This would provide players the ability to keep nw minimal while having unlimited planets.  We'd very quickly see someone doing something like building next to nothing but portals, transports, and ground....and sniping expos.  If we take planets completely out of the equation, we could very well have someone with 1500 planets (again, the value people consider the one that decides the winner) that costs 100% morale to attack.
If size was not related to a player's capabilities (ex: Round 15), our community would not consider it the statistic that decides a winner

1.  Morale is meant to be limiting....
2.  Originally we had NW weighted much heavier in SN but changed it do to complaints.  We can look at this again I guess?

Didn't mean to make fun of you, was just pointing out a fact.  The new morale formula promotes attacking players at or above your nw and planet count

Or by being conservative with growth, finding creative ways to have increased production without massive nw & planet needs, taking into account that the family's overall nw and planet count will effect everyone's morale losses (playing as a pop banker will increase morale losses by 1-4% per attack due to increased nw.  Families must decide if the increased income is worth the morale loss), assigning people to do hard ops (since we adjusted the intel ops to only require 5 morale it's basically the same as 1 op/tick), decide who morale planets are better for (is it better to continue automatically giving them to attackers, or is it worth an opper having double morale allowing you to cpff more portals and need less attacks overall.  This works wonderfully, the round I did it we were able to cut our attacker's morale costs by about 68% by having twice the cpff/sab power.)

I'm definitely biased in this discussion.  Then again, I see that you're still trying to play as a small pax in a big family... no wonder you're bored

We're no where near testing on this (we're at the hey...what if we do this stage) but I'll keep this posted.

Because I like to pretend that IC is going to survive longer than the next 2 months, which requires new players.  Our player base has spent years using new players as farms so that they can win in size, and we're trying to make that more difficult.

I defend this formula because I've played with it in multiple roles, and know factually that it's not the formula causing problems.  I've been the #1 family, I've been in the middle, I've been in the bottom and the only real problem I've seen is when a super active attacker gets into a tiny family and goes ape shit in a top family's core, which is what the core system mechanic is meant to slow up. 

We have less than 100 players now, rewarding mediocrity is the only way to keep this thing going.  If you guys can find a way to stop the top 10-20% of players from chasing away the 1 or 2 new guys we get a round, then by all means step up.  At this point I view giving up on this morale formula the same way as giving up on IC, which isn't something I'm willing to do yet.

Family size and nw is taken into account more than individual, so if you're in a family that's twice the size of anyone in the galaxy that you aren't napped with, it'll cost you more morale to attack or op them. 

This is exactly as intended.

So, again I'm at work and have only had time to glance at these numbers quickly, but a few things.

1.  Supernova was originally put into place to give newer players a place to get the hang of the game without having a leader bashing them over the head with what they "have" to do.  It was never a galaxy aimed to cater to the top players, I believe it was just opened as ftp because there was room and it gave people a chance to play solo.  (correct me if I'm wrong other mods)

2.  The concept of NW factoring into morale loss at all is entirely new to the new system.  It used to be 100% individual size.

3.  As stated, the new system was aimed at leveling the playing field. 

4.  As long as Size is what is considered the winning factor, it will be taken into account for morale.

Round 18
47 players
2 players with less than 10 planets
Avg planet count from 20-30: 210.9
Avg planet count from 1-10: 438.9
% of Mid players to Top players: 48%

Round 15
39 players
2 players with less than 10 planets
Avg planet count from 20-30: 157.7
Avg planet count from 1-10: 469.7
% of Mid players to Top players: 33.5%

Round 11
48 players
12 planets with less than 10 planets
Avg planet count from 20-30: 99.09
Avg planet count from 1-10: 450.8
% of Mid players to Top players: 21.9%

What I'm seeing strictly from these numbers...is an evening of the playing field.  Granted it's difficult to pin down exactly what's going on.  I've been told this round there was an excess of planets (we're working on this, next round we may cut the # of available planets in half), which would also lead to less conflict as exploring is just plain easier than trying to orchestrate an attack.  50 planets in 5 days from a small player is considerably less than the damage that used to be done by farmers
Round 15:
NW: 14    Give me Wings! - LiGhTgUnS (1550) [43,34]    1009    3730441    35483
Size: 1    Give me Wings! - LiGhTgUnS (1550) [43,34]    1009    3730441    35483   
(we all know it wasn't just top players that contributed to that planet count )

Same thing here (it's a 15% hit, not a 30% hit).  If it only targets buildings that players have, we'd have to significantly increase the difficulty.  The misconception here is that nukes are, ever have been, or were ever meant to be reliable.

Also, in regards to epik, I'm 90% sure I've had the convo with devs before and with the way the code works it would be difficult to have the op ping to check what buildings an individual before calculating what is hit, let alone set it so that it bases it's chances of hitting a building off the % of buildings an individual has.  Option A was doable, but any idiot could build 5 of everything on their hp and negate the change.  Option B would be extremely over-powered, and probably wasn't doable.

There have been preliminary talks about semi-targeted nukes, (3 different nukes each targeting 3 potential building types) but we'd have to figure out a way to balance the increased chance out.  Possibly something similar to destroy cash, and have it do 2-7% damage to whatever you hit instead of a flat 15%.

And they'll be in here complaining about how they can't attack anybody when they pnapped their only real competition (barring anything unforeseen) in the first 1/3 of the round

Took me a couple resets to get it set up.

I thought you were using all your super innovative ideas to develop your own game!

I don't remember seeing a thread about a full NW based morale system, but as long as the general consensus is that the highest planet count is what grants a win, I will in no way support the idea.

We're waiting on Devs to check the formula to make sure there's no stray bit that would link these.  To accurately test if the randomness is the same for all those scenarios we would need to do at least a few thousand nukes in each scenario, which we don't have time for. 

Now that I've done a baseline random test, I'm 99% sure what's happening is that people are using nukes hoping to hit a specific building, and when they don't hit it they get upset. 

Once dev's check the formula to make sure it's a closed random algorithm, this is a closed case.

We're in talks again about developing a....more targeted nuking system, but with the system as is you guys need to remember that each nuke only has an 11% chance of hitting any given target   Just like how it's completely possible to send 3000 bombers vs 200 lasers, and still get your fleet blown.