I think a hotseat multiplayer for 2 or more players would be awesome. The game is basically turn based, because you have to build your ships and then only watch the battle, so it should be possible to implement this. Each player should be able to build a fleet and then the battle should be played in realtime.
This has been raised before. Cliffski said there are alot of technical things that actually make this quite complicated. So it probably wont happen. Easiest way for now to is post you challange up, and get the other player to download it.
Dunno about ‘a lot’.
When something can be done manually in three steps (post challenge to self, refresh challenge screen, select challenge,) it really can’t be that hard to do it automatically (although it strikes me as quite ridiculous needing to even upload a challenge just to select a deployment as your opposition.)
Or a ‘skirmish’ mode, with a random race and fleet, with deployment unknown. Try building a fleet that can beat everything! Perhaps it downloads random challenges, and pits your fleet against he challenge.