I dreamed up this idea today at work.

But sometimes in a round it can be a bit upsetting to see a HUGE family "Farm" and smaller inexperienced family to death AND scare away new players from the game.   

For experienced players they will know there are various ways to attack smaller families and in recent months we have even seen bugs that have been exploited to attack even smaller families, last StarBurst round there was a lot of talk of how certain families grew big using such bugs and by farming the small families in general.

So my idea goes like this..........

Each family in diplomacy page has a new (1 off use) option which is:

Send SOS / Send Emergency Distress Broadcast

That option would only become available if they got hit BIG!!!!!

Say if they got 70% of their planets farmed (or some secret percentage) then the option to send out a last ditch emergency broadcast was given.

Once sent it could have a number of effects (to be decided)

But something along the lines of:

- Any one chosen family can send them aid for 5 ticks

- Any family in the galaxy can send them aid for 1 or 2 ticks

One of them or something similar.

Sure some families would laugh and ignore the poor dying farmed family, perhaps another family would feel sorry for them and would send all they could.

I guess even the amount could be capped if needed.

Fun Side: 

I do think this could add a lot more fun for the smaller families and farmed unlucky families and into the round itself.    Sure the powerful all mighty family rain down hell on the small defenseless family, they slaughter them into the ground and invade all of their core.

When suddenly that small family get enough aid in one go to jump one big attacker for one last final attempt to save their family.   Sure in most cases they would jump big and 2 or 3 experienced attackers from the other family would take them down, in some cases however that 1 player could just go MENTAL and end up hammering back that family and breaking their portals and so on.

I feel in our darkest hour this would give such a family some hope.

Would give them one last chance to survive.   

I do not think that would be a bad thing.