Well, my comment about this game involving no skill started a small, but interesting discussion in the legends topic, so I thought I'd bring another accepted idea into question. After only about a week here, I've noticed two things that seem backwards, so this will most likely not be the last post like this.

Another widely accepted idea here is that an alliance can't protect you. It's funny, people are much more war-heavy in this game then other online games I've played, presumably because there will be no repercussions. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense. While an alliance can't do much as far as preventing attacks, they can send a message with retaliation.

Could you imagine if you hit someone, purely for profit, and the next day, you log in and all your planets have been cleaned out of resources and defences? Moons could be popped too. While you can probably keep your fleet safe with good strategy (there we go again), not much else would be left. If the other alliance was really in it, they'd probably have you running around hiding your fleet when you log back on. Now this would certainly take a lot of time, and could only be done to a few people at once even if the alliance was big, but that's all it would take. You wouldn't hit anyone in that alliance, and my guess would be word would get around and not many other people would either.

Now I'm not saying this is definitely the way it would pan out. Maybe all other players would gang up on this defending alliance and take it down. I'm just saying it seems plausible enough to at least get a little consideration, which it hasn't gotten.

You make a good point, but then what's to stop other people doing the same to said alliance members?

Alliances can provide protection, but it is limited and defined to a few tactics, not complete protection. There are one or two alliances that if you join, most people will never probe or attack you just because you wear that tag. However, the people it matters to will not care and attack anything that presents a profit or a good hunt. I think you will find out that the community here has a certain sense of ethical behaviour, like an unwritten rule book that everyone tends to follow for the most part. Completely destroying one player because they hit someone in your alliance has quite simply, never happened (not to mention it is extremely difficult to hurt someone's empire to that degree). You are more likely to get a pat on the back and a well done from the more serious alliances, from the less serious ones, who cares?