The reasons to do this seem relatively obvious but I will lay out some basic points anyway.



We all know that creation of a good AI is perhaps the most difficult part of a 4x game. This is something that will likely still be getting tweaked a couple of months after release.



Yet, during this crucial testing phase, we have only a very simplistic AI as an opponent. This means that many parts of the game are not really being tested fully at all. Currently, you can play in lazy mode, doing just about anything and still prevail. There is no need to push the envelope, no need to push the system to the breaking point and find out where the key flaws in balance are. How can you even compare balance when it is me vs an interim AI? If it were me vs another human then we can get some good data on whether one side or another is overly favored.



The forums have seen some interesting debate on concepts like building tall vs building wide. These are interesting in a relatively hypothetical sense. Let's get some humans duking it out in multi-player and see which techniques really work best in the end.



If MP is only introduced near the end of the development cycle, it will be a lot harder to change some facets of the game that might really need it.

100% agree. AI is very important, but exploits and balance issue usually only show themselves in multiplayer matches.



Will also get us a head start on eliminating those pesky de-sync bugs



I've got a list of cheesy strategies that I'd like to test...

I'll add my vote to this. Right now it's pretty hard to judge the amount of power you should have in the mid to late game since it's so easy to steamroll the AI. I'm not sure I'd get away with half the things I do if I was against another human player.

The prerequisite for this would be a stable MP that doesnt turns out to be a desync desaster as it was and still is with Endless Space.

I never had any problems with MP in ES, though about 90% of my MP games are over LAN which is inherently more stable.

Some things to consider:

- Nerf rock, paper is fine. Yours scissors.

- How hard is to point out that flyers do not fly?

- Trade do not work in MP! (not like it is working in SP)

- Each new patch now have a MP bugs package!



I think that amount of things which are not yet here is so large that the devs do not need extra pointing out what has to be done soonish.

They will likely work on more of the core aspects of the game that are still nonfunctional, such as diplomacy, sieges, building balance, etc. Also, how fun would multiplayer really be if you only had 4 factions, and you couldn't customize any of them?

Well I totally agree with Dalwin :



The implementating of the Multiplayer would really help the devs !

As you already said guys, we would play more (Playing againt that stupid AI doesnt interrest me at all ^^), so we would find more bugs and suggestions and the game would be developed faster !