Hi, about the hosting: The fast free host we are using now is called byethost (http://civleague.byethost12.com/). There are no ads and we could park the domain Ulr!k3 claimed there. However, if your servers are as fast we can think about moving the site there. We are still debating whether to use a CMS. Ulr!k3 has good experience with Joomla, I have no experience with any CMS.

The idea is that you average the rating of the winner and the looser and apply the rating function that tells you the rating change. Then you redistribute the change evenly across winners and losers as you already came up with in your post. Only if you compare different game types with each other this is going to give an unfair result. But if we take your example of a 4FFA it makes sense that 3 losses can be balanced with 1 win. To understand why let's say we have an even match where all 4 players have the same rating. The probability to win is 0.25 and the probability to loose is 0.75 for every player. The winning player gains the full rating change, since he somehow managed to overcome the odds and win. However, the loosing players only loose a third of the rating change each since it was 3-times as likely to loose the game. If they would loose the same amount as the winner gained it would be unfair for everyone, since in the long run everyone will loose rating points. Violating the conservation of rating points could quickly lead to inflation/deflation so that you have ever rising/dropping ratings. This would especially make it hard to find a fair initial rating for a new player.
About themes: Alright :)

Alright, since you have recreated the current standings I propose to first create a simple website as mentioned by Ulr!k3. Since I have some experience with database design I will develop a database model of the League and fill in the data (you can send me the google docs link via steam or gmr message). Our simple website will query the database and show the results to the visitors. It will only take a couple of hours to create, but an authorized user can connect and update the database easily. Since I did never deploy a website to the public web I don't know how to set up 'terms of use' and such. Perhaps you could find out about the legal requirements of a website. The question is where to deploy the website to? Ulr!k3, if you can provide a subdomain of your website that would be cool, but if not we can also go with free hosting for now, since our simple website wont require many resources. As soon as the simple site is up we can start extending the functionality by implementing login, admin utilities, rating and so on (while using the initial database model).
One more thing I would like to know: What does a theme consist of? On the current website there is a description text, a configuration file and some screenshots. Do we need all those?
We should also start a group on steam so we can communicate faster via chat :)

About the rating system: If we rate based on an elo system, we are effectively saying that the total amount of rating points in the league stays constant unless a player joines/leaves the league. This means in a duel the winner will gain a certain amount of rating points while the looser will loose exactly the same amount of rating points. This model can be scaled up for a variable amount of teams that contain a variable amount of players. Therefore we can deal with all game types independent of the theme. However if we want to have theme based ratings we must not create Theme 8-like themes where the team/player configuration is variable.
Also I like your idea for an averaged rating across all themes! :)

EDIT: Okay, I created what I explained above and deployed the website to a free hosting service for now. It can be found here: http://civilizationleague.bugs3.com/ For now it only contains some test data. As soon as you send me the spreadsheet you created I can plug the current data in. I'm looking forward to hear your opinion about the site. Then we can talk about extending and improving it over time.

@Ayu - Cool ideas! Implementing a rating system should not be that hard. I shortly looked up the chess elo system in wikipedia and it seems that it would work quite well with Civ, too. Having players create games and report the results is also doable in my eyes. However, I didn't work with the Steam-API so far so I'm not sure how logging in via Steam will work. But I guess it is not going to be a devil's work.

@Ulr!k3 - It would be cool to have our own domain, but we would have to pay for it. So if you could provide one of your subdomains transitionally that would be great.
About the website I made a little list of features that I thought are necessary from the start:

• Players can register on the League website (Perhaps via steam login)
  
• All players in a League game have to be registered
  
• Games can be started by registered players, but have to be approved by a League admin
  
• Results can be reported by a player participating in the game, but again have to be approved by a League admin
  
• Every game has a theme/gametype, e.g. duel, 2vs2, 3vs3, 6FFA, ...
  
• Themes can be created by admins only
  
• There is a different rating system for every theme, since it doesn't make sense to compare a 6FFA with a 2vs2
  
• There is a player page where all ratings and statistics are displayed
  
• There is a score board where players are listed by their theme ratings or just #wins, #losses

Let me know if you think these are all features we need initially or if this concept is too sofisticated already... :) I could setup the database and php files for updating it, but we need some kind of shared platform where we put the website together. Perhaps we could already test it on your server or we share it via dropbox/github.

Hi, I haven't been in a League Game for a while, which is probably the reason why I didn't notice this post earlier. Thanks for Hoagie to point this out in our league conversation. But I still like the concept of competitions and special themes in GMR games, because it gives you that much more than a regular Civ game and you try that much harder to win to have good results in the league. Since I have some spare time at my hands right now, I am volunteering to develop a new website for the League. However, I can not provide a server to run it on, so we would have to settle for a free hosting service. Since we currently do not have Rillithains spreadsheet I propose to restart the League from scratch. This of course doesn't mean, that all our efforts in previous games are in vain, but as pointed out the interest in the League has declined and therefore a new start if not a change of the overall concept might be necessary to keep it alive. Hopefully we can start a discussion about it because we should consider changes before setting up things like administration and website again.

Site and client are down for me since 8 hours, anyone else?

Client and Website did not seem to work properly lately. Now the servers are completely down it seems.

Hi, I am starting this thread so we can post games where players are missing.
So hopefully there will be players eager to join these games even though they are sometimes many turns in already. It can actually be very fun to see what strategies the AI or the previous player had in mind and change or continue their efforts.

If you are in a game where players are missing, just drop a comment with the link to it.
Thanks.

I got a problem with leaving games where I am the last player in, it will say "Surrendering" but after that nothing happens.

True, it's kind of the same problem as with finishing a game. Perhaps it could be done similar to what I suggested there. The player who got eliminated makes a request, that he wants to surrender. Then all players in the game can agree or disagree to the request. If enough players agree he can leave without it being counted as quitting. But I agree that this is not a very good solution to the problem. Hopefully we'll see the new GMR being able to register ingame events such as victory or if someone looses their capital.