[Althalus]

There was quite a long discussion about this in #planetarion tonight, was actually nearly a whole hour long. (I can get it logged up if anyone is interested)

Some good ideas were thrown about, obviously we had people on each side of the fence, some liking the shrink in size, others not liking it. There was even one or two who think it should be reduced even more (myself included).

The main problem I can see, if the shrink is too big, is alliances splitting into two smaller ones rather than one big one and then NAPing with themselves, the example I gave in the channel was New Dawn splitting into "New" and "Dawn" but this was just because it was the easiest name to remember at the time.

What would be nice is possibly bringing in some sort of official "Junior" alliance wing, so you limit an alliance to something like 50 planets, but they have a "Junior" wing that is smaller (lets say half the size of the main one for now). Now stealing an idea from above of increasing alliance defence to -2 eta, this Junior wing could have -1 eta to their main wing and -2 to themselves, and vise-versa. You could also have it that the main wing could donate resources to the Junior, and that you can promote/demote directly. I would even suggest possibly having some sort of fee system so promotions and demotions are not free, and also have a 72 hour/tick ban from each to try to prevent abuse by kicking someone out of one wing and inviting them into the other one. (72 hours is more likely to prevent abuse than anything shorter, and anything longer could be seen as a problem, especially if you accidently kick the wrong person)

A further suggestion would be that under the alliance page itself the Junior wing is included under the main tag, so like how you click on ships to get the description, you could click on a + next to the alliance and see their Junior wing. Also the score count should be seperate, though my opinion is that there shouldn't be a limit on any size/value/score in either wing, that would let a couple of "better" players be in the lower wing in order to be able to guide and teach the others.

I did also have a half idea of bonuses being given to the main alliance that had the best Junior alliance at the end of the round, though I could see that being abused too so would need to be monitored.

Another semi-idea would be to scrap cluster defence bonus entirely, we're never going to get cluster or parallel alliances back, also rather than -1/-2 on the eta, maybe have it that in-ally defence can be multi-tick, possibly 2 ticks, so a single ally could defend against two waves, this would have the knock on effect that people would have to think more when attacking, and you would never know if that guy who's defending the wave in front of you is going to be there your wave until your wave is at eta 1, two problems I can see with this, 1) people attack every other tick to avoid this, and 2) I do admit that this would be harder to code into the game.

The whole root of this idea is basically to try to reduce the size of alliances but at the same time encourage the use of training wings. Quite a few alliances wont use training wings unless they see it as in their favour (why should they when they can just take the best players from the smaller alliances?) and having training wings would mean that people could be introduced into the game by having a friendly "face" and small community to join straight away. At the moment, if you don't know anyone you're thrown into the mix and are basically left to fend for yourself, makes me wonder sometimes how many people start the game and then quit after being attacked because they didn't know what was happening?

A further "semi-idea" would be that new players are randomly put into the training alliances, or even better, have a "new player" alliance which can defend internally, but also that the "proper" alliances can advertise into/recruit from. So an example would be Player 1 joins PA and is put into "New Player Alliance", then alliances X, Y and Z all advertise into this alliance and Player 1 decides that Y would be the best one, they could then find Y in the list and apply to join their training alliance and give the usual "I would be good for you because", but at the same time apply for Z as a secondary.
You could have helper planets in the "New Player Alliance" handing out hints and tips to the newer players, these helper planets could also be part of the big alliances. I could see that last bit working both ways, it would be a good advert for your alliance having new players come in and seeing that "Oh, Alliance G is very helpful, lets see about applying for their training wing" but also having the big alliances not bother helping out as they don't "see the point".