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At the start of eras, many teams get wrecks. There are suggestions in here to increase the fragment spread further - I personally am in favor of them.
I'd like to note though, fragment spread is a variable that can (and will have to be) balanced based on gameplay. You can not accurately predict the best numbers for systems like that.
There's a few more benefits here - making relics gradually appear (due fragments) would add a dynamic from the beginning to the end of an era, opposed to the current wave based system. It's rather boring to wait for relics. I've seen more than one team simply go inactive and wish to end the world because of it.
While spawning them all with 0 units on them at the start, would mean a team could potentially mass boost and win before anyone else gets a chance.
Relics are profitable - they cause friction between teams even when allied (E.G. teams insisting to let them have it for at least a while, to raise production, causing parannoia in the other team) and can otherwise lead to full scale war (being a fairly big deal to anyone who wants to win).
By putting them in this position - with a foot in the door of a possible victory and a loss of resources if they choose not to - some will decide to simply go for it.
The more teams consider the option - the more interesting the option becomes. If 3 weak teams have a relic, they may be tempted to gang up on the strong team. Something that hasn't been happening in a while, now.
First of all, I do not doubt that trying to get relics spread out between alliances would be good for competitiveness. I just believe this will not lead to that at all. Having relics gradually released sure, I can agree with that. Makes the wait for the wave less boring indeed. Yet I do not think fragments are a good fix for that.
The rest of your argument I can mostly agree with as well, relics are profitable and can cause friction etc etc. Yet the chance of 3 weak teams getting a relic decreases in the new system relative to the old system because when relics are released all at once, a top alliance can usually not go for all of them at once and will have to concede some to other alliances (temporarily, at least). I believe we can agree that top alliances tend to get most wrecks by quite a margin, even more so after taking into account these fragments need to be spread out within the alliance rather than being taken by the 1-2 active guys in some weaker alliances. What this means is that rather than having relics released all at once meaning the top alliances can't get all of them at once, now the top alliance just spawns relic after relic, if a weaker alliance manages to spawn a relic they can just go over there and take that one. Unless you believe somehow 3 weaker alliances will all spawn a relic at once at the same time which would be impressive, that would take good coordination which could be easier used to just coordinate "Hey guys, when relics spawn we all grab one and then gang up on the top alliance".
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Relics are profitable - they cause friction between teams even when allied (E.G. teams insisting to let them have it for at least a while, to raise production, causing parannoia in the other team) and can otherwise lead to full scale war (being a fairly big deal to anyone who wants to win).
By putting them in this position - with a foot in the door of a possible victory and a loss of resources if they choose not to - some will decide to simply go for it.
The more teams consider the option - the more interesting the option becomes. If 3 weak teams have a relic, they may be tempted to gang up on the strong team. Something that hasn't been happening in a while, now.
Re-reading this part, I could literally use this to argue for having relics spawn as they do right now. All relics spawn at once, teams will be tempted to go for a relic as relics are profitable. Because many teams will go for them, they will cause friction etc. By putting teams in this position - with a foot in the door of a possible victory and a loss of resources if they choose not to - some will decide to simply go for it.
If we spawn them all at once, the top alliances won't be able to go for all of them straight away. This means that there will be many teams considering the option to go for a relic. If 3 weak teams have a relic, they may be tempted to gang up on the strong team.
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Rank 1 these days is not nearly always the most active alliance anymore - especially later in the round. Further more, with fragments clearly standing out, smaller alliances will be more tempted to recruit players with fragments. Even right now - say, the #23 alliance on E1 has an average of 2 wreckages per member. The #12 even has a member with 38 wreckages... But again, the amount of fragments spawned could be adjusted quite a bit.
This is misleading, at best.
The #23 alliance has 5 members, first of all. They have taken a combined 8 wrecks which is 1.6 on average over a period of 953 ticks as we speak. That has no chance of getting a wreckage.
These are the average amounts of wrecks taken by members of the "top" alliances.
Rank 1: 15.3
Rank 2: 9.9
Rank 3: 10.5
Rank 4: 15.9 (mostly courtesy of 1 with 88 taken who also took a relic)
Rank 5: 5.6 (5 members with 0 wrecks taken
Rank 6: 2 (6 members with 0 wrecks in a 9 man alliance)
And that is E1, an Earth world where it is hard to control territory, after a full 953 ticks so that surely includes the early ticks as well.
Now, I did the same for rank 1-5 on M2, and I actually ran some calculations.
