Ever since the Alliance feature was added to War Worlds, not a whole lot has been done to support them. We added alliance-private chat a couple of months back, but the basic management was largely unchanged.

That's all changing today as we introduce a better way to manager your alliance. Now, instead of everyone having the power to grant all requests (previously, the only request was "join alliance", but now there's more...) we've added the concept of voting. Different actions require different vote counts to pass. Joining an alliance requires 5 votes, kicking someone out required 10. But not all members are created equal: the "owner" of the alliance (basically, the person who created it) is given 10 votes (so he can pass any motion immediately), whereas "normal" members are given just 1 vote.

In a future update, I'll be introducing the concept of ranks within an alliance, so you can give certain privileged members additional voting power, or take voting power away from troublesome members. But for now, it's just the two levels.

Joining an alliance

So to see the new system in action, here's the new sequence for joining an alliance.

 

After an empire requests to join, you'll see the request in the "Requests" tab, like before. On the left, you can see "Hunters" has requested to join my empire. On the right, when I tap on the request, I get the option to vote "Aye" or "Nay". You can also see that only two votes are required here, this is because there's only two members of my alliance at the moment, so it would be impossible for me to get the 5 votes required...

The request already has +1 vote, so if I vote "Aye" the vote count will increase by 1 and the vote will pass. Were I to vote "Nay", the vote could would be reduced by 1 and drop back down to 0. If my alliance had more members, we could have some voting "Aye" and some voting "Nay", but the motion won't pass until the total vote count hits the required value.

Alliance Bank

Another big feature in this update is the alliance bank. This is a way for more established players to shared their cash with some of the more cash-strapped newer players.

 

Depositing cash can be done by anyone at any time (assuming you have enough cash to start with, of course). You can enter a reason if you like, but in any case, the cash appears instantly in the alliance bank account.

 

Withdrawing cash requires a vote, and 5 votes are requrired to pass a "withdraw cash" motion. As I mentioned, the person who created the alliance gets 10 votes, so they can pass a vote to withdraw cash immediately.

Kicking Empires

Also in this update is the ability to kick empires out of your alliance. From the empire details page, tap on the empire to bring up some details about it. Then tap "Kick" to initiate a vote to kick them. Kicking requires ten votes to pass.

Coming up

I know in my last update I said there would be more options for capturing planets, and that hasn't happened yet. It's actually turned out to be slightly more complicated than I was expecting, so it might be a little further off...

I'm going to continue tweaking things with the alliance stuff a little. As I mentioned above, one thing I want to add is the ability to define your own "ranks" of members, so you can give additional voting power to other members of your alliance if you like (or take voting powers away).

There's also some historical/auditing information that I can expose (for example, if some people have voted for a motion, you can't currently see who that was, but it would be nice to know). Similarly, a transaction history for the alliance bank would be a nice thing to show.

Finally, I'm also looking for some additional ways to monetize the game (in addition to just removing ads and renaming stars). One way is to allow you to customize your shield picture. Another suggestion I've had is the ability to "buy" abandoned empires (say, if someone doesn't log in for X days, their empire comes up for grabs to purchase and subsume into your own). I'm not entirely sure about that one, as it's coming close to "pay-to-win" and that's something I've wanted to avoid... so I'll have to think about that one a bit more.