sharing is fun, the same should apply for starting resources they should devide whats in the pot amoungst the people in the fam at tick 1.
This way every fam has a shot at the same growth curve it doesnt matter if your a full fam or not.

morale i see no reason to do so, when the actual level of playing field has been equialized. but explo build slot max per fam would be a good idea.

This is a pretty interesting idea.  A smaller fam would be able to offset an otherwise doomed round with a boosted start.  Each additional player afterward takes a piece of the pie but also contributes potential activity.  If we combine this with an improved way of handling inactives, this could reintroduce some balance into the game.

For example, let's pretend each starting fam has 100k cash.  In LiGhTGuNs' situation, that 9 member family would have each of its players start with about 11k cash.  LiGhTGuNs' family, having 7, would each start with about 14k cash.  Now let's say those 2 players go inactive and get removed from the fam.  The 28kish cash from those 2 players gets redistributed amongst the remaining 5 (this would be a new feature).  Now each player in that fam has 20k cash to start with.

This 5 member fam now has a better shot at competing, and the 9 member fam has to fight harder to maintain their rank.

There are probably some issues with this though.  For instance, what happens when this 5 member family gets a new 6th player after the round starts?  What if the 9 member fam loses a player after the round starts?  This idea balances out the round start but doesn't guarantee balance afterward.  In fact it might actually damage active players during the critical moments before inactive fam members are removed, as some others here have mentioned.

There's something here though.  Being in a small family is way too challenging, and having a fam full of actives is too much of a safe bet.  The game is skewed in a way that punishes players who just happen to be unlucky enough to land in a small family.

I think there are a few ideas that are related to this idea, but I do like this concept of a collective family starting resource pool that is predetermined by the *potential* number of players in a family, rather than the number of actives.  In terms of the game setting, this puts a stronger emphasis on the family system itself and less on individual empires.

Think of it this way: if you land in a family by yourself, you get ALL of the system resources to yourself.  That might be pretty damned exciting, or at least enough benefit to lessen the impact of not having active teammates.

I can see this working well for resources.  For explorations and morale though it's a little more complicated although conceptually similar.

What do you guys think of the hypothetical scenario described above?

sounds retarded, so because i get into a fam with more inactive pos players i get less resources than someone in a fam with 2 less total players.