Confederation Chat

Okay, so currently I assume there is a screen where my alliance leader (or people he/she has given the privilege too?) can start/cancel confederations with other alliances.

I would suggest a button be added to that screen (for each and every alliance we are confederated with) that would toggle yes/no for "Allow communication with this alliance"

The alliance in question (the one other than my own) would then be able to also toggle this to 'yes' and if both alliances have this option set to yes, then a new confederation chat window would be available to every single member of both alliances for inter-alliance communication :)

Please post here whether you think this is a good/bad idea.

A nice idea in theory, but with the problem of multiple confeds.  Say, for instance, that alliance A was confed with alliance B and alliance C, but alliance B and alliance C were not confeds.  In this case someone in alliance A could be chatting with someone in alliance B, however someone in alliance C would only see the alliance A posts and would therefore not have a scooby-do what was going on.

I guess you could also have a drop down menu (a combo box type thing) which lists alliances that are confederated with every alliance currently in the chat.

Leaders from each alliance (or players who have been assigned the privilege to do so) could then suggest that another alliance be invited to the chat, and leaders (players with the privilege) from the remaining alliances could either click "accept" or "decline" from a popup box. Maybe this could be extended to include NAP alliances.

Although I don't necessarily feel that you would need more than 2 alliances per confederation chat, there is always this combo box option :)

Being part of a training alliance, it would be nice for some of us newer players to be able to talk to the more experienced players of our sister alliance, or to chat with players in any of the alliances that we are confederated with.

Its kind of sad that we remain strangers to the alliances that we are confederated with, and that there is no way for us to get to know our confederation allies in-game outside of Global Chat (or privately messaging each player in the confederate alliances and introducing ourselves that way? ..makes no sense)

You couldn't really discuss strategy in Global Chat without giving away sensitive information, and external chat to me seems counter-intuitive, because you have to leave the game window and therefore can't do any of the normal in-game things such as working on your cities or looking for settlement spots on the world map, equipping your armies, crafting or planning trades, etc. while still being able to converse with your allies or confederates..

There must be a way to do this! (without having to rent a teamspeak/ventrilo server)

surely 'clutter' isn't the only thing holding us back from a confederation chat?

I think this is a great idea, I think it could even be extended to any 2 or more alliances (regardless of affiliation). If they wish to communicate, for however long, they can send a request and if the other alliance accepts, an inter-alliance chat window should be available to them. Until which time either of the 2 terminate the option.