I was really hoping for email-style turn-based options in Civilization V. You know, like "chess by email". Sure, it's extremely slow, but it's a lot of fun when you can think your moves out for quite awhile and you don't have to sit down and play it all at once.
 
I'm also wondering what everyone's experience has been in finding multiplayer games, so far? I fear the lack of leaderboard or stat tracking is turning a lot of people away, perhaps? I just checked this evening and there are only five games on deck.

No hot-seat in Civ 5, though supposedly they're going to include it, eventually. Seems like a poor solution in this day and age, anyway. I mean, like most CIVs, it's probably going to have a good five year life before the next version and I can't imagine using that as a "play by mail" solution in 2015. *sigh*

Play by email was never my cup of tea, but I can see it's merits. I really want hot-seat support though.

Everytime I tried online....it crashed. So the online sucks for me.

I would be shocked and amazed if play by mail wasnt included eventually. Perhaps it is because pbem is only followed by a minority of players that it has been postponed

" Everytime I tried online....it crashed. So the online sucks for me. "

I really want to do something like this with my buddy. Just seems like too much fun in an old fashioned sort of way.

I haven't jumped into an actually multiplayer game yet, either. Mostly because it seemed like the online was nearly dead (like I said, about five games on deck out of how many hundreds of thousands of copies?). I've heard that in multiplayer, there are no animations, though. I guess that makes it more like a "board game", but definitely qualifies in my mind as a little bit of that "jank" that Vogon posted about elsewhere in this forum.