[lokken]

One thing people often fail to grasp is that it's difficult to design planetarion unless you've played it at the highest possible level, directing fleets, understanding not just how individual combat works but how fleets change over time as roids change hands and rounds progress in the political sense. Not to mention how alliances generally get weaker as rounds progress. There are many factors to consider and in the past the people running the game and setting the rules haven't grasped this, the support planet rule being one.

As very few people have had this kind of experience, many opinions barely scratch the surface of this. Playing the game is very different from having to understand its every aspect to craft a high quality alliance performance which exploits the metagame and the growth formulae as the round ticks by. The use of moron (while a bad choice of word) is pretty subjective, because even some of the players left are pretty ****ing smart in terms of how they understand the game.

My view is that setting an alliance limit at this stage is a pretty minor issue and the only consideration we need to make is how big would an alliance be before it makes up too big a chunk of the universe on its own to be able to dominate by itself with fairly simple politics. These numbers barely matter, it's players we need, then we can seriously debate issues like this.

As the universe gets bigger, then you think about raising the limit to prevent alliances suffering too much from a scenario where the best alliance can't win because it's too small to fend off opposition. Then you get to a stage where alliance size doesn't matter any more, because alliances collapse under their own weight at the 200-250 point, but that's a long way off.