Good ideas both, but not quite what I'm looking for. The replays page is woefully underpopulated, and the last replays posted are from mid-July. Kind of a problem what with 1.1 coming all up on us. Is there another place where I should be looking for replays?
As for surrendering at the start, that's mostly what I've been doing thus far, but player positions on Sins maps is largely symmetrical. Say, for example, that it's a 4-player FFA game with everybody at cardinal directions. If I drop out, one of those players will be sandwiched in by the other two while they have extra space to spread out. It also makes setting up AI vs. AI duels difficult.
Is there some config file I can edit or a command-line thing I can pass or a way to, say, just set up a game externally and go observe? I know for example that in Dawn of War (another life-drainingly entertaining RTS), you can put "run = Cpu_ControlLocalPlayer()" in an autoexec file to have the AI take over for the player. Is there anything like that I can use on Sins?