Good starting point. That's the way I've been timing my runs. I think some of the other Civ games have rules where you start your timer from first action, which here, means I could futz around with the preferences menu as much as I wanted before starting the timer, but I think that would be worse.

I was thinking about "Time Warp"... originally I thought that Time Warp should be banned, because the runs would just be that much less interesting, but my current thought is that Time Warp is just useless so there is no point in banning it.

I would love to see a category with a bit more substance to it, where you actually get to see the game getting played, but I have a hard time imagining how it would be viable as a category. Something I do for my own fun is to see how fast I can beat the game on a standard size map on Thinker... my runs are at least a couple hours, but that's not much of a category if I'm the only one doing it.