These are the average amounts of wrecks taken by the full alliances in 400 ticks.
First, E1.
Rank 1: 64
Rank 2: 41
Rank 3: 44
Rank 4: 60
Rank 5: 23.5
Rank 6: 7
And it gets worse from there.
Then M2.
Rank 1: 37
Rank 2: 72
Rank 3: 15
Rank 4: 8
Rank 5: 2
Even without taking into account that most of these lower ranked alliances, as I said before, have quite some members that actually take 0 wrecks, I think you can see what my problem is here. Only the top alliances take close to enough wrecks to get close to being able to forge relics. Furthermore if you check stats, you will see that those that take many wrecks actually also tend to have relics taken because they are active enough for that. Sadly as their alliance is too weak or they don't want to fight those relics are then handed to the top alliance, but they DO at least get relics for a few seconds, occasionally.
This whole data-gathering actually got me even more convinced than I was before. This gives anyone but the top alliances even LESS chance of getting a relic rather than more.
Edit: And I continued reading this thread and saw the expiry time would be 300 ticks rather than 400. That makes this argument even stronger.
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But there IS activity in lower alliances - and for wreckages, not all that much activity is needed (outside of worlds like CE, where resources are very limited considering the amount of teams). But if you feel it is a problem - what would you consider an acceptable alternative method of getting fragments?
Of COURSE there is activity needed for wrecks. Not to launch at one no, but how are you going to get remotely close to relics without having a good network? How do you get a good network without being active enough to build that network and defend it? Yes, activity is DEFINITELY needed to take wreckages. For me there appears to be no good alternative way to hand out fragments because whatever you base them on, the top alliances will have more of them than the smaller alliances. That's the whole point of what I'm saying.
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There's a suggestion to enhance this going on internally, basically to make colonies function as a turret with the turret building, I believe that solves that problem.
I'll have to see. But that actually does not appear to solve anything related to my problem as you'd still have to launch long eta on colonies or camp walls.
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I don't think spawning more crystals on colonies is a good idea. We encourage people to kill newbs too much as it is, in my opinion. Personally I would rather like randomly spawning, small, garrisons, but that's a suggestion for a different topic.
Randomly spawning would work too, whatever gets more fighting and clashing. I think that crystals at 30 power is more discouraging than at 20 power, at 20 power you usually have score from workers and a few units, at 30 power you already have some units and not only get farmed for your crystal but also have your units killed that you worked for a few days for.
Either way, I continued reading this topic and realised that most people aside from those that also make really long posts only read the first post and base their opinions only on the positives described there. So it honestly feels quite useless to put all this effort into trying to show you guys why this idea is so flawed. It really is rather tiring to have to argue against an idea that is stupid in its conception, knowing the reason that some people are even arguing for it, and knowing that it would cost time and effort to implement this. Time and effort that would have been much better spent on suggestions that I made countless times and also suggestions that we almost ALL agree on (a sidebar chat). Even if this idea would cost only €100 to implement (it would be more), I am really sure it would decrease the playerbase even further so it's a negative ROI. Maybe a chat costs €5000 to create, maybe even more. But it would pay off, it would have a positive ROI. So I really do not understand why we are even arguing for something like this when we all fully know what Battledawn needs, which is for example a sidebar chat. It keeps the players more engaged, it gives the newbs a MUCH better chance at finding help and makes them much more able to find alliances.
Therefore this is my last post on the subject as it's just so useless to keep arguing for this. No offense to many that posted on here, but you guys really don't know the game well enough to even comment on this and yes, that is rude of me to say. But it frankly annoys me that people can't see how flawed this is and how much better it would be to invest time and effort into a sidebar chat that we can all agree and rationalize would work.
Well, by the looks of things this seems complicated. Obviously, the fragments idea shouldn't be applied you don't want a complicated game that has more questions than answers here. Secondly, new players don't want this to be complicated plus there not likely or even recommend at the most. I agree that other alliances should have the chance to get them but don't make the game hard to understand to the player. If you want a relic you got to conquer well that's just exccessive don't you think? Also, don't mention the percentages of getting what? Because, when you mention formulas now the player has to worry about that too? I mean what is the new player sopposed to say this is battledawn or is it mathdawn? 
I suggest players discussing more about this before the admin implents the new rule. Trust me, don't give new players a headache keep it simple. We have to realize battledawn is not #1 now. So if the admin implents who knows what could happen.
