I have decided to abandon the idea of a turn-based metagame. It is a bad idea, because the only way to make it good is to create turn-based complexity for it, in the form of involved turn-based mechanics. But if you do that, you are encroaching on the territory of games like Civ and so on, which will always be 1000x times better as long as you are not committed to making a PROPER videogame out of them (which we wouldn't be doing). What we wanted to make, essentially, would be a sci-fi version of the Total War series, but with the turn-based aspect of it running inside our heads, or at most like a board game, instead of in a computer. So we were doomed to failure from the start.
Instead, what I want to do now is create our own version of Clan Wars. Exodus has given up on the concept entirely -- most likely because their star caster, Zaphod, quit the game -- so the field is wide open for us to run our own team-based league. We can start out with an internal 2v2 or 3v3 tournament, to get reacquainted with the game, and teach it to any newcomers who want to join us, and then, with that tournament under our belt -- fully streamed and casted, plus the blog ready to go -- we can go on the PA forums and see if we can sign up a few clans to join us for Season 1.
As for our internal tournament, here are the participant list I have so far:
icycalm
recoil
infernovia
Some guy
danjiro
Robomoo
Yurian
Kojiero
NighAligned
I am not 100% sure everyone listed above wants to participate, so correct me if I made a mistake, and I am also not sure if any other people want to join, so let me know if that is the case, and then I will divide us into Alfa, Bravo, etc. squads, and we can start going into the MP lobby and playing against randoms for a while, until everyone has caught up and we are ready to have the internal contest.
The main advantage of our format over Exodus's will be the greater size of the battles: Clan Wars was strictly 4v4, but our showdowns will depend on the clans' sizes. If two clans can play a 10v10, that's what they will do, and if some other clan can only field three people, it will have to play 3v3s with the bigger clans, and so on.
Also, the systems will be larger. It's been 2+ years since Clan Wars, and now PA: Titans has introduced multi-threading performance gains, plus faster and cheaper servers exist, plus the custom server code is much more robust than it used to be (with the possibility of reconnecting now, if you are disconnected while playing), so we should be able to have far bigger, longer battles -- wars, really -- than have ever been played and streamed before.
It should be very exciting and very fun, and I look forward to Insomnia fostering the only PA competitive scene that showcases PA's scale the way it should be showcased. Fuck 4v4s that end in 45 minutes: let's have some 10v10s that take half a fucking DAY. That's what Jon Mavor wanted to achieve, and that's what I want our competitive league to strive towards.
(And by the way, we'll need to carefully design systems that will encourage this type of play, so with large land mass and without many superweapons and so on, so get ready for learning the system editor inside and out, and extensive playtesting.)