Your question seemed nonsensical until I noticed that you underestimate the capacity of hotseat mode.
Pitboss may be commangled into working like hotseat in your locality for your husband and yourself, as EvilLurks says. There are tradeoffs to both.
Hotseat games can be played by e-mail (or any other kind of file transfer). The save for the game records the whole game state and manages whose turn it is for you behind the scenes. Set up a hotseat game for three players. Play your turn and your husband plays his turn. The game can be saved when it wants your remote friend to play his turn, and this file can be loaded to give that player the very same screen and functionality as you and your husband (except for his or her civilization). You just have to get the file to him or her, and get it back, and so on 600 more times to finish the game.
As for something in between.... no. The developers of this game (and any game) did not have all three of foresight, chops, and money, to implement a modular networking design for multiplayer. In the abstract, a multiplayer game is a presentation of the game's commands and "views" to terminals for each player to inspect and then submit his or her turn, but, assumptions have to be made about usage situations to get some functioning multiplayer off the ground in the timeframe of actual development. Pitboss plays live , but assumes players all have independent access, so it optimizes for remote players. Hotseat is completely self-sufficient architecture for multiplayer on its own; it just doesn't have a file transfer system to augment its usefulness prepackaged with it. It also fails to propagate information about -how- the game state became what it is (but Civ IV's Notices are pretty good), and lacks the ability to let a player continue to study the game situation with which he or she ended his or her turn , and it lacks, of course, controls for turn-replaying abuse.
These are not technical limitations but they are appreciable practical limitations. They still bother me.
