I've given some thought as to how I'd host a large championship of this type. I'll voice some thoughts here, and see what y'all think.
Quoting myself from a while back,
... if you wanted to host a Warlight World Championship, what's the "best" way to do it? It wouldn't be round robin, for sure. That leaves elimination tournaments or Swiss tournaments (a format Warlight doesn't support). Swiss tournaments differ in elimination tournaments in that you are not kicked out after losing, so you have a chance to make a comeback after a bad streak, and they differ from Round Robin tournaments in that you do not have to play a round against every single person -- you play against people with similar scores. This is statistically more accurate than double eliminations as well, meaning that it is a better indicator of skill.
If I had to host a Warlight 1v1 World Championship, I would do one of two things: a) I would host a ten round, Swiss tournament with between 60 to 200 players, or b) I would do somewhere between 20-40 players with different sets of 4-player round robins, with the top player from each set advancing to an elimination. I prefer the Swiss, though. If we keep the numbers the same, 60 to 200 people for a ten-round Swiss, you're looking at a total of 300-1000 games played in the course of the championship, and each game would have to be manually hosted since Warlight isn't smart enough to do all this. I'd preferably get a few other people to host games, but I would be working out most of the mechanics of the tournament by hand (though some help with seeding would be helpful, as I doubt I know all the people who would want to compete).
As for the amount of time needed to complete the championship: for Swiss tournaments, you need to wait until all the games in a round finish before you can know your next opponent. So, each round lasts as long as the longest game. Assuming we do the normal strat. 1v1 template, that could take about 3-4 weeks per round, multiplied by ten, so about eight to ten months. That's doable, and, to my eyes, makes sense. People dropping out would simply forfeit the rest of their games. Voting to end would count as a draw, etc.
The round robin series might take less time, since I would require a smaller number of players, preferably, and each player would play three games at a time against the other people in their set. That could theoretically take 2 or 3 months, though I haven't tested this out, yet...
A Swiss tournament run manually, outside of the Warlight's brackets, would also allow the option of using a different template each round.
For those unfamiliar with how Swiss tournaments work, Wikipedia does a good job explaining, and I have hosted a Warlight Swiss tournament before with the LEA (
http://challonge.com/WarlightLeague1).
Edited 2/6/2015 17:59:15
