That's a good idea on victory conditions actually. You're right, we won't want someone accidently "winning" before they are able. Maybe we can set the turns to something way in the future - 1000 turns maybe? Realistically this will likely die off well before we finish all of the stories and writing, but at least we will know when the end is coming.
For play by cloud turns are not synchronous. Its similar to the old play by email - I play a turn and it sends it over to you, then you play a turn and it sends it back to me, etc. There is no turn timer though, that's the downside, it can sit with someone for as long as needed for them to play. But if its just the two of us, that shouldn't be a problem, since if one of us leaves, its just a single player story anyway! I can definitely commit to 1 turn/day at a minimum, possibly more some days, and on rare occasions I might have to skip a day, likely with some warning.
Agree on Player vs Player wars - either a valid Casus Belli in-game, or some story driven reason which will be obvious in my mind. Same with wars against the AI, there has to be a story. I guess this was my assumption, that every move in the game will have some sort of story to it!
This is for fun, so yeah, let's make it fun. Obviously no god modding, agree on all that. I'm not playing this to win, I'm playing for the creative endevour! Whatever writing commitment you can provide is great, no need to haggle. I might be once a week then, or maybe multiple in a week, depending on how my work schedule evolves over the coming months!
Shall we just pick a time to get started? The challenge for play by cloud is that we need to get online at the same time in order to start it. We have a 10 minute window to join and accept settings. Stupid multiplayer cloud setup!