Its worth a testing, but in a spezial gal, not as a general rule.

Aktually, I rekall the importanze of kustom gals, like in the old days, but added the ability to kreate spezial rules.
Just imagine the possibilities of players kreating gals and kalling friends to play them, that would inkrease the player base for real.

It would turn the game into just banking and saving.

yes, skill and activity will manage to get you somewhere against lazy big attackers, but my thought was to segregate the sizes so you get to fight against similar sized opponents, or at least don't have your round ruined by a big fam that comes a farming when you don't have several active skilled players.

It is possible it will just turn it more into imperial savings and loan for the top 2-5, but hopefully it might make it more interesting for 5-10 ish which may make it better all round, or help to retain players

^This is already happening, the best wars and round-time are played in the midranked families, while the big ones get big eko and then jump over weakened families that just ended a war in the midtable ranks and got into their range.

As I said, your idea is worth a testing on a separated gal, neither you or hk4e or me are future-tellers, kannot guess how this will turn out, so a testing is needed.  hk4e you are looking only at what will happen with top fams on this setup, but dont forget the rule is for all the families, so the bottom fam kannot be attaked, they kan get shares with top fams and grow slowly, fighting the fams ranked right above them, until they're in position of hitting the top fams.

If we gonna guess, and future-tell, then I'd say for this setup NAPs are pointless, what do you think?

Not all top families infra whore.  And people don't delete to get into top families for fun, they do it because they have low self esteem and think winning in a text based game is going to make them feel better or to play with people they know.

It isn't going to spread out talent because the few decent players will just draft together.

This idea is absolutely horrible and unneccesary.  It's the mindset that people have of "if you are not first, you are last" that comes with lack of competition that would not change with this either that causes the problems.  If a family wants to be smart, they can defend against the much larger families well enough.  Last round, We had multiple top 4 families "suicide" on us before fights even became enough to call them a war claiming that they were just going to make sure that Thor's family won and we lost which was never going to happen of course.  These were ALL families that more savings than us at times and a fighting chance to defend themselves and first reaction to a few planets lost was kamikaze.

So the idea that this would give hope to middle ranked families and change things is absurd.  Top families are top families due to their activity and coordination.  Punishing your communities most active and dedicated players to help those that log in once a day is not the answer.  You haven't played and finished a round in 8 years, You_fool, you don't know what is going on at all.