This hasn't been mentioned anywhere yet that I've seen, and it wasn't part of the official presentation. However, there was a bit of a ruckus on the forums recently after Brad mentioned that they might filter out people with very low upload bandwidth on the Stardock servers.
At PAX, a question was asked if people would be able to host their own servers and the answer was: YES.
Stardock will provide their own servers where they will be able to guarantee quality of play (pings, mod content, etc), but Frogboy did also say that people will be able to just host their own servers and do whatever they want with them.
Thanks keith for reminding me I double-checked it again with Frogboy on IRC before posting.
I don't quite get what that lot of data to transfer in such a game should be. In general on each computer the entire map with all information is present.
So you have the choice: You could just transfer the player input and a turn based game which is kind of determinate by default should remain synchronized. Ancient modems are sufficient for that kind of data rate.
Or alternatively you compute some things only on the host or one computer and transfer the result. But even then, what would that heavy computation be? The AI only results in commands similar to players which are low bandwidth.
Maybe additional synchronisation information to make sure things still run fine but then you would be quite flexible in the amount of data transferred.
Well a added benefit of the second option you described (the host doing all the computations), is that it provides some protection from cheating (as long as the host doesn't cheat).
Would it be possible for Stardock to provide a utility which tests the system specifications and networking performance?
Such a utility could perform the same tasks as the game to verify if a system passes for playing Elemental multiplayer. Speaking from experience with troubleshooting software issues, myself and co-workers will show customers its not the software from our company by verifying the server or client system has the same problem even when other software attempts to perform the same tasks.
For example the software from our company will install services on the server. If these fail to install we'll find some freeware software which also attempts to install services... naturally when the freeware software also fails to install services it's clear the issue is with the server itself ranging from permissions, registry, policies, domain accounts, etc., etc., .
The protection from active cheating is not any higher in that case because if all computers do the same computation then you desync at some point if you cheat.
The advantage of host only computation is that you could hide some information from the client which would prevent passive cheating like seeing information you are not supposed to see as player (like the map that is under the fog of war).
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