I was one of the (attempted) players. (Stormwind)

Everyone involved was very patient, we tried for exactly an hour to start the game. It is dissapointing to me to see an expansion coming out in a couple of weeks with MP still a complete disaster.

I like this game, and stardock impressed me with releasing patches on gal civ II 8 years after release. But I am not playing II, I am playing III, and this leaves me with a very bad impression overcoming my previous good one.

I dont know why a game lobby should be that difficult, I still remember one of my first PC multiplayer experiences years ago with Sacrifice, the lobby ran fine, there were multiple rooms, and even chat bots that would auto-answer simple questions. This was in 2000. Its 16 years later, and I have to keep typing "..." just to move the chat bar up so I can see previous chat. 

My enthusiasm for purchasing an expansion took a big hit tonight.

Sorry that you are having trouble.  We are interested in updating the lobby at some point post 1.6.  

I just ran a four player game with a custom race and didn't have trouble changing factions showing up between my boxes.  Can you send me your custom races and I'll see if the problem is there.  Can you submit a ticket (https://esupport.stardock.com/index.php?/Tickets/Submit) with the faction(s).  Thank you.  

Some of the things I saw:

1. Changing my faction was not always permanent. Sometimes it would flip back to Terran. In particular, one time I had changed to a custom civ, then I did a chat, and as soon as I chatted it reverted my civ back to Terran.

2. Players would occassionaly dissapear from view of one or more of the other players. This happened to me several times after I clicked ready, Seilore said he couldt see me anymore so I left the lobby and re-entered (assumption was if he cant see me than likely will be an issue starting the game). This happened to the other 2 players also.

3. Players got randomly knocked out. I was knocked out a couple of times immediatly after a chat.

4. Chat room box doesnt scroll (no scroll bar) and changes color, often new text just will not scroll up at all. Also formats irregularly, sometimes only one word on a line of text.

5. The ready box doesnt really work the way I expect - it doesnt seem to toggle back to an unready status. Once I am ready, it seems I am ready and there is no going back (which it really needs given how unstable the civ selection process is)

I was able to get a 2 player game going with Seilore before, although after I think about 20 turns, we crashed, and every attempt to restart led to a crash at the same turn.

These are all MP issues, in SP the game feels pretty solid to me. I have over 300 hours and the crash rate in SP is acceptable, and has always been recoverable, unlike the MP game with Seilore.

Having lots of factions was not part of my test so that's something I can try out.  QA has a package of 100 factions I can drop in  If it doesn't repro for me, we can schedule a time to try it out in real-time. 

As an additional data point or two:

Seilore and I were able to create a two person game with 1.6 and custom factions.  It took many tries.  The changing faction event happened to Seilore several times.  A major issue we had was that any human error in communicating, choosing, and implementing the initial settings required a complete exit and re-setup.  This greatly complicated recovering from technical issues.  We were unable to successfully join together unless I hosted the game and invited Seilore.  It seemed like my joining consistently messed up Seilore's lobby functions, but the results were inconsistent.  Once we got started, the game ran smoothly on my end with no sign of technical issues.   My attempt to save the game seems not to have worked because I cannot find the file, but I do have an auto save that says we got an hour of play action before we both pooped out at the same time.  I hope to use the auto save to continue the game when we get the chance.  I like Seilore's approach to multi-player, at least so far.   

If there are any files or info I can submit let me know.

I know about the separate folders, but I did a search on the entire drive for the filename and no luck.