How about BOTW + GOTF + WOTF?
Although I'm reluctant to raise expectations, when the idea dawned on me I did some advanced mental arithmetic that goes a bit like like this:
We currently release 2.5 games a month, each with 3 saves. That's 7.5 saves a month. So why not make it 8 separate games a month - perhaps 2 Vanilla, 2 Warlords and 4 BtS. The BtS difficulties could be different combinations of four out of seven, assuming we don't have Settler games. Typically they could be (W or N) + (P or M) + (M or E) + (I or D), but we could have a few "easy" months when we encourage players into lower difficulty games with W + N + P+ M, and a few "hard" months when we push players up to M + E + I + D.
The four Warlords and Vanilla games could complement whatever difficulty pattern we had in BtS that month.
The masochists get a D or I BOTM every month except the easy months.
The newbies get a W or N BOTM every month except the hard ones. I would think they stand *more* chance of getting awards in a Warlord or Noble game than they do now, as the high level players will always have a choice of higher difficulty games to go for
The civ-oholics can play up to eight games a month - surely enough even for kcd_swede
There are lots of issues that arise, and we would need to thrash out the details.
A biggie for the staff would be the workload in creating and releasing maps. But if we used my approach during recent staff shortage problems, and created random starts for most games, this shouldn't be too onerous. With a lot more games, we can survive one or two damp squibs, and we can also take more risks on creative designs for the hand crafted ones.
The pre-game description posts would probably have to be semi-automated to make it quick and easy to start a couple of games every week.
I'm sure we can work something out for Global Rankings - probably just choose the players' best games in each period as we do now ... except the periods might be two weeks instead of 4, and include two BOTMs.
The most important question is:
Would this increase participation by newcomers, and retention of existing players? That seems to me to be the prime objective of any redesign of the competition. Making it more complex, harder to explain, and more exclusive, look to me to be going in the wrong direction.