Questions about pbem procedure

[Hermjard]

Hello SEIV players!

We plan to start a pbem game soon and today took a testrun for the file-exchange procedure, which was unfamiliar to us till now. Principally everything went well, but some questions arose from our testrun, which we weren't able to solve:

1) We want to start the game in a way thats possible for interested people to join the game later. We assume, that's not possible to plant additional empires into a running game on an empty system. But we thought about the possibility to take over a computer controlled empire by a human. We found a submenu "player" in the game menu which can be accessed only by the host in which you can switch off the computer-controlled-property of an empire. And if you try to resolve the turn, then there is indeed a warning which says that the corresponding orders-file is missing, indicating, that this empire needs human orders now. But if you try to login into the "new human" empire, it's password protected. It seems that unknown passwords are to be generated at the time of game creation for all computer players. How can you circumvent this or deactivate them? Another way seems to apply several placeholder empires in the beginning of the game and the host creates passwords for them. But then you get always warnings when hosting, that the orders are missing and furthermore we dont know if the computer plays these empires with the same difficulty level we choose for the "pure" computer players. Another way seems to be to edit every placeholder empire and activate the "computer controlled" mark. But what happens with the password then? Is it still choosable? In which difficulty level are these empires played by the computer and if we choose "number of computer players" to "high", are these placeholder empires already included into this number or additional to it?

2) I am not sure about the files with the prefixes .trn, .cmb, _events.txt and _stats.txt. For example, the manual says that the .trn file is necessary for the movement replay, but according to my tests, you can replay the movement also without this file. Or the stats: we play with visible scores for all players and it seems that you can see the scores even without the stats whereas the "comparisons" are not visible in the third turn even WITH the _stats.txt for the appropriate player. Are all these files really necessary for complete information of the players?

Thanks in advance,

Hermjard