I agree with the suggestion to drop IE. If someone is willing to dedicate enough time to play through a Civ game, they're probably not at work and probably will

I agree with the suggestion to drop IE. If someone is willing to dedicate enough time to play through a Civ game, they're probably not at work and probably willing to install a third party browser, so you're not sacrificing too much potential "market share," and saving yourself some grief; assuming Canvas performance is sufficient on FF3/Safari4. Some other suggestions: * Investigate multipart XHR http://blog.digg.com/?p=621 http://blog.digg.com/?p=621 This is "bleeding edge" and may not, in the end, work, but it'd be worth looking at the work Digg has done w/ multipart XmlHttpRequests (cramming multiple objects/files into a single XHR). The demo they've posted works pretty well in non-IE browsers and it looks like they've laid the foundations for supporting COMET-like delivery of objects over a single request, and have thought about how to address client side caching of objects. * Business model? Is this just an OSS project or an attempt to build a business (or both)? I could imagine a small business that might generate enough $ to pay some coder/admins & some freelance graphic artists to work on the open source part of the code by providing easy-to-set-up on demand game servers for multi-player FreeCiv games, perhaps w/ a sister set of web apps for collecting game stats/organizing games/etc. Good luck!