AdinTheDark
There's plenty of advantages to large alliances outside of combat. Funneling resources, a never ending wave of True Sights so you always know who has armies home, having dedicated casters to have full uptime on all of the beneficial spells. In addition to that you think it makes sense to have the combat built around strength in numbers too? It's not make the game easier for everyone else, it's making it more difficult for the large groups to completely dominate the game 100% of the time.
Again - I'm coming from the angle of attracting new players. Medieval Facebook is not the type of game that people are going to want to play. CLI was a step in the right direction at least.