I NEVER play with Start as Minor Civs. Mostly because AI's are pretty much completely ******** during this time, only valuing building units really since they feel at war with everyone, which they are. I also don't like to be extremely defensive out the gate. There's too much to do just to keep up with the techs as they go along rather than spend time building up forces with a completely undeveloped city, so its more about how much risk you're willing to take and no amount is the right answer really. You're either underprepared and shooting forward or overprepared and lagging. If an attack comes, you die if you've taken the first route, but if an attack doesn't come you'll probably die having taken the second route. So its not much better than flipping a coin and makes you want to immediately clear your continent so you don't have to worry about it, which actually prompts you to ADD to the steam roller effect right out the gate.
I'd think it would be better to have options like these. I'm loving the entire concept actually. And, DH, lately any suggestion is likely to be met by the 'lets wait on that' approach. In short, at the moment, if we're not finalizing, tweaking, or debugging concepts in the works we're not supposed to be working on it. I'm somewhat in agreement that this round should be our focus but I think if it plays into your plans as a whole then I don't see the problem with it, provided we still stay somewhat focused, as a group, on making this next release the most 'complete' version we've ever had, with the cleanest gameplay possible for a snapshot in time in our road to a fully developed C2C.
Along the lines of consideration regarding Early Warfare, I believe we should have a small selection of leaders that display a preference for the Vanilla BtS Incan rush strategy. (For those unaware of the Quecha Rush, the overall strategy is to prepare for nothing but war out the gate, build nothing but production enhancing and funnel it directly into building a powerful army of great numbers and just enough skill to make it through a few cities before it peters out (Quecha were particularly good at this since they had a very effective anti-archery value making them capable of still being meaningful when a large force of them reached your first opponent, when they'd likely already have archers by then. Continuing the strategy, you'd need to capture few cities along the way, destroy most, continue to march on and eliminate ALL (this was critical since you'd be left far behind in tech) threats on your continent, keep the best placed capitals, and back down into gradual recovery and growth out from the lack of research momentum and hopefully be able to colonize the whole continent without further fear of anything more than a few barbarian cities. This might make the early game more interesting to have an ai or two know how to perform such a rush strategy well and would get us to stay on our toes a bit even if we don't rely on the poor game option Start as Minor Civs.
Back on subject, the only problem I see with this proposal is it sounds as if you must negotiate with another civ to establish respect for each other's territory/border. I'd prefer it if it were the other way around. If I was, as a leader, to inform the other leader(s) that from now on they will be expected to show respect for MY territory/border and as a result, they would naturally raise the same expectation. My concern is that the other civs could reject the offer to change your status and this means you must negotiate to get closed borders rather than having it become the default once territorial boundaries can be expressed through improved language skills.
So in short, its a bit like putting the cart before the horse I think. Otherwise its spot on in its gradiation between Closed Borders and Territorial Apathy which I agree should be the way things begin.
or 
or maybe even a subdued animal.
