Most people in denmark got some 10-20 Mbit download and some 1-2 Mbit upload. If this game need to transfer more then 100kb/s then i suggest Stardock gets some new network engineers who have a clue.

Im not sure what a "low end connection is" but i dont think 1Mbit up and down is low end when it comes to turn based games.

I sympathise with your predicament but as a player with a good internet connection, the people with shitty connections almost always screw me over in games that need at least a decent line. Slowdowns and massive pings are a huge annoyance when you want just want to hop in and do a game on a limited timeframe.

Basically, Stardock's position is that on the games we host there will be users whose Internet connections fall below a certain threshold of quality. Rather than letting those users, as has happened in Demigod, wreck the experience for all players, they won't be able to play on our servers.

The threshold will be determined by the beta testers and Stardock during the beta.

However, when users choose to host games themselves, they can make whatever rules they want. There has been talk about letting hosts set a threshold themselves on network throughput.

I doubt it. Real time online games such as FPSs have to constantly send vectors data and player inputs in and out to every players. A turn based game client merely has to send "unit A goes here, unit B goes there, crank up research allocation to X" each turn (every few minutes then) and that's about it. Everything is processed either by the server or the game host and the outcome is redispatched to clients.
At worst, the server might be a bottleneck if it got a really low bandwidth but I don't see how that could be a problem on SD's servers.

I dunno, that's just an assumption on my part, but I really don't see why Elemental would need a big ass network connection to run properly, has long as there are no graphic/sound resources and tons of mod scripts to download. And even then, that could cause a slowdown at game launch but not thereafter.

I was thinking about the one where he made SD to be his own boss adn write his own rules.

It's completely unnecessary for a game like Elemental. It's a turn based game. Turn based games are the only games I've played frequently where someone can loose their connection and return to the game without so much as a beat missed and no one was the wiser except your turn was a little long.

It sounds to me like Stardock has a new toy they are brewing up and they just want to test it on a their next game whether it needs it or not. This sort of thing should be reserved for RTS's and the like.

Elemental shouldn't be a petri dish for RTS features. This sort of thing would be useless for a 4x turn based game and if they want to test it, test it on a game in beta that would actually use it.

Great in theory, but Stardock doesn't currently have any RTS games in beta. Why should they wait years to test something they'd like to introduce to existing RTS games? Testing it on games that are already out risks breaking established games. Testing on Elemental risks disaccomidating a handful of beta players, who entered the beta specifically to test new features and systems.

We still have to figure out what's behind the continuous turn thing and the scale of battles. This whole issue might indicate that the battles will be fairly big indeed, otherwise I don't see how they could be that network intensive.