An empire can now change its family!
When an empire is migrated, they keep everything. All infra, all units, all resources. The only things that actually change are:
- You move to a new home planet in your new family’s home system. Anything on your planet gets transferred.
- Your family number gets changed, obviously.
Specifically worth noting, you will keep any and all existing planets near your original home system. Very interesting!
Screenshots
Personal News View
Departing Family’s News
Arriving Family’s News
Why is this needed?
Proper BoR Family Merging
Prior to this feature, when we would merge families we would actually just delete empires and reserve a spot for them in a different family. They’d have to re-create an empire from scratch, which was a confusing and inefficient user flow.
Now, we can simply migrate empires seamlessly from one family to another, which means we can now very easily merge small families together if BoR joins get imbalanced.
Mid-Round Adjustments
We will do this sparingly, but sometimes it will make sense for us to get tiny and/or inactive families out of a slump.
This Milky Way Round (64) for example, we added spots to every family but hit a bug where closed families were re-opened. This lead to a bunch of families with 8 players and two families with only 1 player.
We can now fix such issues very easily.
Replacing The Rogue Feature (TBD)
The Rogue feature has long been controversial. It’s been tricky to balance a family’s right to deal with problem empires vs players being bullied or killed off for not following a strict family plan.
Now we have the means to support a more amicable split where an empire can simply move to another family. The interface isn’t ready to do this yet, but it does work on the backend which means we can do this by request.
Speaking of the interface, starting out this is only something that staff can control. We’re going to use this feature with a fair amount of caution, as the intent here isn’t to let people bail on families left and right.
Rather, this will let us maintain balance in extreme scenarios without disrupting individual players’ experiences to do so.
See the original idea thread for more ideas for this feature going forward.
For questions and feedback on its existing use, feel free to reply here.
Thanks.