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4. Deincentivize alliance building. We all know what this is about, UIF rears its head in every strat, and while they are all great clans who have been involved in some of the best battles in Strategus, the metagame swiftly becomes stale. I don't really have any good suggestions for this 
but some sort of penalties would be nice.
...
make a fully diplomatic system, spares us a lot of headaches and stomach pains.
With such system, when it is clear who is working with whom. You then would be able to scale trade/transfer/support between factions. Include penalties depending on playercount. Realize it perhaps over insentives like, those who are allied have the view onto all members of all included factions on the map(stuff others cant do alliances can do within the browser)
As long you don't scale/count/meassure and make a peek efficiency for like 40-70 players (single clan or alliance overall) as long you will have these powerblocks. Also Smoothrich, one reason such alliances evolve are f.e. if they face either really big clans(fear the gamecrashing zerging hords of LLJK
) or alliance with similar numbers.
So when the game/system knows who is working with whom then you can make something about scaling down mega alliances/clans.
Some ways to scale it down haven already tried by the trade system included this round ... to some extent that worked, those who are inactive in strat are respawned some where and easy pray. So what you now got are less and less players making stuff in strat because it is so much effort and still not much for players without a faction.
I have hope that through the recruitment of new devs which is ongoing atm things will change more rapidly and to the better, enough very good suggestions are in the forum by far already.
