Imbalance between large and small families

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I don’t really have any instant fix or plan, but I have been many times on both sides and have tried different approaches to keep things even. Now I am taking a beating in a small fam, but I would not want to see secession or divide my fam.

Both secession and assimilation by surprise are not fair. Such actions should be planned pre-round, even though exact details wouldn’t be shared with players, so they cannot try to avoid circumstances when features are triggered or to try to trigger them when it suits them.

Secession is not a fix. If small fam explores newly explorable planets and big fams are allowed to attack those, they will not be able to keep them. Big fams take them back. If big fams hit the planet amount roof and are not allowed to gain any planets, without losing some automatically, their round is over. I would just claim moral victory and wait for next round.

Assimilation is not nice either if the small losing fam is divided to different families. IC is social game and if you find someone who is good company in chat and you play well together, you don’t want to suddenly just turn your fleet against your friend. Also, I would not want to play with some big fam bully, who has farmed my fams planets half the round.

Assimilation in a form of vassalage/alliance could work better than dividing families. Smallest fams rarely have bad blood between them. Usually they even have had very nice war between themselves. When they are getting too small to compete with bigger fams, they could be allowed to form an alliance. Another option would be that when bigger fam defeats smaller fam, instead of just taking hundred planets by mass attacking and 50 more for NAP, they could either take smaller fam as a vassal. That being like alliance, but bigger fam calls the shot for both families. Another option is that bigger assimilates smaller fam. If these options need both fams acceptance (leader option or even majority vote in fam), it could keep fighting more civilized. Of course there should be certain restrictions for circumstances when these options come available to keep everything fair for bigger fams and exact details need not be known. Assimilation/vassalage should not make the combo biggest fam, but just a contender.

Another way to make staying big harder is to boost big empires’ costs and include some penalty to units also, not only for buildings. Portal prices could also be much higher with bigger planet amounts, so planet fat banker/ressie just could not portal all planets and have droid army keep them all save.

There could be a penalty to opp defense also. Bigger empire/fam is more loose society and easier to infiltrate for intell operatives. Opps are usually small fams only weapon, so why not make it more powerful?

When we have implemented pre-round activity checks and families have less inactives from the SOR, we could also try to have more and smaller families. 4-5 players? For a long time there has been around 8-10 spots per family. Winning families have had most active players, losers have had one or two actives and few semi-active. With 4-5 spots and pre-round checks activity could even out a bit.

I also like the idea of scrapping the main fleet concept of defending portalled planets. Portals could be only instant means of transportation and fleet would be divided to planets as stationary forces. Before attacking and sending fleet to attack enemy, it should be gathered to one portal first and then sent. There could be even a spell and opp to gather intelligence of approximate fleet movements and strengths to anticipate enemy actions a bit. But well, that could be a concept for some HC micromanagement galaxy.

One option to make things different, would be to change portals from instant travel to huge speed bonus between two portals and maybe even make traveling slower. Exploration and fighting would be more local. If it would take 200 ticks to travel from one side to other side of galaxy without portal in between and 20 with portal, families would not be spread out or at least would be more vulnerable if they spread around too much. Their fleet would be thinly spread too and it would be slow to move them to hot spot from another.

Just throwing some ideas out there. Some a bit radical…

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I wouldn’t say radical. Different sure, but we need different to solve our issues.

These are enough to warrant their own thread(s) though, as they require more work than is doable within the round in question, whereas the original secession/assimilation ideas are already doable.

These are some good insights, thanks!

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I still think a tax system would be the best option… turn those bottom fams into welfare queens

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this was my suggestion also, but i dont think it is good for the bottom fams to get sth for free. i think a hard taxation (i.e if u make 50% of the universes gc, iron etc u earn 50% less due to tax) would be enough to balance the game. something for free is communist stuff :stuck_out_tongue:

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yea but only active players would use it… most bottom fams are bottom because of inactivity… at least the two or three players hanging on can defend themselves.

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pickle u should take my side lol. reasonable taxation is easy to do, redistribution is difficult and why should there be free stuff??? u are always in a good fam bec u r an activ and good leader, why others should benefit from that

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So even if you are in a small shitty fam with no friends, there is still a reason to play and compete… once the small fam starts catching up in NW, the welfare received would also drop.

I think you could set up the taxes in a way that the smaller fams receives a certain % of a much larger fams income.

Say if you are 300% larger than fam x they would receive x%
200% larger and fam x receives a lower % and on and on until the NW gap is closed and no more welfare is received.

Just get rid of bureaucracy and decay, and you will hardly notice it… unless you are in a small fam of course.

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so i save up for a big EOR war with you, fall behind in NW and get funds from you? great great!!!

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that would be almost impossible to pull off … dropping 300% below my nw just to receive 15% or so of my income will not help you :smiley:

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Only fix is proper alliances again and a morale cap on hitting small fams

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Treat it like the NHL draft or trade system.
Mid round be able to trade players to another team.
Or
Merge all small familys into one family with a 72hr protection on them

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An idea that would keep some competition in the lower rank families.

I’m in 6152 atm, and so we have not much of a chance anymore. I think we had a late start… Well I am one of the late starters so… And even then have seen some of our players go inactive.

For me I don’t need to battle for the top fam places, but it is a little demoralising having 3-4 fams trying to farm you. We just moved up a place in ranking and it feels great, although we don’t have any chance of getting in to the top I do realise.

