what a surprise you agree, Lee

if honour were to come back, you'd have to re-learn the entire game!

When the old written "Code of Honour" no longer worked (basically as soon as the need had arisen to write it down), the next try was to hardcode some rules to support "fair" play and make farming more difficult: morale.

It worked... but differently than expected (as usual in MMPOGs). To circumvent the effect of morale, the answere of the player community was the attacker/banker division. Thus the impact of morale onto the game was huge, the specialization changed IC almost to a different game. Which again made many good old stand alone players leave the game.

So the specialization of the players had mainly 2 origins:
* to circumvent game mechanics which try to discourage farming
* to stay competetive

One easy approach would be to support morale with some other changes to the game mechanics:
* a 25% fee on "send aid"
* a 7.5% tax for each the seller and the buyer (a total of 15%)

Since I am not playing, I am unsure about the exact percentages: they need to hurt.

But the result could be as unpredictable as the introduction of morale. Nowadays those players who remain are used to and like the high specialization. If you take this away, they won't be happy. On the other hand everybody here seems really to wish for a change, any change.

I think it might be.

When everyone was SS, IC had 10k players and used to rank 1 on mmo game ranking lists.
Since the whole banker/attacker specialization and massively team-oriented gameplay began, the game got a lot more complicated and the learning curve became extremely steep. Since then its been on a decline, although I won't say other reasons didn't contribute as well.

I don't mean to say teamwork in itself is a bad thing, but the way IC is played now with constant planet passing, builder strat, etc. it has gone too far. Imo teamwork should be limited to the galaxy map (attacks, wars, positioning strategy, etc should be done as a family), but individuals should manage their empires by themself. Like it used to be.

> [TI] Primo wrote:
> maybe having set banker/attacker/resourcer couples
> or something could be good, but just SS strats
> would sincerely limit the variety of gameplay, imo.

It's a different kind of game, yes. But not a limited one. IMHO even on the contrary: you aren't anylonger a banker or attacker bot fixed to one position for 3 month. What makes 4x games interesting is the difficult choice when and how to invest into the different sectors: exploration, building, research, units.
You have the fun to play the whole game and are not limited to just one aspect.

And it's not the way that everybody is playing lonely and disconnected his or her own game. Families in times of need do get organized. It was actually quite fun and very rewarding. The idea behind taxes and fees for aid and the market is to make high spcialization not the standard but something special in times of need. It's due to IC having had no reworking for quite a long time that no functioning counter measures had been taken to avoid this game killing high specialization with all the problems connected with it.

> anyway, we're skipping a step, i think we should
> define what honour is first (set the code) and
> then afterwards think of ways to achieve it.

I would strongly recommend to just skip the usage of honour.

It's about fun and an atmosphere were people behave responsible to
a) have fun playing a 4x wargame
b) don't overdo the trashing to allow everybody to continue playing (after all 3 month is a long time and the work and heartblood put into your empire quite a lot). So it should be ok to get thoroughly beaten but with an opportunity to get up again.

But any "Code" that needs to be written down, is a failure right from the beginning.

It's a mix of responsible player behaviour and hardcoded game mechanics.

Most of the families of old who have still a reputation and are by now almost a myth, well, they were mostly also good players but what they made special was some role-playing, a theme, a family code of conduct. That in general playing and fun was more important to them than winning... which doesn't mean that they weren't also quite concerned about winning.

Just an example:
Could you imagine Harkonnens paying 100 planets for a NAP? (if anybody still knows those mad maniacs)

Only from the latter remake of it altruist ;-) But even that latter one went for size as primary target.

Was in smaller fams a lot fo times. But we often refused to pay planets for naps.  When we were Iraqi scud missile launchers and only ranked 20 th or lower, we saved up and threw some bombs to the bigger fams.  Back then it was doable to set goals other then winning the round. Like winning a war against a bigger ranked fam. Ending with a certain amount of planets. Even doing a lame eor jump.

Nowadays, you are kinda limited to either win or lose it seems. 20 fams with only 12 members.    There has been an era it was an effort to end in top 100 or even close. 

I hate to admit but i agree with primo on the ranking stuff. It's a bit of a vicious circle, we all yell there are not enough players. Then we discourage smaller, newer players by bashing them. So even less are there next round.

good luck in solving thus ;-)

the game issnt fair from the start, random issnt real randomness.
fams end up full others dont, they lack the starting ress and eship production to compete with other fams from day 1.

some fams have systems nearby to explore 1 tickers in, others dont. some fams home's r so close to another while others have a full sector for themselves.

there alot of things wich arrnt fair from the start.

The problem is not the game but the current community and it is something that is not going to be fixed.  First step to dealing with a problem is to admit you have a problem.  Save yourself the trouble and realize the game had a great run and we were lucky enough to play it when it was good.