Ingame Alliance
 

With this feature Alliances can send defence to each other (a tick slower) for the entire round.

While I actually think this is a great feature and I have used it for both gaining defence & giving defence.

I.e I have saved some incommng on VGN from Ultores using this feature. I think this is great


However two allies using it for the entire round such as a Big alliance and their support tag defeats the purpose of it and abuses the system. It just makes a 60 man tag, a 70 or 80 man tag.

I believe it should be limited to 48 hour alliances, 48 off then you can re - ally. something similar to that

Re: Ingame Alliance
 

I think that's too negative; too focused on preventing undesireable actions, rather than on promoting desireable actions.

PA is a strategic game. It would be nice if defense sharing had a strategic factor.

For instance, give alliances a 'share defense' button that enables sending defense to and receiving defense from your ingame allies. It has a duration of 24 ticks and it can be enabled once a week. Each of your allies can use it too, of course, so having 1 ally gives you 48 out of 168 ticks coverage, 2 gives 72. In PA, I think it's unlikely people will have 3 staunch allies-cum-support tags, and the round is decided anyway even if they do. That's half the active universe after all.

If your opponents receive intel of defense sharing, then they can plan their attacks around downtime. If you don't use defense sharing during a window of a week, then you lose it.

Example:
Ultores shares defense with Apprime at tick 167, just in time. It lasts until tick 191. They receive a new share button at tick 168. They hit the button again at tick 191, and that lasts until tick 215. Then they have no share button until tick 336. They forget to use it in time, the share expires at ticks 504, giving them 1 share to use before tick 672. In that time, Apprime could also share with Ultores, of course.

With these numbers, maximal continuous duration of defense sharing between 2 alliances is 24 from alliance A at the tick 143, 24 from alliance B at tick 167, refresh at tick 168, 24 from alliance A at tick 191, 24 from alliance B at tick 215 = 96 ticks, followed by a 121 tick downtime until tick 336 (and a 119 tick downtime before the 4 times defense share).

The nice thing about this idea is that there's a lot of variables that can be used to tweak how strong defense sharing is:
- Sharing is 2-way, outgoing only, or incoming only.
- Duration is 24, 48 or 72 ticks.
- Period is 72, 168 or 336 ticks.
- Enabling sharing defense is or isn't featured on the user feed, optionally with a small delay.
- You have to pick 1 alliance to share with or it always works with all your allies.