Omg, is that a fact going forward now?
This would be the coolest change in the game since CF’s went from 6 to 8.
@I_like_pie - You could call a single race change an “Evolution”.
You could have the button say “Evolve”
Then pop up a warning screen that says “You may only do this once a round, are you sure?”
With a button below that says “Heck yea! - Evolve”.
One time a round, any time a round, would change the entire game - but within the confines of understandable structure!
Omfg that would be so sexy Like one of us could have flipped in our last round. Holy mother of awesome.
Coresmashers could flip to res, a small player could flip to Pax, a dood going on vacation could give away some spread and become a middy banker. A guy with a vacation could get all set up on the edge of a core, and come home to a decent spread.
Family dynamics changing mid round, studying a fam early, means you have to keep studying them - shit will change all the time.
We will have people (Like @The_LiGhTgUnS or @Airwing ) that would find a way to use this in full on round planning. Bankers starting out Quants and flipping to Rev after their first fist pop jump lands.
A small fam attacker could Cashtack to smash the core, then flip to Camar or holy shit a custom.
You could even make the “Evolution” only “Evolve” into standard races!
(Not that anyone will go for that, but fuck a duck - that would still be hot oily boobehs.)
Or explore in someone core and quick portal with high con bonus (as custom or camaar or so), and then switch to Wardancer to go smashing with 80% mili bonus
Updated the feature name to be “Evolution”. Great suggestion for the name, @Darrk!
So this is gonna work a little differently than originally described:
Upon joining a galaxy, every empire is granted 1 evolution.
This number will be a galaxy setting that can be changed, including for customs.
We may also grant extra evolutions as rare galactic events.
You can still change your race for free:
During pre-round
Up to 48 hours after you join
A non-free race change will use your evolution, and you can do it any time you want.
Once you’re out of evolutions, you can not change races again for any reason, nor will your race be changed for you.
An extra confirmation step will go up to be sure, so “I made a mistake” won’t grant anybody another change. This is similar to how we treat deletions.
Any time your family loses a member, everybody in the family gains an additional evolution.
This will specifically help smaller families who suffer from inactive losses and player deletions, as allowing them to restructure their family roles will help them rebound.
This will not apply if you kill off your own family members. This is to prevent families from cannibalizing newer players to stack evolutions. It will therefore be more beneficial to let the inactive script run its course than to actively kill off people who aren’t as active as you’d like.
We’ll adjust as necessary if people find exploits, but this is the plan right now. I can’t promise anything, but I am trying to get this ready for #milky-way-68.
Is it too soon to bring back “I want to have your babeh”?
Jessica Alba in “Dark Angel” hot.
Heaps of fun. Civilizations going through pre-warp epoch. Beautiful!
Fits snugly into creatable empty lore space for future development. "Audrey Hepburn smoking through an onyx ciggy holder" fanceh.
About as secksy as Danny Divitio’s taint.
A cautionary tale:
Proton and Invl can’t play this round and want to help out Smaug and his band of hooligans.
So they draft in, sit there pumping planets for a few days - and then delete.
Smaug and the rest of the skeleton faced dipshits from Karate Kid 1 now have and additional free race change.
Heart is in the right place, but that last one is a doozy.
Chomp is the only person that could properly display the correct amount of exuberance about you working on this.
I think evolutions from fam members deleting should be a family option.
So when someone deletes, the family stacks 1 evolution to be used within the fam, giving everyone an evolution is a bit overkill, but having 1 for the fam enables them to recover from a salty deletion that could muddy a fams efficiency.
Edit: implementing the use of said evolution could be given to leader.
You guys make a good point, but my concern is that a single race change might not sufficiently rebalance a family after a loss.
@Darrk this actually happened to us when you left our fam in #milky-way-57. The family was designed on such a specific race makeup that when you left we were all pretty hosed. A single race change could have helped, but we really needed an entire restructuring.
I think you’re right that people will abuse it, but we’ll have to see if that ends up being economical. Even in that example of 2 people holding spots to stack evolutions, they’d still be taking up spots from real players who could have stuck around. In that regard, it’s not truly free.
He is actually quite right. If you have a family buying into a unconventional single strat, and the hopeless romantic (or heavily stressed out honky) who they are relying on to teach them it vanishes, well then yeah - everyone can switch to what they know. Honestly, I cannot see this happening very often - but it has happened more than once - and once was fucking enough. Having an entire fam unhappy for 6 weeks, that is bad for the game.
Also:
My knee jerk reaction is always to give the leader more control of game mechanics and I was really close to agreeing with this. It occured to me - I often say (when going into a new fam and people seeing the races I run - hell, I said it to joo my first round back @Random). “Nooooo body tells me what race to run”. I think most people feel that way, unless they allow someone to choose a race for them to play. This falls in line with my assessment of the previous quote.
Side note:
I have long held an idea that a fam leader should have an “Evict” button. It would drastically cut down on the SoR shenanigarbage that seem a ubiquitous thorn.
Saves an entire fam the bloody headache of having to remove even the dullest of salty players. Even the village idiot can build a zillion lasers.
With IA’s being on the table now, removing them just went from a near family destroying task every round - to the stuff of nightmares.
Not everyone is @Picklearmy and @Random.
Some leaders have to earn their fams round after round after round after round after round.
:cough:
It is hard enough for a player like me (having cleared hundreds of players from families) let alone for a new leader trying to make his mark to remove a cancer player.
WIth IA you call his family what it is - an nigh inevitable farm.
Back on topic:
The Buttclincher:
That one sold me.
People having an extra free one once in a while anyway will help deaden the effect of the guys sitting in a fam on purpose just to give their girlfriends an extra Evolve.
I suggest the following:
1."No family Evolves awarded for a player that deletes in >their< first 96 hours."
4 days is just long enough to hurt a fam for using it as a tactic.
&
2."No Evolves gained for a leader Eviction"
Put them together and we gain +39.92% more potential fun per round!
…
I counted!
Giving control of something major for the fam is always going to be dangerous, but most things in this game are and more often than not there isn’t a perfect solution.
“Usually” leader is in charge for a reason, can always make it a vote thing… There’s options
I get what you’re saying with restructuring pie, BUT… (The inevitable but) really… An entire family needing to change race? I honestly can’t think of a time where needing more than 2 race changes would have made all the difference, remember with current discussions everybody in the fam already has 1 “join race change” and one evolution, plus the possible galactic event evolution,
“You don’t give a kid a whole bag of candy and let them decide when they are done, you give them a couple and keep them wanting more”, RandO, ic forums, 2019.
That’s a good way to put it. On the farthest extreme, allowing unlimited race changes would make races themselves pointless. We clearly don’t want that, not as a default anyway.
A benefit of not allowing family evolution (let’s call it), is that it would give players a tough choice to make between maximizing econ vs having “insurance” against player losses. Then again, the same can also be true if we do allow family evolution, as we would give players an opportunity to capitalize on a player loss by stacking 2 evolutions to be used within a specific pacing.
I think we’re just going to have to test it. It’s such a drastic change to what players can do that we can’t really know the impact of either scenario until we try it.
What I’ll do then, is split off family evolution as a sub-feature that can also be enabled/disabled as a galaxy setting. That way we can try it one way, get some real use scenarios to evaluate, and adjust if necessary without having to wait for additional code changes.
The Buttclincher: 
Then again, the same can also be true if we do allow family evolution, as we would give players an opportunity to capitalize on a player loss by stacking 2 evolutions to be used within a specific pacing.
