First of all thank's to all organizators for such a great contest! I'll be participating for sure in the next event.
If you'll implement all that changes that you wrote above it'll remove all the small problems that were present during this contest - old compilers versions, problems with recovering password, profile changes, problems with scalbility and etc. And this will bring your competition for the next level of popularity. I have some ideas how to help you conquer the world.

)) They don't concern to the framwork, may I should make new topic, if it is so please move it to the new topic concernig general suggestions.
1) Try to work intensively with potential sponsors. I think many famous IT companies and organisations would like to become your sponsors now: Facebook, Microsoft, DARPA, etc and support top competitors with the real and valuable prizes.
2) It'll be good to add a bit more advertising about the contest. I find your contest occasionaly. Now you have more than 4600 participant, it is a very good result and with good promotion many new people interested in programming and AI will join this army.
3) Сhoice of game is very critical for succes of the competition, it have to be rich and difficult enough to be interesting for AI programming on different languages, not only on C++ with optimisation insertions in assembler. Galcon was a very good choice, I hope next game will be at least as good.
4) Allmost all participants have ideas that they haven't realized in time. May it'll be interesting for old and new competitors to return to Galcon in 2011 year and make short contest (for a month for example) with extended rules, for example more random maps with larger constrains on size of the map, number of planets, density. topology of the maps (make it like torus or sphere) or etc.
Good luck guys!