What about having a protection rule on smaller families. Once there is a certain % of difference in nw/size/points (I would say nw) that family can’t attack the smaller family unless the smaller family attacks them (or something like that)

For me it would keep the competition in the lower ranks going without feeling discouraged about the bigger fams farming you. You need to show your skill even in the lower ranks to decide spot. The bigger fams would be forced to fight it out even more, as it won’t be about skill of farming the lower fams…

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if ppl could vote on this, we can get attacking fixed:

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Just the planets, so as to make war more likely. How likely it is for a fam that dominates entire systems to lose them entirely?

Or if systems were half the size, but twice the number?

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yes faming is what is making a smaller family going inactiv bec we just cannot get up. but ofc there cannot be a total protection rule bec bigger fams need to protect their systems also against intruders

but maybe there could be a rule that if a family takes a certain % of another familys planets over a certain time without declaring war (=farming) then this automatically leads to an ressistance/partisan war where the victim gets a (i.e. 100%) bonus for opps/spells for (i.e. 72h) a certain time. then the smaller family could retailiate aginst the bigger familys economy and maybe that would make bigger families think before mass farming all round?

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As i suggested in the hardcore map feature, i think if we would limit the Map information this would also change the dynamic of the game.

Imagine a 6 family galaxy, that #1 family dominating, would have to do 6 fam yama ops a day or monitor enemy attackers by finding their plist to keep track of whats going on around them. This would direct benefit the smaller fams, alowing them explore more freely and alow them secure area since they would most likely focus on smaller area than the #1 fam. basicly with a hidden map, its easier being the small fam but ALOT harder being the big one. This should indirect help even out the imbalance.

So please help with votes:

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I know whining is not that constructive, but this thread is under feedback and I think @I_like_pie should know what ppl think about IC. Maybe there is some constructive ideas in between there also.

After I got the mail about new ownership of IC and new features, I was ready to give IC another chance. I hoped things have changed. Did not take long until IC proved to be same old. Just because the players are the same and the game itself has not changed enough to prevent bullying.

Yet again I found myself to be the main attacker of a small fam which had a bad start because inactives. And yet again I had good time with my fam members who supported me all they could, but we all knew we were fighting a losing battle.

Farming was the same and nobody would give us any NAPs after fighting. Just CF, so they could farm us more later. #6153 was generous enough to offer us a NAP if we pay 30 planets. We agreed, offered 30 and they just never took them, because they lost a war and needed to start taking planets from us. I think that is quite low move from top fam vs smaller fam. Now they are even opping our bankers to keep us on the floor, so they can kick us more.

This is the attitude:
"T-722
Leadername of Empirename (#6153)

Just grabbing w.e planets we can before your family is assimilated into other families like 51 was"

I have been back in IC and I already have found 3 players, whom with I would not play. Several more who have been in grey area. Anonymity here makes me sick too, because it is important for me to know who these guys are in the future, so I can at least avoid them. Anonymity protects bullies.

For those ideas: lose anonymity, let us see who were who in past rounds. Also, let smaller fam force a NAP onto bigger fam at some point. Maybe make some formula that calculates lost planets from smaller to bigger fam (net amount) in specific time frame and the bigger the size difference between families, earlier the forced NAP would be available to small fam leader.

Only thing keeping me here now is loyalty to my fam and a hope that I could be in a big fam next round and be in a position to persuade my fam to play fair game. Don´t take that as a promise not to attack smaller fams or empires. I will fight as usual, but I would give NAPs instead of CFs and I would not try to win at all costs. Honorable second or third place finish would be better than winning without honor for me.

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I fully understand where your coming from but plz if showing mail from me show our whole convo so it dont look like I’m being a dick haha you new and know I wasnt aware of the opps on use lol.
Also I know drones quite well did not see his mail till today and have mailed him about it. There is more to play then what you are aware of and mistakes have happened.
Anyways that being said I agree fully that bottom fams have been hit to hard all round. This is why i handed out naps to all small fams,your familys nap had bad timing and mishaps happened.
We are only so big in nwth tho do to fleet. Once we lose the fleet we wont be much bigger then use. That’s not an excuse tho and I want to nap use and waiting on the chat.

If @I_like_pie is doing the assimilation I think the delay in it is just hurting smaller players more and needs to be fully done right away this is the only way to fix this for bottom fams

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Thanks for the perspective @Zanharim. If nothing else, I hope you realize that we hold player feedback to be of extreme importance. I can confidently say that IC is in no way “same old” in that regard.

As for your points themselves, I whole heartedly agree. We should not mistake toxicity as difficulty, which is one of IC’s worst faults.

This is possibly one of the biggest problems we have. Allowing players to “go undercover” shields them from the consequences of their actions.

This isn’t directly related to size imbalance though, so I’ve opened a thread here so we can discuss it further and with more focus.

Your other points all reflect a basic core problem with IC’s design in that once people get big, they don’t have to really work to sustain it.

Yes, there have to be winners and losers in any game, but losing shouldn’t be such a negative experience that it drives people away. To the contrary, losing should make players feel like they want to try again. There are a lot of ideas within this thread that are great starting points to help us achieve that.

I’m glad that your loyalty to your family is keeping you here, but if that’s the only thing keeping you here, then it’s worth considering the value of this discussion itself. Every player here has the ability to help shape the direction of game, and that’s not something that every game out there offers.

I’m not sure exactly when you left IC originally, but to many players (including me) who endured our years-long dark ages of our previous inactive owner, the mere fact that we care enough to ask players what they want is worth sticking around for.

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very easy: dont have 3 months rounds, or have another galaxy (not a customs one), where people can start over. this automatically would also trigger “survival of the fittest” bec unsuccsessful players would leave the galaxy for the new one.

also i have got many new players this round who logged in once, for sure they see no reason to stay for 2 months after explo phase is over and they cant get any planets, what a waste of players, no?

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