First thing I would say, is that the term "Alliance" is probably a hold over from Eve and the terminology makes us focus on the combat benefits of corporate cooperation only. While providing military support is certainly one of the reasons corporations would choose to work together, it's not the only one; Production is the other side of the Perptuum coin.

The game clearly promotes players to specialize to be most effective, and this would be equally true for corporations too, but there is no easy way for Corporations to cooperate. Recently PIE worked with another corp to produce some high-end goods that would have been a challenge for either corporation to do ourselves. Both of us being small corporations, literally in different parts of the world, weekends were the only time we were able to conduct business.

What I would invision would be a Logistics supply chain feature; we call it Extra-net here in the business world with tie-ins to programs like SAP. I'm not suggesting we implement SAP in the game, because that's overkill, but being able to place and fill orders between corporations would greatly encourage team play. This feature is something that smaller corps would find more usefull, hence promoting smaller corps, but not hindering the creation of larger corps.

As we see in the real world, even large compaines will subcontract out to smaller ones, the Build vs. Buy model. Or they may choose to aquire the company and run it as a wholly owned subsidiary; and this is where I think we replace the term "Alliance" with "Mega-Corp", simply meaning more than one corp. This is another level above 'extra-net' compaines involving a greater degree of integration between the corporations. The subsidiary's have a certain amount of autonomy but have to meet certain expectations from the parent corporation - be it production or number of combat troops.

Any cooperation feature has to mention outposts, and Mega-corps would technically share outposts, since the outpost would be owned by the mega-corp.

From the pod cast, what I got from the Alliance features that were talked about, is they wanted an alliance to be like a Mega-corp. Where one CEO and a group of officers made changes to roles and set access for all the corporations that belonged to the 'alliance' and allowed them to basically operate a large group of corps as they would want to operate a single corp.

No alliance features are needed, like the others said focus on other corp features like showing corp leaders what is in production etc or help develope pve content.

More basic functionality in the game, and more pve.

contracts are a good idea, that would make corps work much better, I've forgotten them.

I really enjoyed hearing the various views of the panel and hope this discussion continues.

from my point of view, I agree we don't need alliance features. In fact I want more corps features and reasons to not move into the blob mentality. 20-30 people in a corps should be more than sufficient, however any mechanics I have seen or have dreamed up can be gotten around using alts and alt corporations so the deal is harder to manage.

I would love to see corporations having to specialise, the whole prototyping system is fundamentally busted IMO in that it a) relies on a sole char and b) is not tied to corporation faction. This makes smaller corps which specialise and then use a supply chain a moot point in this game. You make a TMA char and you can research everything in game???? WTF, like that happens in RL at all, personally I would have preferred tiers of tech to be tied to faction standings but that's just me.

The other issue is that geographically, the islands themselves don't promote smaller corporation ownership. They encourage blobbing and demand for Alliance features as you can't segregate a section off from others and defend a small patch, with current design you hold the whole island or none.

We don't need alliances, but we do need some of the current mechanics altering to focus on smaller group play and not on longer term numbers of 2000 people all grinding like mad so the alliance prototyper can eat kernels to have the complete tech tree in their head and then have a bad morning and reset their account (had to put that in there TBA, hugs n kisses buddy )

sorry for the soapbox moment