As I have been saying in chat lately, you can't make changes to IC without knowing how to play the game from every aspect and understanding how a typical round progresses.

Anyway, a lot of this stuff has been said by experienced players so this isn't me taking credit for everything posted here, just reiterating.

1. Cut out allies for the time being.

- The IC population is too small for allies anymore and it actually promotes more farming/napping than fighting. Honestly, out of the 800 or so players that play IC right now, there are probably 50 that are any decent at the game. And even less that really know how to do it all in terms of attacking/banking/resourcing/leading/diplomacy. The talent level in IC is spread far too thin to maintain IC this way. We can't even fill a galaxy up let alone get 50% of the fams that do get filled up to be competitive. This is pretty important if we're going to make round interesting.

2. Make adjustments to units.

- Right now, the bomber/fighter/droid/soldier set up doesn't really have much in terms of creativeness for attackers. Anybody who actually knows how to attack in this game knows that when you build a fleet, you pretty much use the same typical set up. You have some players (won't name any names) who go extremely soldier heavy and think that they are doing something good but in the end, the attacker who has the most fighters is going to come out on top. In a cancellation war, you can look at a family's savings and guesstimate what they are going to build because those of us who have been around know the deal. 10bil gc, 50mil iron, 35mil endu usually produces the same results in terms of fleet sizes.

Its pretty much long overdue for new units. I mean, seriously. I'm not going to speculate on specifics, but a 3rd ground unit and a 2nd offensive air unit should be taken into consideration. Another problem is the battle order. Lasers right now are kind of a non-factor in IC. In early round, lasers are killer. But mid-eor they don't matter anymore. And the problem is that most fams sign early naps so there's not much need for lasers for a bigger fam early on. I've banked/resourced in fams for the past few rounds and have not built a single laser. There are many other players who don't do it either. Why? Because they don't matter much. Lasers hit bombers, they hit transports but they don't hit fighters. This needs to change.

Bankers don't have much protection as it is. And for smaller fams its worse. Attackers should lose fighters from laser fire just as they would lose any other unit. Obviously not as much as bombers, but a % at least to make it so that banker raids and farming isn't so easy. It would also change the dynamic of fighter running. Also, take into consideration to lower the cost of fighters by 1-2 iron. A big problem with people not wanting to play the attacker role is because they can't afford fleet. So its almost not much use for a fam to have 4 or 5 attackers because two of them don't get anything to play with. Activity is an issue as well but you're not going to promote activity if the family can't afford to build attackers.

3. Drastically reduce farming

- Implement a family pmode option. This would take some thinking about but families as it stand, don't really have much of a chance to grow. The biggest problem with competition in IC is that there's nobody to attack once you hit a certain stage in the round. If you're in a less active fam or a fam that didn't get off to a great start in IC, you will find yourself being doubled in NW and size by the 5th-7th day of the round. Once that happens, its nearly impossible to catch up because you're going to get farmed. The best part of IC is a war. Not just a war but a war with an equal fam. If a family with 1500 planets wants to compete, they will often attack the fam with 900 planets and less nw. Why make it so that they can take 350 planets off them? Have it so that the fam goes into pmode for 72 hours or so if they lose 20% of their planets or so within a certain time frame. Particularly if war is declared. I'm not 100% sure what the best way is to approach this but there is no honor code in IC anymore. That went out the window years ago when certain rules and regulations were set up. The honor code was enforced by the community. That's not possible anymore with IA rules. So if there's going to be any way of reducing farming, it'll have to be up to the mods and the developers to take a more aggressive approach to things.

4. Change the dynamic of research

- As it stands, you have Economy - Military - Population - Construction - Resource as the research fields. I suggested adding a resource research years ago and that worked out great but why not take it a step further? One of the benefits of drafting mid to late round is that your fam is already established and you can pretty much draft in an attacker or otherwise, get him expo ships, send him 10mil to drop into construction, have him build trannies to take planets and boom, you have yourself a productive player overnight. This helps the larger fams but the smaller fams who are trying to get into the groove of things don't really have the ability to keep up with the more active fams. So change the set up of research to this:

I don't recall the research formula off the top of my head but just eliminate the use of gc to fund research altogether and make it so that research centers play more of a factor into infrastructure. You can have it so that you get X amount of research points every tick, like morale, and it caps out at a certain amount each day. This will allow players who play certain roles to be a lot more set in how they want to develop their empire and prevent the larger fams from getting a large advantage with their bankers. Obviously to use the points you'd have to be active so this doesn't take away the benefit of that, but it evens the playing field a lot more in that sense. It also changes up the dynamic of players switching from cf to pop and it adds a new wrinkle to start of round infrastructure.

