a fwew comments,

"have their resources placed into a family bank"
we get a fambank system finally?

" The buildings and population remain intact."
So i jump my popper, i tell him to go inactive for a fwew days so he gets removed, we pass all planets inclusive pop to our allready fat popper (wich we cant jump annymore cuz its just to expensive) then the 'inactive' drafts back in the fam starting over getting high con fast we feed him planets jump him to 700% and wait.

i see abuse, some might call it tactics, but this wil only realy benifit the organised fams, poppers on draft/vip spots and it ka-ching for noir (although his problem is the food production required ) but we do need to work this out.

you want more competition right? that is what your suggesting this idea.
if you want to balance the fams from inactives, u should have all starting ress in the bank. if a person joins the fam he gets his part. but if his spot remains empty the starting ress should be accesable by the fambanks holder (leader/vice) this way u ensure them having the same chance in contending as anny other full fam. the same should apply to exploration ships, if a person is slacking on building them, the fambank should be allowed to build those for the fam (it wont have con functions though so they stay 10k) , and u can hand them out to whomever. (or use a avarage exploration cost price for the fam), if u feel the handing out of explos to the smallest sized person would benifit the fam to much) cuz people could deliberatly not build them so they can always let the smallest sized person explore for the fam to drop costs)

I only read the first line of ur post pie.....but sounds AMAZING

sounds promising, keeping infra is a good idea, but i would kill pop off like we do now. (althought it makes little sence to kill of millions from a friendly nation ) but it would fit how ic-attacking works allready, then theirs little abuse left to profit from

its happened before that a person deletes, or goes inactive with alot of the fams resources (current fam bank system, or their own production) it going to bank would solved alot of fams problems regarding people who turn inactive.

"Auto-removal is good idea....but tell me more how this would work...would we set player inactive and remove him/her off the family immediately???"

I see it all based on time and not having to actually set the player as inactive.  There would be a warning system involved before the actual deletion of the empire so players can get a planet list.  After x amount of hours the player is then removed permanently.  So instead of the leader saying "Hmmm this guy hasn't logged on in awhile.  I'm gonna set him as inactive." it all happens on its own.  It'd be more like something in family news:

Week X, Year Y:  In the interest of fairness, the Galactic Overseers have issued our family notice of  [Some Empire Name]'s coming dissolution.  If they do not make an appearance in the next 48 weeks, their empire will be dissolved.

At which point everybody else in the family can either try to contact that person, or start taking their planets.  Before the player is deleted for good, the resources get sent to the fam bank.

"I want to point out one serious problem: illegal randoming"

This is definitely a big problem.  Unfortunately, if a player joins a family and just sits because they don't like it, we don't have a way of knowing if he is actually inactive or is just waiting to get booted.  I guess an option is to allow families the ability to dissolve empires whenever they want by way of vote.  That might not be a bad solution.

Maybe it is time we experiment with it and see what happen, get the feedback from IC community on how they feel about it. I don't think it's bad idea. :-D

naps r made to fam numbers, not players.

vote him off the island

It adds an interesting spin to NAPs and would enforce a sort of honour code by virtue of the fact that if you were an asshole to a family they may end up being your family members!

> lamb wrote:

> well with naps, it would make sense that the bigger family's naps would stay in tact.. and the naps that the smaller fam had would just delete along with the family

Well at least someone started thinking down the right track.

Think of the repurcussions of this
Think of map and where the planets of smaller inactive family will be
Think of map and where the planets of smalelr inactive family's NAPed families(could be rank 1 family or last rank family) will be

You can't just dissolve naps it could be unfair and destructive to the extent of round-ending to one of the families involved.
You can't just add NAPs that the smaller fam had to the bigger fam's nap list either as that poses other issues.

Like I said, NAPs will be a mess.

Are you honestly trying to argue "it's too hard on the big family" if the small families NAPs are disolved upon the merger of the families? The merger of the smaller families with the removal of their NAPs and them maintaining their spread will lead to some very interesting tactical decisions and the possibility that smaller families can still gain a hell of a lot of pleasure out of the round.

Whats so difficult to understand...

example scenario:
Rank 1 family attacks rank 10 family early in round and makes a pnap at the end of the skirmish
Rank 1 family proceeds to explore all around rank 10 family's core as it is a safe zone for them for rest of the round

one month later
Rank 10 family merges with rank 3 family
Rank 10 family's pnap with rank 1 family is dissolved
Rank 10 family members are all over shared systems with bankers of rank 1 family
Rank 10 family attackers suddenly have access to huge eco of rank 3 family
Result: rank 1 family gets whooped, loses 100s of banker infra planets out of nowhere and loses their lead which they had worked hard for all round long.

This is just one scenario out of many such possibilities.

On another note: Theres already too few families for certain facets of the game to work properly (like market and map positions). Merging will reduce the number of families further thereby making it worse.

Gwynedd, I don't know whether you are arguing for the sake of argument or you actually have no clue about the mechanics and way of playing in top fams. Either way I'm not going to further this argument. Those capable of seeing my point will do so and I can just hope the IC team don't implement a major feature such as this without thinking through all the possible flaws and exploits that come along with it.