Yes, harbours do work, but there are a few things to bare in mind:
For a harbour to connect the owning city to your trade network it must be able to form a valid water path to reach your capital (if it has a harbour) or another city which has a harbour and is already part of the network.
You need a visible unbroken path of water tiles between harbours for them to form a link.
Harbours can be blockaded by enemy ships (including barbarians) being in the vicinity of the owning city. This stops them creating a trade link.
If none of these issues come in to play I would say you may have run across a bug, or possibly have a mod installed that is interferring in some way.
**This doesn't come up often but I have discovered that it is impossible to establish trade networks if you do not have roads researched. (Happened to me while playing on islands)
It is entirely possible to play Civ V using the Remote Desktop Connection that comes pre-installed with Windows starting with XP.
To do this, you need to first configure the server (in this case, your computer) to allow remote connections to it. After that, you'll want to use the Remote Desktop Connection app on the Notebook to connect to the server.
In order to play at the same time, you'll need to create a second account for your wife on your computer (if you haven't done so already). The reason for that, is that Windows does not allow access to one account using multiple terminals (including local access) at the same time; i.e. if you try to connect remotely to your own account while you're still logged on locally, you will be locked out locally and vice versa.
The performance when playing Civ V remotely is not much of an issue, since the game is entirely turn based. Depending on the connection speed and quality, you will notice compression artifacts, especially around text, which will disappear over time so long as the image doesn't change too much; because of this, playing Action games remotely is not recommended unless you have a very fast and reliable local network (802.11g is a bit slow for Full HD, but acceptable for Civ V).
It is possible to experience lags (most noticeable by listening to the in-game sounds) during the remote session, but this shouldn't be too unbearable.
Unfortunately, since I do not own multiple copies of Civ V, I couldn't verify if it is possible to run two separate instances of the game on the same machine.
Depending on how Microsoft implemented the Remote Desktop Connection, attempting to run multiple instances of a game remotely may result in one of those three outcomes (there may be more or less than three):
- Both instances may run at a reduced performance similar to playing at double the resolution (ideal case)
- One instance may run at almost full speed (GPU accelerated) while the other will be extremely slow (rendered by CPU)
- One instance will run at full speed; the second instance will be unable to claim DirectX ressources for itself and will therefore be unable to launch (worst-case scenario; maybe playing in borderless windowed mode can fix this?)
It is unlikely that using two or more GPUs will change the outcome.
Keep in mind, that just because Civ V can be launched over Remote Desktop Connection, it does not imply that other games will too. For instance, two games I've tested, Just Cause 2 and Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 will refuse to launch over a remote connection. Funny fact: it is possible to play Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 remotely, as long as it runs on a Virtual Machine and you are not directly connected to it via Remote Desktop Connection.
Best Answer
Depends on what you mean by host.
You cannot use different methods of multiplayer, so if someone needs hot seat, the entire game needs to use hot seat. To accomodate, what you would need to do is create the Hot Seat game, and then send the save file back and forth so that each PC can take it's needed turns. It would boil down to file transfer, whether live through a file share or emailing it back and forth.
That said, there are websites out there that help make this a lot less onerous than it sounds.