Just a proposal for discussion -

When setting up a multiplayer game, will there be a provision to adjust the relative difficulties for the various players - Set a base difficulty, (which will guide any AI players and general game conditions) and then allow either harder or easier offsets (or settings) for the individual human players. This would open up a particular game to more folks without either boring experienced players &/or discouraging new ones [particularly local LAN games, I would expect].

For example: 1 experienced player and 3 new players - base setting easy (for the AI's) high resources, etc. - individual setting for the experienced player could be -2 (or low) resources, and +2 difficulty[hard] (maybe not effect the AI routines, but maybe impact the initial positioning and increase the AI's awareness of the player/aggressiveness towards the player)

Or

3 experienced players and 1 not so - base setting hard, but a -1 difficulty (including threat assessment by the AI) and a +1 resource adjustment for the less experienced player.

Another way to handicap (plus and/or minus) would be to give or take bonuses that the AI gets at the various levels to the appropriate player(s).

Details above are only for illustration purposes - what balance items could be safety tweeked for handicapping and how is really up to the devs.

Of course, any scoring that would result from a game would have to reflect the handicap.