Official Alliances

Suggestions Open
1

Official Alliances are coming back, but in a very different form.

Compared to Old Alliances

For those who didn’t experience it, our original alliances were relationships between families, and limited to 2 per family. This lead to Tri-Alliances being common. Unfortunately, this feature has been broken for years.

Instead of fixing it, we are going to replace it with a new version that will allow players to join alliances on a per-empire basis. It will be possible, for example, for you and family member to be part of rival alliances.

This will put form around existing unofficial alliances. It is therefore not so much of a new concept as it is a feature to support existing player behavior.

This is why we are not fixing the old version; it makes more sense to support what players naturally wish to do than to force structure upon them.

More Control

Players will gain more control over how they group themselves, with families being more a reflection of geography than of a default team. So while you will still have family members, they won’t necessarily be your teammates unless you want them to be.

This will also lessen the impact of rogues and inactives, as alliances would be inherently selective over their membership. On other side, rogue empires would be empowered to find assistance elsewhere in the galaxy if their family does not support them.

Part of this is also to encourage alliances to compete over new active empires who join the game. A new player may then find themselves with a few different team options to join, instead of stuck and alone in the bottom family.

A New Focus

Alliances will have their own pages, news, and rankings.

This will provide an additional way to compete, changing what it means to win.

2

Wouldn’t having people in your own family part of another alliance just get a lot of people getting markerked as Rogues and have just shitons of in fam fighting going on?

I totally do not understand.

Example:

Fam - “Fancy Fam”
L - Jim
FA - Jason
LV - Todd

Are all part of the “Shiny Things Alliance”

Fance Fam members:

Lando - Elects not to be in alliance.
Strings - Is in his GF alliance (of just him and her)

And Fancy Fam memebers:

Dumbass
Prolly_Multi

Join the “Beiber Patrol” alliance.

Multi and Dumbass are in a family that just declared War on the Beiber Patrol.

Or Fancy Fam has a nap with “Posse C0ws”

The Bieber Patrol needs Dumbass and Multi to do ops on the “Posse C0ws”

Even m0ar crazy:
It becomes obvious that the BP and ST alliances are heading for a showdown.
All the leaders involved puge the fams of people in the wrong alliances.

Hell, it might become a pre-war ritual.

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3

That’s a great question.

There are some aspects of the family model that will move to alliances, including war declarations.

Another way to think of this is that the Alliances feature is just another name for “dynamic families”, and families as we know them now simply becomes a group of players who share a home system and nothing else.

We may even find that no family leader is needed, as the family unit no longer represents a unified team, with alliance leaders now serving the leadership roles.

In this regard, the in-fam fighting you describe would really just means fights between different players who have nothing to do with each other aside from home geography.

I will likely remove the ability to kill off rogue empires. I had planned to do so anyway, and that feature makes even less sense in this new design.

Ideally, the only purging that will ever happen will be from an alliance removing a member from its ranks.

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4

haha would be interesting

5

@I_like_pie

Isn’t this called “Super Nova”?
Not trying to be a dick, never played there.

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6

Nah, that’s a fair comparison. It is indeed similar in its freedom, though SN lacks any formal team mechanism.

This is like the team-play focus of MW + the flexibility of SN.

At the root of this is the realization that our family system is inherently broken. Inactives and rogues are a byproduct of a flawed design, and all we can ever do is apply workarounds when we should be rethinking our concept of “team” entirely.

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7

Would you be able to send aid to your alliance members, family members, nobody?

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8

OOOOOO
MY
GOD

Couldn’t agree more!

Instead of capping drafts (kills team unity) more drafts.

People who really want to play together - well… really want to play together.
Let them / us.

This doesn’t mean change freaking everything - this is just shoot for 7 man team and 5 drafts.
The people who random will get to play with a team.

Not some cobbled together
3x Players that want to be there there
3x “Dumbass, Prolly_Multi, and Revenge_Boy”.

5x Players that want to be together
2x Randoms that can choose to get on board or fuck off

Sounds like alot more fun, and less stress for everyone.

The “random crowd” can learn from freaking clans, and move on - till they become part of a group - or learn enough to make their own.

It is (imho) round structure that is flawed - not the concept of families.
Respectfully.

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9

Anybody, but with a delay based on portals. This will fold in the existing UA Aid Packages idea.

I see drafts as another workaround to solve a basic flaw. If we have to choose, do we want IC to be a sports simulation or a war simulation?

