BIGGEST RISK: There is no way to know how this approach would feel when playing international games without actually going ahead and implementing it.One of the players needs to host the game / act as the server, and the bandwidth load would be significantly higher for this machine.Large Beast / Creep populations have the same effect, regardless of map size. Estimations show that bandwidth usage increases significantly for large maps with many Cores, Doors, Sentries.Calculations indicate that this would be more bandwidth intensive than the current P2P implementation for 4 players, but would probably scale better for more players.This is something that is currently possible and I think would be fun to have. The potential for replays of networked games is lost.Adding more players has huge negative implications for user interface screens, split-screen layout, as well as pure physical space in the airlock.Technically would allow for players to drop in and out of games at any time.Scales better for more players, and is probably required to be able to go beyond 4 players at all due to bandwidth concerns.I apologize if this gets ranty, technical, or speculative. I'm going to write out my thoughts on this not least to sum it up for myself.

The main fork in the road (pun intended) is whether or not to switch to a Client-Server architecture (the game is currently Peer to Peer). I'm really quite torn on how to proceed with multiplayer, and spent a few hours wandering around in the woods yesterday thinking about all the options / trade-offs / implications.

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