[MaverickPH]

My qualm is : what is defined as a support planet ? I mean how do you know if a planet is doing it's best but its ships keep getting stolen, or if it's a ship farm ? same with roids. You must first design strict rules as to what a support planet is so when it comes to deletion time you can say "it's explicitly in the EULA".

An immediate suggestion is : simply stop allowing free accounts. If people are forced to pay for their accounts, it'll start getting very expensive for alliances to muster support planets. Perhaps you could make free planets restricted to playing "two weeks" instead of just restricting what they can do. Should be long enough for people to decide if they like the game enough to pay for it.

Of course : how many members should an alliance be allowed ? This is, frankly, the bigger question. For instance, if 1up or Omen are allowed 100 members, how can smaller alliances like Heroic or Myth ever compete with them !? Especially if you don't allow them to merge. Then again, if you only allow them 50 members, they have to pick-and-choose who to have, and they're restricted in what they can do. They'll start setting up sister/splinter/wing alliances and act as though they were one alliance so it would defeat the point of the limit.

If you allow only 50 members in an alliance, they will obviously be more tempted to secretly organise support planets than if they have 100 members. But then how do you find out who is supporting and who they are supporting ? If all 50 members recruit one real-life friend to sign up a free planet - how on Earth will you detect them all !?

50 members, for example, should be sufficient to show what quality those players are, but then PA has new members joining every day joining training alliances and to compete against 50 combined elite players is impossible.

Quite frankly, it is only the big alliances who are capable of organising support planets. Smaller alliances do not have the time nor members to do so, and prefer to simply recruit planets and do what they can with them. Thus my feeling toward the actual question here is : no, certainly not. It might tip the balance for one alliance or the other, but it's certainly not fair for ALL alliances. It's not a matter of strategy, it's a matter of cheating the number of members - or roids, or ships - the alliance actually has and has actually worked for. "My mate's set up a free planet - go steal it's ships and roids for free" ... they haven't worked for it, they've just exploited the niceness of the PA creators allowing people to try the game for free to artificially increase the alliance and the planet then ends up in the 200 cluster and is forgotten about.

Which brings up another issue - roids. When the top 100 players start becoming out of reach, everybody outside the top 100 can't truly hit them. The problem is : how do we get roids then ?? The top player is holding 5,000 roids, but only started the game with 200 initiated roids, so where have the other roids come from ? He didn't init them you can be sure of that ! He stole them ! From who ? Other players. That's why the 200 cluster is literally PACKED with players, because they started the game, got screwed over, then thought "what's the point" and disappeared. That is why PA maintains the number of players it has and the increase is only slight.

I must say I cannot see a way of avoiding this other than periodically giving out a few roids to random planets, or to those below rank 1000, or something ... or creating "ghost" planets that appear with 100 roids, slowly increase in score/value then when they've been roided as an easy target disappear. Right now the number of roids in PA only increases due to the fact that new players try the game out with a free account, get roided to hell, then disappear - while the top 100 players hold onto thousands of roids and get stupidly large.

My 2-cents (or pennies as I'm British).