Hello all galciv newbies and veterans!

First, I've only gotten active on the forums and the metaverse a couple of days ago, but I've had GC 1 and GC 2 since the beginning. I consider myself an average (at best) player, partially because I'm of the too-lazy-to-think-much-and-just-wait-what-happens kind of people. Basically, I hit the turn button until something happens and then react to the situation, instead of planning ahead. But enough about me, here's what this is all about:

I've also been playing quite a bit of Civilization 4 and have always enjoyed (and found very helpful) the community games like for example the ALC (all leaders challenge) series on the civfanatics.com forums. Basically, these are games-in-progress where every few turns (or everytime something interesting happens that requires a decision to be made) the state of the game, including screenshots of the map overview, diplo relations, etc. is posted and anyone who's interested can give advice on what to do next, what overall strategy should be followed, or just basic gameplay advice. It's a little like the gameplay examples we have here, only that the community is involved in the decision making, which makes for very interesting discussions for new players to read through and get an idea of what kind of 'thinking' one has to do to beat the game on the higher difficulty levels.

So, since I haven't seen anything like this for Galciv2, I'm thinking about starting such a game, if only to see if there's any interest or if it works at all.

To get a better idea of it all, here's a list of all the 'sample games' that were played on the civfanatics forums (the ALC games are right at the top): http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=258697

Keep in mind that such a game will take a few weeks minimum, since there will be about one or two days wait between each post so that people have time to discuss their ideas. Also, it only makes sense if there's actually people discussing and involved in it, otherwise it would just be me playing it my way and _not_ giving a good example of how it should be played.

Please tell me what you think of this and what settings you find useful for the first game. I suggest the terrans (since I guess most new players start with them) on a small map, fast or very fast tech speed (so the game doesn't take ages), common everything (for a balanced start and a not too long colony rush) and about 5 opponents. Things I'm not sure about yet are difficulty (suicidal all the way?), victory conditions (all enabled or one game for each?) and a few minor things like tech trading or not, blind exploration or not, etc.

I'm very intested to hear your opinions and hope that we can make this a very fun and helpful experience for players of all sorts.