I do remember the Civilisation games. :)

I actually started writing one long long ago but after a while I noticed that the FreeCiv folks were also doing so and I liked what they were doing better than my own attempt so I have been using FreeCiv ever since.

The thing is, in their community what passes for "long turns" is games in which one day is allowed per turn. So my deployments using a full real month per turn kind of boggle them; possibly because they are focussing only on the one game rather than the possibilities that open up when your FreeCiv planet is "just" providing the large scale "backdrop" to other games that are played at smaller scales.

FreeCiv does not (yet!) have the ability to "delegate" control of individual cities within a Civilisation to different players, but presumably a nation wishing to do that could put itself together by means of alliances among civilisations that each only have a single city, or something like that.

I need the game-turns at that scale to allow a full real-life month per turn because for most of the smaller-scale games involved a whole year of game-time takes that long to play out. (We have CoffeeMud and Crossfire-RPG running at about 5 minutes real time to one hour of in-game time for example.)

I hope if you are still interested in Civilisation type games you will take a look at the Galactic Milieu :)

-MarkM-