I've been told numerous times by numerous people that this game is slowly dying because of a lack of things to do, which is why me and a friend just thought up of a new system that can be integrated into the existing game that can provide more playability for everyone (including the very high players).

Legion Wars - the concept is simple...
At an undecided price, legions can initiate a diplomatic war against another legion. In reward for eliminating the enemy legion's players, you will receive a new type of badge that allows you to purchase modules (planetary/ship) from the Battle Market.
This provides a method of actually having a 'LvL Battle' instead of frantically searching your Battle Tabs for the legion members to end up with no action (been there myself three times now!).

*Rewards should be distributed on a scale of a single Orange Badge for every player in the opposing legion. Once this is calculated, the Average Strength for the legions are compared to work out the multiplier...
For example - If Legion 1 has 30 members with 2000 Average Strength and Legion 2 has 50 members with 6000,
The multiplier will be 2000/6000=0.3.
Legion 1 will have 50x3(reversed)=150 Orange Badges available
Legion 2 will have 30x0.3=10 orange badges.
In this instance it is unlikely legion 1 will win the war, but if they did they would receive a potential massive boost in their badge collection.
Legion 2 however would likely have more members going without any additional badges and would likely want to find harder opponents.

*The process of reward can be entirely different. This is just an example.

*Reward distribution would follow a similar drop to base locks;
Top 5 receives 10% each of total badges, 6-10 receives 5%, 11-20 receives 2.5% (Accumulates 100% of badges).
On this occasion Legion 1 players receive;
1-5: 15ob
6-10: 7.5ob (7 to players, 2.5 added to pool)
11-20: 3.75ob (3 to players, 7.5 added to pool)
10ob in pool, pay 21-30 1ob for participation. Any slots not filled from there are lost.
Legion 2 would receive;
1-5: 1ob
6-10: 1ob
11-20: 0
Etc...

An additional 'Involvement sum' of Orange Badges may be available to both legions at the start where 30 badges are available for distribution in the hierarchy above. This could spur more legions to engage frequently in wars and have more players active on war days.

*The reward structure can also be entirely different. This is just an example.

Cost - how much?
How much it costs is flexible. There should be two ways to initiate a war, pre-arranged (friendly) or random (like base scans). A pre-arranged war is one that is to be accepted by the opposing legion. In acceptance, each legion must contribute 10 silver badges to initiate the war. A pre-arranged war should be a visible option on the diplomacy tab and the leader/officer who requests the war loses their silver badges immediately. The invited legion then accepts the invitation and the accepting leader/officer has 10 silvers deducted from their cache. If a war is rejected, or left unanswered within two days, the initial requestor has their silvers refunded.

A scanned Legion War is a war that is randomised and matched upon by legion strength (using leader boards) capping the multiplier at 1.5 or so. Each scan for a legion's ships location costs 5 silver badges. Only the scanning legion spends silver badges, however the opposing legion may steal the orange badges with victory.

Who wins?
The objective is to perform as many PvP actions possible against your opposition. Any traditional PvP badges cannot be acquired. Ship disables add to your legions stats against the opposition (3 points). Successful Raids should result in acquisition of random artifacts, both common, uncommon and rare and add to legion war stats (1 point). Successful hacking should result in planetary locations (do not add to legion stats for the war), planetary conquering adds a large stat boost to your legions stats (10 points). Failed hacking causes your ship to be temporarily unavailable in the war for 30 minutes but can still be disabled, raided and hacked. Only the winning legion receives the orange badges! (A participation bonus may be included to motivate more wars)

Using the scenario described above, this could be a possible realistic outcome;
Legion 1
Disables: 7
Raids: 4
Planets: 0
Score: 25

Legion 2
Disables: 63
Raids: 79
Planets: 3
Score: 298

Legion 2 wins.

