,Devils advocate moment here.

Once upon a time a 50% rule, NW and Planets was enforced by mods. You were not allowed, without getting blocked, to reduce an empire under 50% for either.

This was argued against by Spam and myself, leaders of the two biggest tri alliances in MW at the time. We aruged a loss of units could exceed 50% of a players NW easily and that there was no way to predict how much infra/pop loss would affect NW.

So they changed it to stop if dropped to under 50% unless the target maintained hostilities. Then they changed it to 50% of planets. I remember screaming on chat to stop attacks on certain enemies because they were down to half their planets.

Farming: Back in the day you had to hit small fams before they hit you, for position, to prevent them from getting in your cores, etc. Even now getting position by secret is critical and few small fams want to give 5 planets for a regular nap (after all they might suddenly grow into the top 10) and to many perm naps kills your round.

No this won't help at all.

But you did get me thinking.

I see some things helping

1) Add a new Dynamic to Empire OB
Make 4 tiers for it, and dramatically increase the cost per tier. This slows the growth of top families and increases the growth of 'victim' families. Thus it increases competition.

2) Increase the effective player base
This is radical but effective. Add two empires for a player to the same family, with 8 players in a family (and 4 VIP/Invites out of that 8.)

This doubles the effective players, allows people to try multiple roles at the same time, gives a small active core some serious flexibility, and at the same time increase the family count by 50%.

3) Make Galaxies more fair.
This is a must have! Even back in the first drafting round I realized position is 50% of your round. Being a tick (or even 4) from another top family usually stunted your growth. Being 30 ticks from anyone with 8 systems inside 2 ticks usually meant a huge advantage.

Make it so every family is a minimum distance from eachother, has a set number of planets 1tick, 2 ticks, 3 ticks, and 4 ticks out.

4) No Expo attacks
I like this a lot. The best farming time is expo and this gives those farms a chance to actually grow unhindered with a definitive time to get defenses.

It also adds that cores won't be guaranteed safe from a hostile fam so planning can occur and this would increase the top wars a bit imho.

However this could be negated by making travel distance at BOR expo phase limited to 6 ticks (0% speed) of an existing planet for that player (slows intrustion ability but does not outright deny spread).

There is my devils advocate and my offered solutions. Haters will be haters but maybe some can see the value I offer on the topic.