As for scouting with Galleons, I think that we can always do so later, once we've started the respective wars.
Seeing as how Isabella has 9 Cities and Joao has 7 Cities, we won't have trouble "finding targets" for quite some time.
I agree that eventually, we'll want to scout for their remaining Cities, but I think that it's a bit premature to do so now. Maybe once these AIs have about half of their Cities razed we can send out some Galleons... which we might even have units inside of, such that when they do spot a City, it can be attacked immediately.
I don't mind playing even shorter rounds than 5-6 turns if I run into troubling issues, but yeah, don't expect me to play 10+ turns or anything like that. "Two City attacks per AI" is about the limit that we can reasonably be expected to plan ahead, so we'll almost certainly want to pause play at such a time, if not sooner (for example, after we capture London would be a good time to pause play, if we haven't run into major issues before then).
I'm still trying to find an online image hosting site.
It's hard.
I've found a couple of options, but they all seem to have some sort of downside
- Log in every month and you can only upload a max of 10 Megs. Okay, well, with that limitation on how many files you can upload, I'll have little incentive to log in every month, so the pictures will eventually just get deleted. Yuck.
- Unlimited uploading but very limited bandwidth per month (and sometimes there are even limits per day!). With the amount of times that we refresh the pages in this thread, we probably won't exceed the limits, but then as soon as other teams start viewing our thread, we could end up finding the images being unavailable for an entire day (not too bad but still annoying for certain days, like a couple of days before the competiton closes and when everyone is done or nearly done) or a unavailable for a month (by the time that the images are viewable again, many people will have moved on)
- Annoying tracking of my every move, such as being heavily integrated with google and wanting to send out data to google web sites for every single page of theirs that I hit--if I block these google ip addresses with my firewall then the image site refuses to work, sigh
- Images get automatically deleted after 60 days. Umm, that situation is fine for an online auction, but not so great here where I don't want to be editing my messages every couple of months
- Hotlinking only works to thumbnails. It can be annoying if you have to look at every image in a new window
So, there might be no images from my playing time, which would suck since I really love to make the detailed reports, but I'll keep looking for an image-hosting solution while waiting for additional feedback.
What I'll probably end up doing is choosing one of the lesser evils, such as a site that auto-deletes the images or requires regular logging-in... since having images for 2 months isn't GREAT, but it's far better than not having images at all, right?