Timescale
In order for this to work, it needs to be organised and requires some form of tactics to be involved. The Legion Wars should only be available once every 48 hours for a legion and cannot be engaged in more than one war at any time (requests for wars should be disabled on the legions currently engaged, and removed from potential scanning pools).
A war should last somewhere between 8 and 24 hours. (I'm not sure on how long the duration could be effective, tweak it)

Orange badges - what do they get us?
That's entirely up to the developers really. New ship modules, planet terraformers, rank points, planetary structures... Whatever the devs decide.
The colour of the badge doesn't necessarily have to be orange!

Artifacts - All examples only!
Artifacts received from Raids should be beneficial to the war. For example, an item could be acquired to 'cloak' your ship (without boosting actual cloak stats) which removes you from the war for 1 hour or 2 hours. A more common artifact could be a planetary shield which prevents the coordinates of your planet being hacked by your opponent. Special PvP and sabotage items could be acquired through this raiding process.

Common drops - 80%
Crimson Obelisk
Tachyon Cylinder
Grid console
Subspace Seeker
Unnamed Cloaking - cloak boost of 200 for 30 minutes.
Planetary vortex
Ion shield

Uncommon drops - 15%
Time manipulator
Ancient Crystal Foci
Unnamed Combat Artifact - raise attack by 10%, Defense by 5% (non-stackable) for 10 minutes
Unnamed Pacifier - Removes player from enemy's legion list for two hours. Cannot attack, raid or hack opposition. Doing so cancels the pacified state. Cannot be raided, hacked or disabled.

Rare drops - 5%
Unnamed Planetary Structure - AP 2, Defense 200, Size 2, limit 2.
Unnamed cloaking artifact - unables player to be targeted for 15 minutes. Their actions are still permitted though.
Unnamed ship artifact - receive 5 rank points for distribution
Time Manipulator (increasing drop rate to 20%)

Pros

• Adds whole new tier of play and replayability
• Some professions that aren't used as often may become more valuable - 'Hacker', 'Raider' and 'Explorer' for example.
• Increases active time on game
• New items - Modules, structures, artifacts
• Gives further use to Silver Badges beyond 'Exo Clamps'.

Flaws

• Non PvP players being dragged into the war and being harvested and Raid actions expiring
• Wars continuing through news feed events after the war has ended

Potential Fixes
Non PvP players being dragged into the war and being harvested and Raid actions expiring.
To counter-act these flaws I think once in a war, players are removed from battle tabs and their action counters are removed to the engaging legion (any players that have your ship in their news feed and want to retaliate to your previous actions before the war still have that opportunity, with your old actions tab intact).
This prevents players from staying disabled to keep their legion in the lead as they can still be raided for points and hacked for planet locations (although rare artifacts could potentially reverse this).

Wars continuing through news feed events after the war has ended
When a player commits an action against your ship you should still be notified, however, the notification should not be a link to their ship (like when you set off a trap on an enemy ship)
So, non PvP players won't be disabled any more than they would be on a normal day although raiding would be more often, they won't lose any minerals or artifact points from the raids.

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Any thoughts, comments, improvements, criticism welcome...

+100000000000000000000000000000

+1. I like this idea, but although I cannot see any flaws, I'm sure there will be someone along shortly to fill those boots. For the meantime, it would be a very welcome addition.

The only flaw I thought of is non PvP players being dragged into the war and being harvested and Raid actions expiring.
To counter-act these flaws I think once in a war, players are removed from battle tabs and their action counters are removed to the engaging legion (any players that have your ship in their news feed and want to retaliate to your previous actions before the war still have that opportunity).
This prevents players from staying disabled to keep their legion in the lead as they can still be raided for points and hacked for planet locations (although rare artifacts could potentially reverse this).

So, non PvP players won't be disabled any more than they would be on a normal day although raiding would be more often, they won't lose any minerals or artifact points from the raids.

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Edit: added in to OP along with potential artifact drops for raiding.

