During and after the playtest, I've been in constant dialogue with the players. While it was a lot of fun, we found that players were also struggling with these issues:
During the playtest, players were not allowed to take defending units out of their outposts all at once. This stopped players from weakening an outpost using a secondary account. However, this takes away control from players. So, we will be removing these limitations, instead opting to restrict which outposts you can attack, based on your current territory. This also allows defenders to anticipate incoming attacks, based on encroaching territory. The exact working of territory still needs to be determined.
We noticed that some players were purposefully scheduling their attacks late at night to get an edge, maintaining control over objectives for longer hours. To make sure players get a chance to fight back when their objectives are under attack, we will most likely assign a contestable window of one hour for every single objective. Only during this window, other alliances will be able to rally the objective to try and overtake it.
In order to ensure that alliances can still fight effectively, even if some of their players are not present, we will be limiting the number of players that can join a single rally or defense.
To help players who are unsure which alliance to join, we have added a quick-join option which lets the game choose an alliance for you. Of course, you can always change your mind later.
In the last playtest, rallies only used rally leader's commanders, while the rest of the alliance provided bonus troops. For the next playtest, we have completely changed how this works. Now, every player can provide one army with a commander, and choose which area to send it to. This will provide players with more clarity on what rallies and objective defenses are composed of. We will also be increasing the maximum number of players that can join an alliance, because we are letting more players in for our next playtest.