RE: Varied game rules from round to round. Isn't that sort of what someone else is trying to do with the skills competition. I also toyed with the idea for Survivor. I'm not against the idea in principle, I am just wondering if it's really practical for a big tournement setting. How many different ways of playing are there? How many would you like to see incorporated in the tourney? How many games for each player in each style are a sufficent measure? Would you like to finish the tourney some time before SE5 is released?
RE: Swiss paring. Wouldn't that require that all players going in have some sort of rating? DO we just stick the unrated players in at 1000 and seed them somewhere in the middle? Or do we seed them at the bottom, below the ranked, but sub 1000 players? Or do we not allow unranked players? Avoinding that mess was what I was going for with the random pool idea for the first phase.
I'd like to get more info about the swiss paring style. I'm not totally clear on it. I'll look it up.
RE: "Mediocrity" empire setup. Ok, maybe that was a bad idea. I like the idea of zero racial points though. I don't know if I want to get into the complication of negative points though. I don't want to have to go through everyone's empire setups with a fine tooth comb. If I can come up with an easy way to do it I might consider it.