Also thanks for the support guys

Awesome idea massive +1 from me, but i've got a few questions. Would there be a minimum base level to participate in this so we aren't sifting through a ton of level twos when scanning? How would the bt be structured, like its currently with only 10 people and you would have to bump people to see others or would there be more pages to see up to all 60 players in a legion at once?Would a rank 100 raiding a rank 100 have the same raid chances as a rank 1000 raiding a rank 100? I could see higher levels having lower levels get disables then raiding a ton for the rare drops. My apologies for all the questions, I really do like your idea and hope to see something like it implemented.

Thanks SP...

The scanning would be dependant on your legion members and strength. Base size would be irrelevant as you wouldn't be attacking the enemy legions base, only their players and planets.

The implementation of the idea would be up to Devs. Ideally, I'd prefer to see a huge list of enemy legion members with simply a 'Target' button next to their name. The list should show rank and name only, anything additional can be checked once you target their ship like a normal PvP window. However, the page could easily replace your BT list instead with 10-12 pages of enemies. It's really up to the devs and how they see to implement it.

Raid chance calculations should remain as they typically are now. Adding to many parameters could cause the process to be too difficult to implement alongside the current game and obviously leaves more room for bugs and glitches. So typically, a rank 100 wouldn't be able to raid a rank 1000, however a rank 1000 would typically find ease in raiding a rank 100. The two rank 100s would have a chance based on how well they've been building up their crew over the timeline they've played the game for.

No worries! Glad you like the concept. I'm hoping the devs like it too and find a way to implement it!

So i hack someone a 100 times and get 100 planets from there scans, that's not going to work who in their right mind would risk losing max arti worlds to collect these orange badges.

The hacking system would be different to the standard system. You'd be looking at a 1% successful chance if you have 400 cloak and they have 400 scan... The succession would rely on you buffing your ships stats, using sha'din algorithms etc, fitting the correct hacking modules (Cipher bots, + 2.0s) and then removing your opponents scan. However, is the risk worth the reward? You're eliminated from responding to enemy ships for 1/16th of the time slot, allowing your ship to be defenceless against the opposing legion. The hacking system is to introduce new ways of obtaining planets without buffing your scan up to 60000 just to add to your database, as well as providing a new way to play the game.
Basically, you'd have to be sure of your successful chance to hack your opponent and like Planetary Invasions, the success rate should be capped at 90% maximum.
Even then, the single planet you obtain may only be an invulnerable planet, a crappy planet, a bricked planet, or like you said a max Arti world... Even then, their chance of invasion success isn't guaranteed and there's nothing preventing you from defending your planet, or fluxing.

You also don't know what the Orange Badges could provide you with.

I respect your criticism, but you'd have to raise a stronger argument than that to dismiss the idea immediately...

Bump

I quite like this idea, except perhaps you get an orange badge for disabling enemy players in place of red badges and then raids/hacks get you better stuff. Maybe include a points system and then the winning legion gets something akin to a base drop. Orange badges could just be spent on a new series of badge items and the rewards for winning could depend on who you are at war with. Something like your legion's average rank compared to the enemy legion's average rank. Of course, this means that legions like EotS have nobody to go to war with to get really good drops. There should also be a downside to losing a legion war to spur people into action.

i like the overall idea, but the hacks shouldn't give you peoples planets, if anything have the same chance for crit hacks etc but do not increase it...

I love it ! Big +1 from me too. Increased Crit Hack is what I'd suggest.

loseing a max rank arty planet is likely not worth the risk, a x22 Planet produces ALOT of ap, and many of these drops you listed are things we have in HUGE quanity already.

Other problems, Some legions are trainer leagions, higher level with afew big players but alot of tiny players these legions would be harvested big time, Maybe allow players who do not wish to partake in the war the ability to opt out. so I do not wish to take part in the war so I can click a botton and not have it effect my game play.

+ 1 Found the actual topic regarding this new badge set idea great post covering a bunch of facets of a new badge set! Come on Dan add to the rainbow! :p

Wars aren't about badges. The only thing worth the time in a war is taking quality planets from the other legion. Everything else is just stuff you can get from random people on your BT. Planet-thefts can actually hurt your opponents.