<- does not know first thing about modding. 

That's one thing, but for a tournament that I feel would keep viewer interest it needs to be somehwhat simplistic and straightforward. Handful of planets, handful of ships. I was thinking give each person/team a capped amount of command/supply numbers and let them pre-choose their fleet before the match and thats what they start with on the homeworld, and they have the option to forgo some fleet for structures that would cost fleet supply too. 

And keep in mind I was mainly thinking the mod should be able to change all these variables from the start screen from a nuetral parties computer. 

Well then maybe he can just be a 3rd/5th player who immediately surrenders, that would work , right?

Well you'll have to educate me since I don't play multiplayer myself, but I'm assuming one could make a map for 5 players and the referee could simply surrender and be able to spectate from there, or does it kick you back to the ICO menu?

Yeah, after reading through some of the mod edumacation stuff it sounds like something modders just don't have real access to to do all the features I was thinking of.I really wanted to have variables that could be changed on the fly in-game at the startgame screen that granted a decent starting fleet and could grant resources or pre-occupied planets somehow. Kinda like the multiplayer on Homeworld where you can start out with resources and a fleet. I also realize getting people to all get the mod might be difficult, though if we were getting a tournament going I think everyone would be inclined to get the mod.

Could still make tournament style maps (as a quick example I was thinking a 4 point star-shaped map, with each player getting a homeworld, a dead end asteroid to the rear, and two planets branching out in a V pattern forward towards the center of the galaxy and the forward planets each make a connection to the adjacent players homeworlds as well as a direct connection to the planet directly across from them, there is no connection to the central star. So each team gets two choke points but breaching them leads directly to their home planet, and players can bypass an adjacent player and go directly to the chokepoint of a player on the opposite side of the map.) And could still speed up the game, overall there might be a possibility to make games quick so it could be watched on the youtubes or even a live stream.

You never know, maybe IC will throw out a tournament expansion that does all this nifty stuff. 

Is this tournament 1v1s only?

Problem with anything else is that you can do well, but your ally can suck...map starts also are a huge factor in games, but then fixed maps favor those who know the maps the best...

All in all, I'm not really sure this is a good game for tournaments...the more enjoyable games are large team games, and those just don't work for a tournament....

Yep, that's exactly what I thought, or at least someone that can watch what's going on, at least some abilities are graphically shown. But more watching for things like exploits or frowned upon tactics that may be banned per agreed tournament rules, like the use of z axis. =P Also that person could provide commentary for people who don't really know what's going on, that really helps make watching a match more interesting. Viewers would start to pick up on things and start seeing hem on their own without the commentators help, and who knows, might start dragging in players to the multiplayer scene.

1v1 2v2 4v4, if people wanted, we could set up a tournament for every category with different win conditions, the sky is the limit. Ideally, if you have a partner, you know him or her. You picked em to be on your team for the tournament.

As far as the map, it should ideally be something that requires no forward knowledge of the map, all sides are equal, for example, this is what i was trying to describe for a 2v2 map. In hindsight, it might have been smarter to make a stop sign and gve each player their own dual chokepoint worlds instead of having one of ech chokepoint shared by adjacent players but the point is its straightforward, and the match becomes more about who understands military tactics better. 

http://i191.photobucket.com/albums/z95/reddaggerz/samplemap.jpg

Yeah. So there is no way you could make, say, all the values in something like Gameplay.constants a variable that can be changed via a drop-down menu once sins is running? .... or maybe even if someone made a 3rd party program that could change it, but then the changes couldn't take effect on the competitors clients, and can't really trust competitors to enter agreed upon values and that'd be confusing with a bunch of people trying to make all the value changes. 

I guess agreeing upon mods would be the best we can do. =P