None of this is live yet. All of it starts at the next season rollover. Nothing below changes anything in your current season, so read it as a heads up and plan for it, not as something to go and try tonight.
Clans have been the part of the game where the most was asked of you and the least was handed to you. You had to find an opponent yourself, convince them to accept, remember to collect what you won, and fight every battle alone. Four changes land together to fix that, and this post explains all of them, including the parts you may not like.
You will no longer send a challenge and wait to see whether anybody answers. Every hour, the game looks at every clan that is ready for a war and pairs them up. The war starts immediately. There is nothing to accept and nobody can decline you.
How the pairing is decided. The two clans closest in power fight each other, then the next two closest from whoever is left, and so on. Not the top two, not your neighbour in the table: the closest match available.
There is a limit on how uneven a war can be. A clan will never be paired with one more than twice its power. If the only clan near you is further away than that, no war is made and you both wait for the next hour.
This means you can get no war at all, and that includes being the biggest. If you are the strongest clan in your league and nobody is within reach of you, the clans that are within reach of each other will pair up and you will sit it out. Being first is not a claim on an opponent. We would rather you wait than hand you a fight that was never going to be a contest, in either direction.
What it takes to be matched:
At the start of a season, matching waits four hours. Everyone's power is still moving in the first hours of a season: members rejoin, cities change hands, nothing has settled. Pairing on minute one would pair on noise. Four hours gives every clan time to take position first.
You can opt out. There is a switch in your clan settings. Turn it off and your clan takes no part in wars for the rest of the season. Not just automatic ones: you cannot be matched, nobody can declare on you, and you cannot declare on anybody either. It is a season off, not a preference. Turn it back on whenever you like, and the choice expires with the season, so every clan starts each new season opted in.
A war runs for 3 days. You can only fight the same clan once per season, which is what makes all of this necessary: without automatic pairing, the clans at the top of a league would run out of opponents within a week.
This one takes something away, so here it is plainly.
Today a war reward waits as long as you like. It is never filed away while it is still unclaimed, and the list reaches back to the start of the previous season, so it survives a rollover and stays collectable for roughly a month.
From next season, any war reward you have not collected after three days is claimed for you automatically.
The reason is that rewards were being forgotten rather than saved: 565 war rewards across 140 players are sitting uncollected right now, the oldest from July. Those are not people timing a booster, those are people who never saw the message.
But if you ARE one of the people timing it, this costs you. War rewards include troop hours and gold hours, and those are exactly the kind you hold back for the right moment. Three days is the whole window now, not a month. If you are saving one, use it inside three days or it will be spent for you at a moment you did not choose.
You will be able to gather several members' armies into a single attack. One player opens a rally on a target, clanmates add their troops to it, and the whole force marches and lands together.
The defending side is not helpless against it. A clan that sees a rally coming can call a counter-rally and send its own members' troops in to meet it.
This is the change that most affects how a clan actually plays. A city that no single member can take is well within reach of four of you who agree on a time.
You will be able to march your troops into a teammate's city and leave them there as a standing garrison. They defend that city as if they were its own, and they stay yours.
Up to 6 different players can reinforce the same city. You can call your troops home at any time, and so can the city's owner. Nobody can trap your army somewhere.
Between this and rallies, defending a position becomes something a clan does together rather than something each member does alone in their own corner of the map.
These four changes are one idea in four parts. Wars should be found for you and should be fair. What you earn should reach you. An attack should be something several of you can mount together, and a defence should be something several of you can hold together.
They all begin at the next season rollover. Tell us how it goes once they do. The power limit, the four hour wait at the start of a season and the three day reward window are all numbers, and numbers can be changed once we see them meet a real season.