I’ve been thinking about the Senate from the original Emperor, and about some of my initial questions on how to model it in Emperor 2. Originally, everyone was a member of the Galactic Senate (though Matt left the senate towards the end to join the NPC alliance called The Conclave), and I was unsure of how to handle new additions or departures.

Instead, voting bodies will be player-created. There will be no initial voting body, but two or more players may opt to form a Concord, which will allow them to hold votes amongst members, invite other players, etc. I’m debating making Alliances between players merely an advanced form of Concord, so that you could have multiple players in an Alliance that vote on actions of that Alliance, but I’m leaning towards making alliances simpler than that. (The same effect could be achieved by having all players who want to be an allied group form a Concord, and also all sign treaties of alliance with each other..)

Player-created Concords would allow for huge multi-player democratic galactic states, which makes me really really hot.