PBEM

The problem is it winds up being a 1 person at a time email game.

The other is ATM there is no passwords so the other players could log in to you and thus have complete intel on you.

Thank you for the reply.

If I am ok with the 1 person at a time and I trust the people I am playing with then it sounds fine.

Can you tell me how to set up a game like this and what I would need to do to make it work?

If we happen to all be around and online could we also play some sessions together by simply connecting or is it once PBEM always so with that save game?

I have not gone all the way but from my looking it looks like all parties need to meet and make  a multiplayer game and save it.

Then as each opens the game, logs in, plays, saves, email.

The problem would be if anyone changes the game in any way durring playing. I do not know how much it would take for  the save to not work.

If they could just add passwords for each player as optional then 2-4 person games would be posible.

I have also wondered if a game can be made on a server and the server game is always on the GC multi page. From here a person can join the game and only play 1 turn. If that would work then we have another viable option. Just no passwords.

I will give it a try and try to report back.

Idea:  Instead of PBE, what about a campaign server mode.  In Dev Stream on 19 Sept, they were talking about why would anyone want to play with more than 4 because it would be hard to get that many online at the same time.  Well, mix that with PBE and you get a campaign server mode where you could login to your race, turn in a turn, and when all turns are in it would process the turns.  It would be good to have it inform the players that ready for next turn.  It should also have a setting to auto turn any player who didn't turn in turn in a timely manner.  Maybe like max time between turns = X days.

As someone who still does StarFire with my friends using emailed spreadsheets and a GM, this would be a much used feature for me and my friends.

It's an interesting idea, but it seems like the demand for this would be too low to be worth it.

I would LOVE to have a campaign server mode.  

We are the .1%. If we get even the ability to add a pass to a multiP game I would be surprised.

In the Steam forums they were taking about the steam cloud so instead of PBEM we could have PBSC.

I would take that, as long as it allowed players to turn in a turn, and when all turns are in it would process the turns.

Devs; please add PBSC capabilities and an option to password protect a civ to multiplayer games in an expansion.

This should be much easier and cost less then actual PBEM.

As far as processing the turn maybe the first or last player's computer will as part of their turn.

That would be OK too.  Also providing the last player (slow-poke) an opportunity to do 2 turns in a row (turn - process turn - turn) allowing the game to move on faster.  I do hope that Steam Cloud has some mechanism to inform the other players that new turn is available.

PBSC seems like a good idea to me.