Pbem

I'm sure someone has mentioned this before, but I think that Civ IV needs to seriously improve the Play by E-Mail game format. It wouldn't be too difficult to program the suggestions either. Perhaps in the diplomacy screen they can add a button that leads to a players section. E-mail addresses can be stored here for the respective players and changed if needed and it could also have a bulletin board funtion that would allow players to leave messages to eachother. Private messages should also be allowed. Functionality with common e-mail programs like Outlook could be added as well so that the file will automatically send itself to the next player without needing to be manually sent.

I know the PBEM feature is marginally used by the multiplayer community, but to add this functionality to the system it would vastly improve PBEM enjoyability and playability.

There is huge potential for improvement here - especially in early game play. Figure out a way to let us play four or five turns at a time until we meet someone.

If someone wants to quit let the administrator give their position to the AI, so all those cities don't just disappear.

Improving diplomacy like you mentioned would be quite handy too.

In speaking with my friends about it we also came up with another good idea. The different multiplayer modes should be interchangeable. If you start a game online and you can't finish it, you should be able to switch to e-mail mode to continue the game. Once schedules are coordinated yet again, the game could be switched to a normal web game.

The MP should be enhanced overall. I simply cannot understand why they made MP different from ordinary game - all the features should be optional. I used to play by LAN with my wife and would have wanted all the original pop-ups and would have wanted the game to show me events (like somebody invading my territory or some such insignificant stuff). It also jumped from unit to another when I attacked - so I had to scroll into the battle in order to see it. For some reason it also changed the selected unit after "go-to" command - which was a real pain in the ass when I wanted to move workers in stack and it always changed to other units after moving.

All those changes were probably made to speed up the MP, but they should have been optional. They should really concentrate on the MP side of the game in the future!