Drafts solve a problem that shouldn’t exist: if a new player joins the galaxy, anywhere, they should be able to officially declare that their friend is an ally. We shouldn’t need drafts to make team play possible.

Family sizes too: they are arbitrary, as are draft spots. It’s all a bunch of structure that impedes on naturally forming relationships. Even the galaxy cap is something that ideally we would do away with, but that’s another technical can of worms. :grimacing:

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10

I totally get where @Darrk is coming from…this could lead to other problems in terms of you being in a “Fam” where practically half of y’all is on a different alliance and end up being kicked out becuase of it…but the way that your describing it @I_like_pie makes it very interesting and is actually something I think can help with the game by taking it in a new direction And adding a new dynamic…

“Don’t be afraid of change. You may lose something good, but you may gain something better”

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11

I really don’t see the point in these massive overhaul. You are keeping families but calling them alliances, but people could be anywhere on the map and share a home system with people from a rival alliance. Oh look I need to explore 30 ticks away to be safe otherwise my explos will be taken by the local rival alliance

You are giving family powers (make nap, dec war etc…) and giving them to alliances (aka families)

Is there a limit to the number of people you can have in an alliance or could you potentially Have half the galaxy ina single alliance?

And Won’t this just lead to the same groups of people playing together and very similar results as well by not forcing some sort of reshuffle in families every couple of rounds

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12

You think people are going to let Revenge_Boi, Prolly_Multi, or Total_Newguy exists in their neck of the woods at all?

Arbitrary in specific value.
Valid in ratio.

13

That’s reasonable.

This is something that has been under consideration for a long time, and bubbling up recently because of #infinitum in particular. It’s only now on the roadmap, but it’s been part of various discussions for easily a year.

We’ll have to play through it to figure it out. Nobody can answer this right now without it being anything other than speculation. We may find that we need to limit alliance size by % of active players, for example.

Yes, but that’s a bad thing currently largely because other families do not have compelling options to compete, and UA was illegal for far too long.

I think that instead of asking why it’s so bad to let people play with friends, we should ask how can we incentivize groups to bring new empires into their ranks.

Possibly. This is a reasonable assumption but it is still an assumption. We may just as well find that alliances splinter due to the social dynamics. We’ve certainly seen that already through people deleting from families they were previously on good terms with.

Why wouldn’t they? People take chances on new players all the time. IC has long been about activity over skill.

True, but still a ratio that only exists to serve the existing structure regardless of its merits.

That’s a good analogue to the inactive problem. We can spend a ton of work tweaking the inactive-killer script, and we have. However, if we negate the impact that inactives have then we solve the underlying issue.

We’re better served by fixing underlying issues.

14

Why not just give each player their own home system, as opposed to the family home system as has been in place for years? With the size of the existing player base that is not an unrealistic option at all.

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15

We definitely could. The number of empty planets does not have to indicate the family size.

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16

I’m all for this @I_like_pie

17

I feel like the game is in need of some drastic change as it’s been the same since before I left…and when I came back, the exact same. A few new things here and there yeah but everything was the same…

I feel like sometimes stagnancy and lack of innovation can lead to a game’s demise…while on the other hand Major overhauls (which can also lead to a games demise) carry a great risk…you won’t know the feedback until you try…luckily we have a developer that listens to the communities feedback

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18

Smart move. Personally I like meeting new people so I’ve pretty much always random in unless it was for the {pee stoners}. Rip. But I do feel a lot of people like to play with the same group. Which is obv fair enough. I’m in loads of discord channels with friends who game and it’s always the same people playing the same old game

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19

This is nice when you have played a fair few rounds and know enough people to get into an alliance or whatever it will be called, but think of that newbie, first round on his own not knowing what to do - I for one woulnd’t stick around as it is not engaging enough imo

I understand the point of looking to overhaul things, but is families really what is the most broken? and the suggestion is just a rehashed version of the same idea. having an alliance is the same as just giving drafts to families except you could potentially have the disadvantage of being across the map to each other.

Player A wants to play with Player B, in current format they can just draft to the same family and viola.

If my understanding is correct, in the above suggestion, they would dhave to “random” in and then potentially be 40 ticks from each other but be part of the same “alliance” is that really a better option?

20

There we disagree @hoit. I hate the strict core strategy. I love being able to explore all over the galaxy. These alliances will give me the ability to do such that. Instead of one dense core, we’ll have the ability to arrange alliances that will enable us to have clusters of systems scattered throughout the galaxy. In the current gameplay, if you break a family’s core they are pretty much toast. With this new arrangement though that will not be the case necessarily.