I joined the dedicated server and found a single AI having a fight with natives after over a thousand turns.  The server list showed 2 users as being present (before I joined), so perhaps it's related to the observer on custom map thing. See the attached screenshot. I've since restarted the server.

Thanks for reporting this, I've rebooted them.

Chris, I've created a "mayhemig" user and stuck them in a loop started with "/etc/init.d/mayhem.sh start" so hopefully that should bring them back up if they go down again or the server is restarted.

Both of them died with this stack trace if that's any use in tracking down the problem:

Stack trace: packet.execute()
Stack trace: sendServerPacketToWorld
Stack trace: startbattles
Stack trace: packet.execute()
Stack trace: sendServerPacketToWorld
Trace: Client disconnected (Remote peer closed connection)
Stack trace: Game update
CRITICAL ERROR (Critical error): ArrayBoundsError net.packets.server.battleround(91)

Stack trace: packet.execute()
Stack trace: sendServerPacketToWorld
Stack trace: startbattles
Stack trace: Game update
CRITICAL ERROR (Critical error): ArrayBoundsError net.packets.server.battleround(91)

A new experiment, lets see how it goes. Currently all it does is sit on the first dedicated server and watches the games making up some very stupid ratings.  I may add tracking of other stats (like ships killed or planets taken) vs certain players and such later.

That's really odd.  What's the server doing to be using CPU? I would have thought that you should be able to run at least 100, maybe even 1000 simultaneous games of MI before approaching anywhere near the cpu usage of say a FPS server which handle hundreds to thousands of object movements and updates per second. (This is assuming you run all the games within the same process.)

I don't have a comprehensive answer for this, but it seems ridiculous for one person to be allowed to monopolize the dedicated server for an hour, and not let anyone else play.  We had at least 7 people join and quit while only one person was playing.

Hmm. Maybe if I restricted votes to one per IP address.

Well for this particular problem what about just auto-scaling the dedicated servers.  When all the servers are full bring up an extra one (within reasonable limits)?  Future idea that'd take smoe more work: since it's a turn-based game and shouldn't be resource intensive to serve a lot of games, why not make it so that all games are served by the dedicated server (the user who creates the game has their map auto-uploaded to the server and is the only one that can change settings by default).  That'd stop all the firewall and most of the griefing problems.

[BUG]

BUG: Played a few games with Commander Minus hosting. With a few turns remaining in the game it crashes and kicks everyone out. Minus says he gets a "Network Error" "9: Bad File Descriptor".

One thing I didn't quite understand was how if you 'attack' an allied planet, the ships just orbit until the alliance has been dissolved. It sounds cool, but what function does that serve?

It means you can help defend an ally's planet.

also.. what is it made in? prog language

Something slightly unusual, the D programming language.