It would be really cool to have a tournament mode within the interface itself.
At the moment it isn’t clear exactly how this would be designed exactly, but the ability to organize groups of players, through the game interface, to be able to play out tournaments; it would be awesome.
A really cool part of this could be a feature of the game AI, to fill out tournament slots which don’t get filled, with quality fleet/orders combinations.
There could be an option ‘blind setup’ for each battle as already seen in certain specific challenges.
In a bracketed tournament, players could be designated as ‘home’ and ‘away,’ so the issue of which computer a given battle is played upon is decided that way. If two players were to meet within a certain bracket, maybe it could be decided by a pair of games, ‘home’ and ‘away’ for both sides; with the overall totals from both battles being added up to determine the winner there.
There could be round robin tournaments, where everyone plays everyone else once or twice, and the tournament winner is the one with the most overall victories.
As mentioned, it’s not clear exactly how this would all be designed; so these are some stream-of-consciousness ideas.