And I cannot think of a 4X strategy game I would like to play multiplayer MORE than this one.

Elemental's multi-player will be much more fun than most 4X strategy games for several reasons:

1. RPG and customization features.  This is the only 4X game I can think of where you can customize your individual units to such a great degree.  It's going to be awesome to show off my decked-out sovereign, his wife, children and units to my friends playing against me.  No two games will ever be the same, because the customization will be so great.  Because of this, I think games will have a much more role-play feel to them, where you will be able to feel like you're playing a competitive or coop RPG with your friends.  In other 4X multiplayer games, there is nothing like this at all.
2. Epic Spells.  This will begin to take more shape once magic is revamped, and more spell mods are included, but I forsee multiplayer games being incredibly fun in this respect.  Think of how cool it would be to lower your friend's land, destroy his forests, or drop a mountain on top of his city.  With this kind of power, it will feel like a multi-player version of Populous or Black and White.
3. Mod sharing.  How cool will it be when we play on a map with our friend's imported mods included?  It will be awesome to see my friend whip out some incredible new monster to combat me, something that I had not seen before.  Or it will be cool when he starts his game with some new race he came up with.  These modding features will keep you on your toes in multiplayer, unlike any 4X game that has come before.
4. The perfect (non)Artificial Intelligence.  With multiplayer, I'll never again worry that Elemental's AI is not up to snuff.  I won't have to wait for Brad to fix the AI.  With a real human, crazy stuff can happen that can take you expectantly such as ruse attacks, bait and switches, or using cities to block bottle-necks, and a lot more. 

This is why Elemental's multi-player will rock, and be much more interesting than most 4X multi-player games before it.

Not to invite people to yell at me, but... For my 2 cents, multiplayer functionality is secondary to making a fun, interesting game that people want to play.  For me, for the moment, Elemental is pretty boring.  It tantalizes only as long as you don't know the game logic behind what's happening on the screen.  Once you work it out, you quickly find the mechanics to be childishly simplistic, stilted and/or artificial (not all at once but in turn for various features), and the game world sandbox created for you to play in to be lifeless, drab and boring.  Many systems which might be interesting turn out to be underdeveloped, requiring more work to realize their potential (i.e. to be interesting/fun).  Until these pretty fundamental problems are dealt with, there is not much of a game worth playing, single or multiplayer, so the question of rushing multiplayer out the door would seem to me to be moot.

That being said, it is important to keep in mind that Elemental is eventually intended to be multiplayer, and that fact creates consequences for the design and implementation of the rest of the engine.  That can not be ignored.  The work for making Elemental multiplayer has probably largely been completed at this point, so we're probably not talking about a major undertaking of new code on Stardock's part, but more of a packaging, polishing and testing effort, which is much less demanding.  For continuing a sense of momentum and keeping people tuned in and interesting in Elemental, that could be a very good thing.

Personally, I'd work on the core game, "were I Brad".  Which probably sounds like a funny thing to say.  Alternatively, Stardock could focus on getting out the core of the modder's tools, so that the modding community could make an interesting game on top of Elemental.  Either of those two focuses seem reasonable to me.  From my perspective, multiplayer is a side show, at this point.

My apologies in advance to those whom my comments may have incensed.  Just my perspective.

I appreciate and understand your comments, but I cannot support the idea. You walk into a place like Wal-mart, right on the back of the box it says there is multiplayer up to 16 people. There is no excuse not to have this feature in the game yesterday. It's listed as a feature, and it's simply not there. I want you to consider what this industry would look like if every publisher put out a game with bullet point features and just left them off to finish later. It would be a mess, and you couldn't trust anything they wrote. You can barely trust them now. This isn't a knock against Stardock persay. I have the same issue with any company that advertises a feature and then doesn't deliver.

Well, I wasn't talking about the perspective of Stardock delivering what they promised.  I think that topic has been pretty well beaten to death, shot in the head and left in the desert to feed the vultures.  Yes, they (insert your favorite invective here) messed up the release of Elemental as badly as anyone cares to state.  I think that's pretty unequivocal.  The question here, I think is, to get from where Elemental is now to where it should have been at release, what steps are most important to do first to keep the game alive and make their customers (us, presumably) feel most fulfilled.  From that perspective, I think making a game that is fun to play would trump making the current game multiplayer.  If Elemental was multiplayer tonight, I still wouldn't be playing it.  If it was more interesting, I might .

Loved that game.

Too bad they had a bad AI system where only some of the faiths were active based on the one you played.

Whether you are interested in MP or not, it is simply the best way to really analyze the game rules. Most games actually start with multiplayer before the AI is even considered. That way you can see if your rules are holding up and have the potential for competitive fun. I know alot of you don't appreciate being beta testors, but MP is the way to fix the single player game most quickly and thoroughly.

agreed focus on redesigning the game when workign with a limited number of developers you can't have em all going off half caulked

The focus right now should be on the main SP game and forget about MP for awhile. Remember? " "nothing in SP will be sacrificed for the sake of MP" and that's the way it should be until the SP game is polished and a lot better than it is now.

Oh they can turn MP on just don't improve or do anything with it for 6 months or until the SP game is in top working order. Just reminding them an everyone else their main objective "nothing in SP will be sacrificed for the sake of MP". Since SP is rather messed up anything taken away from it right now would be a "sacrifice". At this point even turning it on would be a sacrifice since 100% of the effort should be put into the SP game right now.

Yeah, I pretty much agree with Tridus here.  I'm actually in the same boat as Belizan in that I can not get into this game at all but, for me, it's mostly AI reasons (even on ridiculous level, it's still ridiculously easy).

Adding MP functionality should not take away much from improving the other aspects.  So, there direction of adding it in sounds like a good one.

fuck it to sped out that nite

That rock over there, please crawl back under it and come back in another 30 years.

You're actually degrading the discussion for anyone who has valid reasons for delaying multiplayer, and in sense, you're hurting their cause.