Setting Up Kind of "Alliance Player"

[TMaekler (OP)]

Hi folks,

thinking about setting up a different type of game start and don't know if I am thinking in the right direction here. The basic idea is maybe best explained with the British Commonwealth; you have several countries who are separate states, but they have common goals and (on some level) do act as one single player.

So I would like to setup a player in Aurora named "Commonwealth" - which is basically an empty shell and which is allied with all partaking countries - like the UK, Scotland, Australia, Canada, etc. All of these individual Nations have their own production, population, etc - everything a normal Aurora Player does have. And each player can create new colonies, explore the solar system etc.
What I want to synchronize is the research. So not all countries do have to research everything for themselves but everything that is researched is automatically shared with the Commonwealth which gives it then to all the other members of that union. Also, Officers and Ships can be given to the control of the Commonwealth and be handled there as normal ships. But the Commonwealth itself shall not have its own population.

I don't know if that is a too complicated setup to archive this goal of a type of Union similar to the Federation of Planets and similar unions. Has anyone ever set up such a game? Any experiences with that?

[Garfunkel]

You don't need the Commonwealth, just use SM to make diplomacy ratings high enough between all the component nations for a research treaty and they will automatically share everything they research from that point on. Note that they do not share technology that they have already researched before the implementation of the research treaty. This goes for sharing geological and gravitational survey data as well.