Alliances have been a much-requested feature in the game, and some people have even formed "informal" alliances despite the lack of any actual supporting features for alliances in the game. So I've been working over the last week or so to get some basic functionality in place to make the formation of alliances a bit more "formal". What follows is a basic overview of how I see them working.
Overview screen
The first screen you'll get is the "alliance overview" screen. This'll show you your current alliance and a list of all the other alliances in the game. Here's a quick mockup of what that will look like:
On the left is the "overview" tab. If you currently belong to an alliance, it'll be shown at the top. Underneath is a list of the other alliances in the game. The details you'll see here include things like the number of members and -- in the future -- the alliance's rank and so forth. If you don't belong to an empire currently, you'll have a button at the bottom to create a new alliance. Alliances cost $250,000 to create (they need to expensive because I don't want new players creating them, and I want to make sure you're really serious about it before you start).
The tab on the right is the "Requests" tab. I'll get to how you join an existing alliance in a second, but basically you send a request and existing members vote on whether to accept you or not. I haven't worked out exactly how many votes it takes, etc, though most likely it'll be based on some kind of ranking system within the alliance (i.e. if you have the rank of "General" within the alliance, it'll count more than a rank of "Private", etc).
Alliance Details screen
Tapping on an alliance from the overview screen will bring up one of three other screens, depending on whether you tapped on your own alliance, an enemy alliance or if you don't currently belong to an alliance.
Joining an alliance
If you don't currently belong to an alliance, then tapping on one in the "alliance overview" screen will bring up something like the following:
This shows you a bit more detail about the potential alliance. The list of members is at the bottom, you'll be able to tap on them and see where there are in the map. To join the alliance, you'll tap on "Request" which lets you send a custom message that'll appear in the alliance's "Requests" list that we saw above.
Your own alliance
If you already belong to an alliance, then when you tap on it from the overview screen, you'll see something like the following:
Because it's your own alliance, you can see your current bank balance and you can deposit/withdraw money from it. For the initial release, there probably won't be any requirements on how much/how often you can withdraw, but a history will be kept so that if someone takes too much you'll be able to kick them out or whatever.
Again, you can see all the members of your alliance and tap on them to see them in the starfield view and so on.
Enemy alliances
If you tap on an enemy alliance, you'll see something like this:
As you can see, I haven't decided what'll go in the section marked with a "?" so there'll probably be nothing there for the initial version of alliances at least. But maybe some kind of diplomacy options such as declaring cease-fire, declaring war and so on.
Other features of alliances
Also in the initial release of alliances, I'm planning to add alliance chat, which will be a separate tab of the "chat" window where you can chat with your alliance members privately. There'll also be "flair" for your empire so you can see in the various screens which alliances people belong to. And possibly a few other features which'll make navigating your alliance a little easier.
In future releases, there'll be more features for managing your alliance, such as being able to assign ranks to people, kick people out of your alliance, build teleporters and so on.
There's quite a lot of UI to add here, so it has taken a little longer than I'd hoped to get the initial release out, but hopefully within the week we'll see something.