User customized game recorder

After reading many strategy articles and timeline writeups I have felt the need to have a customiseable gamerecorder that can record whole games, or small parts of it.

A rough outline of it would be like this:

-Put it under Preferences.
-A menu with the minimap and a selection of what detail level you want to record at. Duration/individual movement level/popuptext frequenzy etc.
-Click&drag rectangle of the area in the minimap that you want to record - and a command to terminate the recording when you have the gameplay you need. When it plays back it will autozoom to fill the page.
-A systemclock in the corner to tell the viewers how long time each round lasted. This must be an enable/unable feature. But of interest in SP contests where speedplay/timelimits is a part of the game.
-Forward/Rewind(slider?)/Pause/Play interface like in the endgame screen in Civ3. Maybe Zoom even?

I don't know how much storage and systemresources this will take. But it would vastly improve the method of sharing strategy and gameinfo compared to the current level. And would be a nice way of recording historic battles that you die to share with your friends and fellow civ'ers.

I've probably left out important features. But the core of the recorder would be the ability to customise it. Of course the best way would be to have a fully free recording that the viewer can immerse him/herself in and stop to check the tiniest micromanagement details or speed up to the general info level that you get in the current endgame recording. But that would perhaps take up too much space and system resources?

This would be a good idea if it was easy to use.

The 'totally immersive 3D world' quote from Sorenson at the Civ4 team suggests that you can zoom more freely in Civ4. In that case it should be like the replay feature in Warcraft3/Starcraft if you're familiar with those. There you have a game running that you can speed up and down(not rewind I believe) and you can click on individual buildings and units to see their status and ownership. Maybe a popuptext that tells of trading when that's done as well?

This would defintly be a tool for the seasoned civ players that need to compliment comptetitive games and strategy with a better documentation than saves, screenshots and written timelines. So the interface don't have to be 'newbie proof'. It all depends on the game engine and the interface in the game itself I guess.

There must be some sort of dropdown menu where you can select what civ you want to view. That would decrease the number of moves shown, and also give a cleaner window where only relevant popups appear on the screen.