How can a longturn game be started without having everyone logged in?

[MalibuJack]

Hi there, I used to play a lot of Civ/Freeciv solitaire, and would like to play against real people...since I currently have very limited time, longturn sounds great!
I've signed up to play in LT31. However, being somewhat impatient, I've also been setting up a private server to play with friends (thanks for making your rulesets etc. freely available), and I have that solved except for one thing...
From browsing your forum, it appears that you guys can start games without necessarily having all players connected to the server simultaneously. How do you do this? Do you manually create AIs and then use 'take' to assign them to inactive connections, or is there an easier way?
Thank you for your help.