The community is fairly small but ya, all the action has moved to Diplomacy.

Eeeyup, the people are on the Diplomacy expansion, which is on a separate server from Vanilla/Entrenchment.  There are normally several 4v4 and 5v5 games each evening North American time.

I argue the game being best played through LANing.  You just need a reliable mod to play on (I don't bother with vanilla due to TSOP).

I know the game was built to be played on most systems.  If you have friends with laptops, they could probable play it without much issue.  Doesn't require much to get a session together and play.  My sessions are weekly and usually burn up the whole evening (4-6 hours of gameplay).  Sometimes more if we decide to waste a day on the weekend.  Good times, really.