((Someone had posted about starting from apprenticeship, but deleted the post. I'd been working on a response, so I'll post it in any event.))
I've been thinking that the magi would be relatively young starting their covenant after having been in correspondence with each other for a period of years. Or perhaps their parentes had been in correspondence and we were matched up by our parents. I was thinking simulation would begin with the covenant founding. So I'm thinking maybe magi 5 to 10 years post gauntlet to start, post gauntlet progression being by RAW (spells cost XP and are limited to purchase as apprenticeship). The problem with starting from apprenticeship is it also requires a more fully fleshed out master. That's not a huge problem, of course, it's just more work. The entire apprenticeship question was one I was interested in exploring in the course of the simulation.
The build points for the covenant should be divided between the participants based on an agreed upon power level. To account for the disproportionate value of vis stores vs. vis sources, I propose that we pick only vis sources, and based on the vis sources we establish a reasonable amount of stores we would have on hand based on those sources.