Any plans for this to occur?
The game is a single PC install with no network capability and runs off a single save file. Itâs not designed for multi-player. In addition to the technical limitation, it can also take months or years to play a campaign so it would be difficult to sustain the necessary level of involvement for that long and waiting for others to complete their turns could soon become frustrating.
Having said that, you can theoretically run a multi-player game by passing the save file from person to person and trusting them to not look at the database. I know some groups have tried this, but I donât believe it is common.
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Once, out of curiosity, I was searching about multiplayer, and I found this:
I tried to run it, something didnât work out for me, and I just left it. I donât have anyone to play Aurora anyway. 
Additional fuel for thought - PVP does not have to be combat based. I am running a game with some friends on discord where they get to represent various factions within my empire. Every 10 years I calculate a prestige score of the factions based on things like systems they named, scientists who represent them, etc. Itâs competitive, but friendly and allows some nice roleplay, collaboration, and everyone is invested in the battles because they know some of their factions commanders may be part of the action.
Thereâs a ton more to expand on this the limit is your imagination. The players could debate jump point assault tactics, fleet composition, literally anything in the game can be given an interesting context.
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The most common type of Aurora 4x #C âMultiplayerâ Games that are being run are various kind of community games structured more like a Roleplay game with one Game Master that advance the time of the savegame, and manage all participants empires as per their orders as well as feedback the information they are able to see.
As the complexity of savegame and number of systems grows however the main issue here is that the work needed from the Game Master grows exponentially which greatly slows down the game. Another main challenge is that as a player you are very limited in what you can see (often by a few screenshots and what the GM writes in the updates).
The MVP update to try and support this style of gameplay a bit better would be if we could have the ability to enable encrypted âempireâ passwords & spacemaster passwords which can be set for a specific savegame by the game master, as well as a âempire selectâ popup when loading a savegame with multiple player empires before any empire is shown. This would allow sharing the savegame with all players as a Game master while preventing all players from viewing anything except what their own empire can view.
Hope not.
Multiplayer always brings sweats, min maxing try hards, griefing and rest of the cuntery.
Leave my comfy space rp game alone, if you want mp you have Stellaris.
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Cooperative multiplayer, in which all players play for one/allied empire(-s), would be quite interesting. Someone can do the navy, exploration, colonization, and so on without disturbing the comfortable RP.
But of course, for this you will need friends who share your interests.
Itâs an interesting point about min-maxing.
I invested a lot of time in the 1990s into a game called Starfire. The third edition of the game was created by David Weber (Honor Harrington) and had a lot of roleplay and background flavour in terms of tech and function descriptions, plus detailed supplements with a lot of story elements. David Weber also wrote the Starfire novels.
That is the version that led to Starfire Assistant, which was the forerunner of VB6 Aurora.
The game was bought by someone else, who was a competitive gamer. He created 4th edition, spent a lot of time âbalancingâ everything and removing some key âleap forwardâ technologies that he believed were unbalanced. All the roleplay elements, tech descriptions and other background material were discarded as unnecessary fluff.
This caused a major schism in the community, with many people preferring 3rd edition. The two camps were basically role-players vs competitive gamers and it didnât end well 
So Aurora is very much about roleplay, with the âbalanceâ more about ensuring different systems work better in different situations, rather than making all options functionally identical for competitive reasons.
Now Iâve given it more thought, I am not sure Aurora would work as a competitive game at the campaign level for those reasons. What makes it fun is not min-maxing
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Donât make the mistake of labeling all Multiplayer as automatically min-max though. Certainly it is more and more common, but the most fun and âsuccessfulâ multiplayer games I have experienced over longer time periods (months or years per game both in Aurora and other deep strategy games) have been more about collaborative storytelling first and winning not nessecarily being the main goal of all participants.
Itâs quite sad that almost all Multiplayer today even when the game remains exactly the same (like World of Warcraft for example) is played in such a different and min-max way. We have lost a bit of the goals of having fun, exploring and experiencing from the earlier days of multiplayer computer gaming and itâs not because of the games being different, itâs because of the players being different. //end rant.
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Yes, there is a huge difference between competitive multi-player games vs collaborative. I enjoyed quite a few of the latter.
BTW I was a professional poker player for six years (from about 2005 - 2011) before I starting working in the egaming industry, so I donât have a problem with competition in itself. Itâs more that competition can ruin the experience in games where there are other, more fun, ways to play.
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Having done some competitive 4x games through PBEM in the past I know its a real pain to try and manage on a day to day basis and thatâs in games where you take turns so would think anything in Aurora would be exceptionally painful not least to mention the usual issues of people dropping out mid game etc.
For Aurora I always thought the idea of a comparative ironman mode playthrough would be interesting way to âcompeteâ with one another. Ie each player starts with the same universe and can then compare on achievements such as first to hit a certain tech, explore x number of systems, defeat one of the NPRs etc. Clearly that would need either a fully pre-populated galaxy or, to keep with the existing system generation process, some central database to provide that detail to other players when they then explore the same warp point in their own game. Super complex Iâm sure but simpler than trying any sort of concurrent gameplay.
That might be easier to achieve then you think, depending on how the randomness in Aurora is achieved under the hood.
Alot of other game use the concept of âSeedâ numbers to make maps and other things appear random even if they are not. If Aurora is built that way it could actually be totally deterministic (100% predictable) and all that would be needed is to expose that seed number so that you can essentialy re-play on the same map again.
Aurora doesnât create the whole map at the start, so it wouldnât work like a normal âseeded mapâ.
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Creating the whole seeded map at start is not a requirement for it to be deterministic though (even if that is how itâs normally done).
But it should be possible to re-use a single seed (randomly created at game setup) as input for all systems even if detailed system generation is only happening later on upon exploration. But I take it from your answer that this is not how Aurora is set up, so all fair. 
Being able to reroll a system by going back to a save is part of the fun in my view. But I suppose an option to allow it to be deterministic might help one do the kind of multi player you are talking about.