For purposes of clarity, I'll respond to your comments in reverse order.
also: and if your teams arent locked then, even assuming you could get profit sharing to work, it just musses the whole game theory aspect right up because the dominant strategy every single game would be to try and ally with the biggest and best team. there would be no shaky alliances (navigating shaky alliances being an important part of the game already). there would be no suspicion between players except on the level of wondering where the biggest alliances were which isnt really a big deal since Diplomacy keeps track of player relations to each other and this knowledge is available to everyone. thered be no possibility of disallying because why would anyone want to lose their access to a huge pool of resources? what would the incentive be to disally? not only might you be outmatched numbers wise but income wise youd have a huge comparison deficit to make up for and you really couldnt unless you were rommel reborn or something and even then youre basically fighting a defensive battle the whole time which is fairly reliant on attrition and youre gauranteed to lose that because theres no way you could catch up to something that is economically so much more massive than you
This feature was mainly suggested for locked team games, which is the only type of game my friends and I enjoy playing. I personally feel that the Diplomacy expansion has very little benefit for locked team games at the moment. Yes, the envoy abilities & pacts are nice for miscellaneous bonuses, but I'm not going to be able to convince my friends to buy Diplomacy for those alone. Shared Income is a feature we've always wanted, and would add a lot to our overall enjoyment of locked team games.
why should it even be an option? how would you even incorporate resource sharing? why would you want to be worried about how your teammates would spend your resources? even if you were locked teams it makes no sense that you should recieve shared income because that means youd either A} be sharing expenses and/or B} really only needing one person watching development and economy and general admin which makes no sense, especially if there is more than one fleet and more than race. youd have to completely change how the game is played and designed.
I said "Shared Income", not "Shared Resources". In this mode, you would only share *raw* income. Your actual pool of available resources would NOT be shared with your allies. The raw income from all taxes and extractors would just be divided evenly between the team. Adding a Shared Income feature would NOT require any major dynamic change or rebalancing of the game.
Modifiers from research and fleet supply would still be applied separately to each player after they receive their ration of the raw income. This means that you could NOT have only one player in the team working on economy, since only he would benefit from his economic research.
It *does* mean that if one player on the team had twice as many planets as the others, he would NOT receive more raw income than they would. That's called teamwork. Shared income ensures that each team member can support approximately the same number of ships at any given time, so that no team member ever feels like he isn't contributing to the battle. Yes, a bad player might hurt the team by not pulling his weight economically or militarily, but that's the nature of teamwork. From your comments, it seems that you simply have very different gaming preferences than my friends and I do.
