So I am back and I am making this happen. I have had a lot of time to think on how this could be made to work, and I now see that our original ideas and also our thoughts on implementation were all misguided. It was very wrong to try to come up with a fully-developed turn-based metagame from the get-go. It was akin to designing Civilization lol; of course we were going to get bogged down and abandon the project. What we'll do instead is jump right in, with next-to-zero rules, and build the game up slowly from there. This is how it will go.
1) I pick a Commander for myself (that no one else will be allowed to use, ever), and a ready-made system, and declare it my own.
2) I then wait for someone to pick another Commander and challenge me for the system.
3) We wait a few days to see if other people step in to offer to ally with me or with the challenger, and then we play out the fight.
4) The winners get the system, and the losers are kicked out of it.
5) Once kicked out, they choose another ready-made system to flee to, or they could split up, going in different directions, and therefore to different systems that they themselves choose. In this way, we don't have to spend weeks designing the galaxies: we will shape them on the go, and everyone will have a say in how they are shaped, since everyone will be picking the systems that they flee to.
6) Once all the losers have decided where to flee, the winners get to move and challenge someone. In this way, the "prize" is the systems. This is essentially our ranking tool: which faction owns the most and coolest systems. And of course we can have 1-on-1 challenges for the leadership of a faction, betrayals, and so on. And if someone comes up with an interesting-sounding rule for the turn-based phase, we can try them out and test them one by one -- but the barebones game I am suggesting more than suffices to keep us playing for years. Instead of the stupid 1v1 rank that's just a number, the factions in Cosmic War will be compared by the size and beauty of the territory that they own: much like the Empire in Star Wars is the coolest faction because it owns everything. Dirty rebels lol.
My only problem is that the cosmicwar.pa domain is still not available, but it might be going on sale in January. If not, I will use cosmicwar.net until the .pa domains go on sale. And in any case, I need at least a couple of weeks to get Orgy and Insomnia updated before I can play any game whatever. But I'll start work on the CW blog immediately (it will be a WordPress blog so it won't be much work) and post news about that soon.
Exodus events have fizzled out and there are lots of people in the official forum who are complaining about being bored with 1v1s, so I am sure that once I launch the blog it will become popular.
I'll be back with more details, but in the meantime post here if you are interested in joining and let me know your thoughts in general.