The following is of course just my opinion. I'll happily abide by a consensus decision on any of this! (Or a unilateral one if you so choose Matrix
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The no reloading rule seems clear-cut to me, and a good thing. As I understand it, its purpose is to disallow the use of foreknowledge and of trial and error. These two things are the same at heart but feel different. The most extreme use of foreknowledge would be by knowing the entire map in advance. The most extreme use of trial and error would be to replay a single turn different ways to win battles or leaders. In-between would be cases of going back a few turns to avoid a problem. All of the above are clearly disallowed and I feel should stay disallowed.
Reloading for an accidental keystroke seems to me to be a different subject. If we were trying to simulate multi-player then it would matter. But for the purposes above, disallowing this serves no purpose and seems unnecessary. To me it seems fine to reload after going OMIGOD I didn't intend to do that! The one that trapped me a lot early on is the darn Spacebar == Enter key, to end a turn. I'd hit space space space etc for a bunch of units and hit it once too often and DAMN, I was going to change my production/taxes/... before ending that turn! I sure do wish that only the Enter key would end a turn! I've gotten better at watching out for this but still. If it doesn't create foreknowledge or trial and error which is used to alter the outcome, a reload seems ok to me. The accidental keystroke/mouseclick seems to me to qualify in that sense, it doesn't have those effects.
Reading the spoiler thread before playing also seems clear-cut to me. Reading it would gain a lot of foreknowledge and is therefore disallowed.
BillChin, in response to your note, I know you want feedback from other players as well as top scorers but FWIW here are my thoughts. (I've missed some techniques no doubt, these are the ones I can think of which might be grey.)
1) Abusing a Right of Passage: Seems completely ok to me. Unless used with a rival who is not in contact with anyone else, the consequence is severe and appropriate, no one else will ever give a ROP again in the game. Quite a penalty, higher than I'm willing to pay. If used with the last rival, it doesn't really matter, the game is in hand anyway. (I view being able to renege on my last ROP as the prize for being good with everyone else
And it still isn't free if you are milking the game and leaving a rival.)
2) Worker factories (size 6/7 city with 10 shields producing 1 worker/turn): I've only ever built one in two games. It sure is useful and does seem unintentionally easy. But I don't think it is a game-maker/breaker, it isn't that high on the scale of usefulness to be worth excluding. Although a worker factory can produce more than it should, there is still some cost - a busy city, and each worker counting toward one's military force count. The benefit of building these doesn't seem to me to change the game balance significantly, so I don't think we need a rule banning their use.
3) Drafting: I haven't used this so I am probably not the best person to comment on it. Perhaps I don't understand how powerful it can be. From my perspective it just doesn't look like a good thing to do. I know that I've drafted a bit in times of emergency, but don't even remember the last time I did it. I don't want conscript (2 HP) defensive units counting toward my military unit count. So from my perspective this need not be disallowed, I don't find it worth doing.
4) City-trading tricks: I'm not the best person for this either, I haven't used tricks based on city trading. But again, from what I've read, I don't feel it necessary to disallow them. Aeson posted a nice description of a neat one he found, taking advantage of a blind spot in the AI. It didn't seem to me like a game-altering technique. Although it can be used to gain advantage, it takes a lot of work, the gain doesn't seem huge, and there is some built-in cost in the territory one must dedicate to the purpose.
5) Pop rushing: I left this to last because it is to my mind the fuzzy one. I think most of us agree that pop rushing is powerful beyond the game's intent. It is definitely game-altering, my scores would be significantly lower without it. And many of us think that perhaps it alters the game negatively. Still, I'm not sure that it is important to disallow it. I think that the most important thing for GOTM is a level playing field. In that regard allowing pop rushing is fine. But also important is balancing the game if we can, reducing the military emphasis which goes with pop rushing. The big problem would be to have a simple and clear rule. Ideally pop rushing would just be less over-powering. I don't think we can do that, it would have to come from Firaxis. A self-imposed rule which tries to say "you can't over-use pop rushing" seems impossible, there would have to be a defined limit which everyone would interpret the same way. A rule like "you can rush at most X units from any city" seems too awkward to me. Would people have to (and be able to) keep track of whether and how often they'd rushed in each city? The only remaining choice I can think of would be a rule which simply says "no pop rushing". That's clear and easy to follow. I think it could be fun to try one GOTM with that as a rule and see how it works out. Does anyone else think that would be fun to try? I'd like to make the rule a tad more specific actually: "no pop rushing of units". I think that pop rushing of city improvements is not an over-powered technique, and should still be allowed. It can be very useful in quickly reducing the potentially rebellious population of a captured city. If it were not available that would just increase the already high incentive to raze and replace instead of capturing.
Finally, a note about reloading and Domination: My vote would be to make a special exemption to the "no reloading" rule for GOTM. To explicitly allow reloading after a turn which results in an unwanted Domination victory. It was sad to see the number of ruined (well, disappointed at least) games in the GOTM#3 spoiler thread caused by unwanted Domination victories. It was not skill, just dumb luck, that I wasn't one of them. To my mind it is a serious flaw/bug in the game that there is nothing in any of its windows showing one's progress toward the Domination goal. It should be possible to see any win or loss condition as it is approaching so that one can try to control the outcome. As long as Domination is enabled, the highest 2050 score in a GOTM is likely to be heavily influenced by luck related to this victory condition. I think that explicitly allowing a reload to avoid accidental Domination would be a good thing, it would level the playing field and it would remove the sad frustration/disappointment of players who get blind-sided by it.
But it's not naive. Still you just can't believe some's this good.