5. Increase the amount of endurium at start of round

- With so few people in IC and even less activity, it would be nice to speed up start of round and allow the families who don't fill up their families with active people to get a decent chance at developing their family infra. In a round set up with families of 12 players, only about 7 of them will be on at the start in the average top fam. And the smaller fams will get lucky if they have 3 or 4. So getting players fully built takes a day or two longer than it would for the larger fams. It also hurts that the bigger fams can afford to place endurium bids, thus locking out the smaller fams. Its just not very sensible to leave it as is.

6. Remove score

- Cause really? lol

7. Change the op/race system

- Octarine Hurricane was a great step in improving the dynamics of IC but its like everyone just settled on that and left it alone. Warcry is a nice addition to things but being that Wardancers isn't really a great race still, its not gonna get rave reviews. The thing about IC is that each race is supposed to have its own identity. Its bread and butter. Quantum heavy researchers. Wardancers is the lovable attacker race that can never really get right. Camaar is the hc attacker race. Revalons the cash machine. Pax are the harry potters of the universe. But in reality, Camaar isn't all that popular, Revalons is a horrible banker race and Wardancers are just bad. Its about time that some additions were made. I feel like you can get just about everything in a custom race that you can get in a standard race. You might lose camaar speed or octarine hurricane but otherwise, you get all that you need in a custom/attacker banker race. Each standard race needs its own race specific op.

Pax = Octarine Hurricane. You pretty much NEED a pax in every fam because of this op.

Quantum = Something agent specific I'd imagine. Nuclear Winter - op that reduces resource production by x % for x amount of ticks. That's just off the top of my head since the paxes reduce cf income.

Revalons = Revelation - self spell that increases pop growth by .10% for x ticks. Stackable 5 times and can only be used 5 times in a 24 hour period.

Once again, just something off the top of my head.

Camaar = Battle sense - Self spell that detects enemy fleets approaching "portals" a tick before arrival for x amount of ticks. Not stackable.

Yeah you guessed it, off the top of my head. Infils show ticks landing at the tick. This would give you a 1 tick notice on portalled planets.

Wardancer = Warcry. Yeah, its a good idea that just needs some fine tuning. (note this log)

[20:43] <&Torqez> Actually..
[20:43] <&Torqez> the reduction doesn't really matter 'that' much right now ...i suppose it should be greater than 20%? ..no?
[20:44] <&Torqez> cos like ....can't u just recast it and bring u back up?
[20:48] <&Torqez> Personally, I'd prefer more of a burst type thing
[20:48] <&Torqez> eg...
[20:49] <&Torqez> Cast = +30% morale .....then when expires, u lose like 40%
[20:49] <&Torqez> cos its not often u need consistently more morale ....its more useeful to have a burst of morale, w hen neeeded
[20:49] <&Torqez> eg mass clearing, or raiding, etc

[20:49] <&Torqez> who cares while im sleeping that it goes negative <------- THIS

[20:49] <@Genesis> it's a tiny little burst
[20:49] <&Torqez> Constant +morale is only good for those 24/7 attackers
[20:50] <@Genesis> 130% morale at the start of a war isnt bad
[20:50] <&Torqez> Ya, was just giving an example of losing more than gaining ...but making the gain something more substantial
[20:50] <&Torqez> just my opinion tho!

Anyway those are just my thoughts on the races and the ops. They don't provide significant advantages but enough so that you would have to consider taking certain preset races in fams.

8. Add VIP features

- VIP's aren't all that needed so much anymore because of the reduction of draft spots and the overall competition level of the game. Advertising requires money. VIP's = money. Give VIP's a reason to be VIP's because some of the options that VIP's had are gone. Like Draco, the VIP tag in forums, being an exclusive person with a signature/forum pic. Its just a yama and draft thing nowadays.

I'd consider:

- Giving VIP's the option to check draft spots in a family (as a former mod I realize this might not be possible but maybe?)
- Allow VIP's to receive emails when families declare war

I don't know to be honest. But VIP's deserve more than what stefan has allowed for them to receive. These forums are pretty shitty and draco is just not possible anymore because this game wasn't kept up and text based games are dying/died out.