civilians will always flee from enemy soldiers because soldiers have such a high military rating compared to enemy NPCs (e.g. Alpha 8 will also bring in better military controls, to go with the new armor and weapons players will be able to craft. You can use in-game commands/"cheats" to make the different players enemies too, but the game isn't designed for PvP so there are some odd effects and imbalances e.g. It doesn't necessarily need to be a Steam copy, there are instructions for hosting and forwarding your own servers but the idea of multiplayer Stonehearth is for each player to control their own town/settlement and work together.
The "proper" multiplayer experience for Stonehearth is co-op with everyone playing a separate town, which requires everyone to have their own copy of the game. Multiplayer is almost ready to play Very soon now, we hope to release a very early version of it on a special password protected branch, much as we did with the new building editor a few weeks. There is a odd work-around to allow "multiple people playing one town together on multiple computers" kind of co-op using Steam's Remote Play Together but it's a bit janky - everyone shares control over the same mouse cursor, so you have to take turns doing things.
A full list of all controls can be found here. Basic Controls Stonehearth is controlled through a combination of mouse and keyboard controls. There are additional screens and controls that are used in game, but we will cover those in the relevant sections. It has co-op, but no splitscreen (Steam's tagging system isn't very good at understanding the difference.) The the pause/play/fast forward buttons allow you to change your game speed.