Small galaxy planet count wise to encourage lots of fighting.
Lots of starting rezzies
0 official NAPS
0 official Alliances
6-7 man families
4 weeks long
0 drafts
0 deletes

No such thing as an illegal alliance.

I believe I've proposed this multiple times in chat, and I thought I'd seen it in here before but Oh wells.  Idea behind this is to see what would happen if say...the bottom 5 families were able to team up against the top fam.  It's a situation that has been illegal for years, and there's a lot more thought going into it than just that scenario but that's the current discussion in #mod so there.

People discuss honor like it's a thing of the past, because it is.  There are a lot of reasons that the sense of Honor is gone from IC... lots of players have left, lack of interest in the game, lack of respect for others, etc. etc. but recently I've thought that the addition of the ingame naps is part of the problem.  No longer do players need to worry about setting up naps because the game takes care of it for you.  At this point if you sign a NAP without signing it ingame (how it was done for yearsssss) you are looked at as an idiot.

Keep away drafts.  I hate drafts, drafts suck, drafts have kept new players from getting into the game for years.  Being able to work with friends that aren't in your family takes away from the need to draft anyway!

Take all that away, take alliances away, take naps away, allow families that aren't generally allowed to work together to work together when the timing seems right...and see what happens. 

People against this idea will say that it will just turn 2-3 top families atop the leader boards like it is every other round...but the difference here, and in my eyes it is a BIG difference...is that if there are 15 families....and there are 2-3 at the top...that's 12-13 families making the active decision to not work together to take them down.  The round would be chaotic, uni news would light up like it hasn't in years, and the conflict would be everywhere.