Personaly, I think playing stuff like CK2 in multiplayer just takes too much commitment. If I want to play multiplayer I play shooters or in the other extreme, something like Dom4 which can be played as PBEM.
You think that takes too much commitment but play PBEM with zero problems? A multiplayer game like this takes a few hours of commitment, Dominions takes MONTHS of it.
I agree, actually. Something like CK2 takes your full attention for several consecutive hours.
^ Not really, if you play with your friends or active CK2 or EU4 MPers at least. We simply save the game if someone has to go, and continue on when everyone is available again. It works like a charm.
Well in practice, unless everyone involved devotes a huge portion of their life to idleness, that means you need to either coordinate a time or it's very unlikely that you'll get more than a session or two in the same game. So while a game session may not need the entire weekend, it'll need a pretty decent amount of time if anything is going to happen.
While the latter might take more time in total,
I wouldn't consider that necessarily true either, if you play both to completion. Dominions is like an hour a turn at most, if you don't do frivolous stuff like blogging about it, and it's not that common to get to even 100 turns. Playing from start date to end date in CK2 can easily exceed 100 hours, especially if you have a bunch of people slowing things down whenever there's a war.