Local Multiplayer?

Oh, that explains why I can't play multiplayer.  Where did they say this?  My brother is pissed off and calling it "Bait and Switch" right now. 

https://forums.elementalgame.com/391747

At the bottom of his post he talks about mutiplayer going online next week.

You can not play any multi player yet at all.  The dev team already stated that the multi servers are not yet up and won't be until next week.  That means LAN is out as well since there is no real lan play.  "lan" play for this game requires internet connectivity for the duration of the session because stardock's servers host the game.  There is no lan in the traditional sense that someone within the lan hosts and others join without needing outside networks.  You absolutely have to have an internet connection to play this game multiplayer, so no multiplayer at all until the servers go up. 

Ah well, that explains that.  Kind of a bummer though, they should just have put in LAN play and this wouldn't have been a problem.

Are you sure about this Spooky? I thought I read from a dev that stardock hosted servers will only support 16 players and private servers can have up to 32 players.

yeah im sure, unfortunately as of right now there is no way to play multiplayer.  ive tried to get a lan game going. you can try too, but look here first https://forums.elementalgame.com/390801   there you will find that to play any type of multiplayer game you must have an internet connection to stardocks servers.  this being the case no multiplayer will be available until they decide to get said servers up and running,  which i doubt will be a priority since most people consider this to be a single player game.

Custom server support will be released later. For a bit after launch, the only way to play will be on Stardock's dedicated servers. In theory, once players can host custom servers they will also be able to play on offline LANs.