Hope is the secret sixth hero of your attacking team. I find her special to be even more unreliable than Wu’s…
Joking aside…
I would still like to know what these mechanics are rather than download random games to see if they do anything different. A vague notion of ‘this other game does this really cool thing’ isn’t sufficient to convince. Also, once a solid idea is actually proposed (with details) I would suggest posting on the Ideas board rather than General.
I have been playing for some five years, too, with breaks. And have few good heroes. I am spending here and there, but not too much.
The gameplay is good, TBH, better than any new graphically astonished, but just dumb story games.
However, some of the new games do have many alliance interactions, including friendly and not-friendly alliances, member interaction, and helping, which gives those games a significant edge over the E&P and lots of fun that are not forced in any way. That is something that I would like to see in E&P; it would be fun and certainly a significant gain for Zynga. But, yeah, as you said, why would they do that if more than enough money is coming by almost doing nothing 
From the calendar, seem like Monster Island will be back in October, and it should be great fun for alliance 
I would like to see a way to view members rosters, and a 2nd chat other than general (like the monster island had its own chat). So tatics / hero discussion can be separate from general chat. Would help engage players who dont use the forum or external chat apps.
Capturing castles with other alliances on a board like Monster Island is a good idea.
I am not sure if we are on the same page, but your alliance chat is hidden, and it is between alliance members only. Just switch from global to alliance chat. During the war, on the war board you see alliance chat only. And in the alliance, too.
A completely different issue is the chat itself, which is very limited and completely useless (outdated).
There have been many requests to improve it, but as you said, alliances are using other ways to communicate, and the in-game chat is the same as it was in the beginning. Bad.
That is why everyone is using something else, and the in-game chat stays “proudly” by SG, and Zynga neglected; there is no money in that for them, and they do not care, as they do for everything else where there is no money.
The different languages between the members are enough good reasons to improve the chat.
This way, the alliance is locked down to the same language members, which makes the game not globally aware, but small tribes (30 nax) are playing together.
All similar games have a multilingual chat!!!
I have always thought that team members should be able to share (or sell 1gem per 10k meat ) their surpluses to other team mates.
I am aware, i dont use global chat.
I was refering to alliance chat. I have been in some chatting alliances and you log on after waking up (different timezones) and any offical/tatical chat etc is lost in the random chit chat. It would just be good to have two channels of alliance chat.
Ah, that is the problem of the in game chat, it is limited, not only about what you can write, but in number of posts that it can hold. The new posts overwrite the old ones.
Well, it’s a very bad chat in the game, but we were asking for improvement since the beginning (long time players), never happened anything about that.
It’s actually open source code that they are using (still), regardless that there are way much better open source chats available.
They are too lazy for that, there’s no money, therefore no need to do anything about that.
Zynga said, over our dead bodies lol