I'm sure some of you have heard of thin-clients. Very, very basic PCs (basically, single-cores connected to a monitor) that call out to a centralized server, which hosts their data and runs all its processes.
With a lot of the pains of playing single-player with the slowdown and stuff, and also matching Stardock's beliefs in trying to make this game run on very old computers, or notebooks, that Stardock could create a "thin client" mode for Multiplayer.
Basically, a player could just call out to the server. The player's computer would be responsible for sending out/receiving XML and for rendering the game itself. However, all the AI, calculations, game states, etc would all live on the server itself. This would greatly reduce the amount of CPU powered required to play the game and also greatly reduce or -potentially- completely remove memory issues.
There are other issues regarding a thin-client mulitplayer (latency, Stardock's servers being slow/non-responsive). But the point is I think it would be a somewhat simple thing to do and it could help a lot of people out with their problems.