the only difference here is the lack of waiting whilst your opponent thinks or goes to the Loo! (I added the last bit LOL )

Whilst this is not strictly true (i.e no Banter) its a half way house with some pro's and some con's

p.s. I bet people start constructing 'virtual MMPRPG' versions of GalCiv like they have done over at Battlefront.com for Combat Mission anyway.
S

Steve and magus,
thanks for the feedback.
Does this mean that not even in some 1.x version, there is a slight possibility of multiplaying this excellent game?

There will not be any multiplayer (in game connecting with another person on the Internet or LAN) in Galactic Civilizations.

Nor do we plan to add it in GalCiv 2 or 3 or 4 or so on.

Having worked on multiplayer games for the better part of the last decade, I can tell you that you lose a lot of good stuff when you have to design with other humans in mind. The game, by necessity, becomes much more generic, and MUCH more expensive to add new features to.

All these cool feature discussions we have here would be moot if the game had multiplayer.

On top of that, a great deal of time would have to be spent checking for "cheese" tactics. I.e. minor holes in game play that can be exploited by players to win in multiplayer.

And all that work so that a tiny percentage of people could play it multiplayer. Some games have large multiplayer populations, but turn based strategy games have much smaller ones and even RTS games don't have, as a percentage, very large multiplayer populations either.

And I say this as someone who is a multiplayer addict. As some people know, I was the top "Free for all" player at Total Annihilation on Boneyards.net for over a year and have played strategy games in the PGL. And I've been part of the development of several multiplayer games and have seen the market statistics on both why people purchase games and how many, as a percentage, play a given game on-line.

if you do PBEM multiplayer, it shouldn't interfer with any game mechanics. All you do in PBEM is send a save game file, that's all! There is no good excuse for not adding at least PBEM feature.

"On top of that, a great deal of time would have to be spent checking for "cheese" tactics. I.e. minor holes in game play that can be exploited by players to win in multiplayer."

- that has to be done in single player also. You can't ship a bugged game and expect the player to avoid all the bugs. Some players may not even realize that they are exploiting a bug, thinking its just another feature.

Frogboy -
I respect that - I also surmise that it's near impossible to add multiplayer support to a game that has been developed as single player.

oh, and by your post I can tell you guys know what to do the next 10-15 years then, hehe LOL
Galciv 2,3 and 4? Impressive, can't wait to see them

for now, thanks for a great game

i can see a galciv democracy game happening easily

YOu can always retrofit multiplayer later on into a game. Especially a turn based game.

I just don't (personally) want to put the time into that kind of thing. Every second spent on multiplayer is a second NOT spent on game play, diplomacy, AI, and new features.

I think the finalized Metaverse will provide all the competition most players will want to realistically have. Especially once empires are in.