Timing suggestions based on RTA. Suggest to time from the frame that you press ok to start the game & ends the frame the ending credits show up.

We've been using any number of options based on random map, which seems totally fine. Audio required for a run to be valid?

Looking for other suggestions for this to come up with something together. Hoping that any% doesn't turn into just a test of luck

Those are good suggestions. I'll get the rules added soon.

I do think Any% is always just going to be luck-based since 99% of it is just going to depend on where and how many enemy factions spawn. But on the other hand, when whether you have a good spawn is apparent within a few seconds of starting, it's easy to do a lot of runs quickly.

Good starting point. That's the way I've been timing my runs. I think some of the other Civ games have rules where you start your timer from first action, which here, means I could futz around with the preferences menu as much as I wanted before starting the timer, but I think that would be worse.

I was thinking about "Time Warp"... originally I thought that Time Warp should be banned, because the runs would just be that much less interesting, but my current thought is that Time Warp is just useless so there is no point in banning it.

I would love to see a category with a bit more substance to it, where you actually get to see the game getting played, but I have a hard time imagining how it would be viable as a category. Something I do for my own fun is to see how fast I can beat the game on a standard size map on Thinker... my runs are at least a couple hours, but that's not much of a category if I'm the only one doing it.