I'm really tired after PAX (oh god double shifts oh the pain I am an idiot), so please forgive my awkward phrasing throughout, but I want to get this started ASAP.  Welcome to the first (to the best of my knowledge on the SD forum) Elemental Succession Game thread!

For those of you unfamiliar with the idea of a succession game (SG), it's a way of playing 4x games cooperatively.  Basically, a group of players (usually about 4-6) take turns playing the same game for a set number of ingame turns each.  At the end of a player's SG turnset, he posts a report of what happens (screenshots of particularly important events are nice, but not strictly necessary) and posts* the saved game for the next player in line.  The entire group is free to discuss overall strategy between turns, which makes succession games fantastic learning tools for both the immediate players and anyone reading the thread.

Roster:

1) Corbeaubm

2) RFHolloway

3)

4)

5)

I suggest (this is open for some debate, since this is the first time we're trying this with Elemental) that the basic rules for this particular SG be:

A) The roster will consist of the first 5 (or, rather, 4 plus myself) players who wish to participate.

B ) We will discuss Sovereign design, faction choice, and overall strategy prior to the first turnset.

C) We'll play using version 1.07, but if 1.08 comes out before we start (or immediately after and/or is savegame compatible) then we'll use the latter.

D) The first turnset will be 30 turns, each turnset thereafter will be 20 turns (thankfully this is very easy to keep track of with Elemental's built-in timer).  Turnset length is very much up for debate, but  I feel that each individual turn in Elemental is rather short relative to other 4x games.

E) After a turnset is completed and the save posted*, the next player on the roster has 24 hours to post that they've "got it" and 24 following that to post their own report and save file.

F) Each turnset report should also include, at the end of the post, an updated roster with the next player's name in bold.

G) There are many codes of conduct that have been written for SGs, but for now I'll just say "don't be a dick in the thread, even if you think your fellow players are morons with the tactical skills of a grape, and try not to unilaterally overrule the rest of your fellow players on major strategic decisions."  The spirit of this SG is, first and foremost, to learn about and demonstrate the game mechanics and their strategic implications; the point is not to swagger with the l33tness of your brain or to deride the game for it's broken elements (though hopefully demonstrating the latter will help bring them to the developers' attention).

The filepath for Elemental save games (a least on Win7) is:

C:\Users\[your username]\Documents\My Games\Elemental\Saves

* [update: current plan is to use a Google Documents page for the succession game]

[old: One significant snag compared to SGs that I've participated in before is that the SD forums don't seem to allow direct file uploads.  I'd rather not have to deal with emailing save files directly, so if anyone else has a brilliant idea for how to handle passing around the save files then I'd love to hear it.]