Multiple monitors, will there be multi control too

So you can window multiple views of the battle field, drag those onto extra screens, is there enough interest in multiple controls to get this in as well. What I mean by this is that me and my friends love to play hot seat games, this only works with turn based but there's an opportunity here to make a brand new way to play, you can share your army with your friend who's using his own monitor with an extra keyboard and mouse but is the same system not a separate computer. Gather your best strategists and join together around the command hub (multi monitor and multi keyboard mouse system) to battle others or conquer the galaxy. You'd be at an advantage to someone playing there army alone (they could always share control with people on other computers though) but you'd run the risk of too many cooks spoil the broth.

This particular feature has not been announced to my knowledge (and it would require quite some work) but fear not: Just connect the second monitor, keyboard and mouse to a second computer and you'll be able to play the same commander/faction in multiplayer.

When I see this all I can think of is allowing 2 players to control the same army. I don't remember the term for it though, but while on that, it would be a very interesting feature, how it would work with 1 commander I don't know. The game play doesn't immediately lend itself to it but there are more then enough creative ways to work around this I guess if it was really supported.

As far as Hotseat, it could be done but I don't think it fits with how the game would be played out. TA turn-based ? not that it would be bad I mean I love turn based games (Alpha Centuari), But the amount of units each waiting for a "turn" makes me shudder at the thought.

Hotseat is the wrong word, but the idea is just right.

Since single-player also uses the server-client-model, it shouldn't make any problems to launch multiple instances of the client on one PC and assign every instance of the client it's own set of controls and only one screen.

All required functionalities will be in the game anyway, so there are only 3 little details which would have to be considered during development:

• Allow several profiles for the game, including choice of monitor and inputs whereby profiles are independent!
• Allow to start multiple instances of the game on a single system, each with a different profile (no global lock!)
• Only accept input from controls which have been assigned to the profile

All supported platform (especially linux) have support for assigning different controls to different instances of the program, so that shouldn't be much of a problem.