Thanks everybody, I’ve had some time to read everything here and wanna hit a few points. Incoming wall of text! 
I think this would be offset by the large banker targets in smaller families being able to redistribute their own planets amongst their new family’s attackers. Your original concern here was specifically:
As an attacker, I have no chance to defend him. Closest planets are 17 ticks away.
This would solve exactly that. On the other hand, big families who get a new small attacker don’t receive any gain that they don’t already see in the first place. They already have portals via the new attacker anyway.
Imo this would only be a defensive gain.
This is something I regret; we announced this as a favor so the small fam could say their goodbyes, but the reaction was really aggressive. In hindsight this makes sense, and I think in the future we will not actually announce it at all to other families; we would only warn the target family via an in-game notice that they are at risk.
By doing that, we could even make the assimilation threshold a hidden setting that players don’t actually know, so they can’t watch target fams and try to game their potential gains by planning against specific growth disparities. In this case, everybody having too much knowledge ended up being a problem.
I like this idea in some aspects, especially that it would mean the small fams get to stay with each other. The main downside I see is that 2 smallest fams could end up with twice as many players as the top fam, which might be unfairly penalizing the top fam for doing well.
Still, it’d be interesting to see the results of something like that.
I actually don’t see this as a bad thing in future rounds. Consider that if we all knew going into a round that assimilation will happen, the smaller fams could be targeted much faster and moved into a larger team earlier.
If the target family wasn’t going to win anyway, at least they can move into a new role with a new purpose as soon as possible. This round in particular is painful because this feature was announced mid-round, but if this was an expected risk going into the round start, I think what you describe might actually be a good thing.
Those who lose fastest get reborn earliest.
Yeah, I think our attempt to force fairness backfired. In retrospect, a random distribution may have been better. Some people would potentially be even worse off than they are now, but at least it wouldn’t be consistently problematic for bankers/ressies.
The problem this reveals is that we don’t have an objective way to quantify a player’s worth. Neither networth nor planet count actually say much about any sense of skill or activity; they only mean something in the context of the team, and it’s hard to automate decisions around something so nebulous.
Something we could try is to implement a mid-round draft system, as in a traditional sports draft. When a family hits the threshold for assimilation, their empires can be frozen and protected while the other families get to pick their new empires, with the first choice going to the next bottom family.
That’s a bit more complex of a feature, but would very well shift the decision of who goes where to the actual players who understand the value of their potential new members far more than the game’s automation ever could.
I’m not convinced that this is actually the problem. I see the details around this as symptoms of related things that need fixing, but the distribution of presence amongst the remaining families is part of what makes this idea worthwhile, we just haven’t gotten it right yet.
“Challenge” is indeed a better word; having to decide how to handle the shakeup with new competitors who were formally allies should be seen as an opportunity to explore the game’s depth. We just need to make it more fair than it currently is.
This is a good point; a complication right now is that #6150 has pretty clearly won the round already. Their lead wasn’t as dramatic before the assimilation, but now that it is, “what’s the point” is a valid question. The whole idea was to give the bottom players renewed life and purpose in the other families, but if the win is secured already then they’ll just land in a new family who also sees no point.
The only way around that is to either:
- End the round early
- Do something very dramatic to give #6150 an actual challenge
For #2, we could make families past an upper threshold ineligible for receiving new empires. So we could in theory start merging families upward together with the hope that the top fam loses their safety. This would be pretty extreme, but could make for a really interesting “everybody vs the top dog” type of EoR rumble.
This could be a good way to equalize the gains. The newly assimilated empires could then be assessed as a fresh empire instead of a potential liability.
The downside is that the most well funded family will likely nab most of the new planets. 
But then, that might already be happening and at least this way the newly assimilated empires would be restarting fresh instead of restarting on a frustrating and hopeless feeling defensive.
Nah, it’s all good. This is a very new thing so we’re going to consider everything very carefully. The relationship with former members is very valuable and we want to encourage people to make their own decisions on how they handle this change.
I was initially hesitant about anything other than an “all or nothing” approach, but my position is changing now that I’ve heard more player feedback. I think a defection approach would work very well.
This and @TIF’s idea about merging bottom fams together would help ease some of this pain.
Phew, that was a lot!
Thanks for your feedback everybody, it really does mean a lot to hear from everybody about this, and your patience (and pain tolerance!) is very much appreciated. The game is going to benefit a lot from this in the long run, even if right now it feels very frustrating. Future empires are indebted to your adaptability!
As for what happens now, I think the biggest factor is #6150’s position to win.
Time for another poll!
What do you want to happen next?
- Do nothing, just let the round go on as normal.
- End the round early, it’s already won.
- Assimilate the next bottom families (distributed randomly) as was originally considered.
- Assimilate or Merge families in some manner to challenge #6150.
0 voters
This is definitely one of our more interesting rounds in awhile, even before the assimilation. Thank you all for your feedback.
