[elmokki]

While I do not know how exaclty tcp/ip in CoE3 works, in Dom3 you do your turn technically in offline mode and send it to the server when finished and then wait in lobby for others to do their turns etc.

Implementing a text chat for the lobby should be fairly trivial. I mean seriously, if you already have what dom3 tcp/ip has, adding text chat for that is not very hard. Anything that has the basic server-client architecture can do "Hey, client sends data with specific tag, let's send it to all clients!" without huge effort and I highly doubt the UI components would be that hard either.

That said a text chat in lobby only is pretty cumbersome and it's easier to use IRC or something else provided you use that stuff already anyway.

I do highly doubt it'd be that huge job to implement a game wide text chat either for when you are connected to a server, but unlike above that's totally a guess and depends highly on how stuff is implemented in the source code. That'd be a good thing in general even if I personally don't really give a crap due to using IRC anyway. Most people in dom3 community seem to communicate via forums and email though, so it would probably be a fairly useful feature for them seeing how CoE3 is supposedly a far faster pace game than Dom3.