To sum up, and give people the option to skip my reasoning. I believe there should be a required amount of active company players per company in order to keep a territory. Maybe require 30-50 active players(maybe has logged like 4-10hrs a week play time). If they fail to keep that roster or recruit new players then they lose the city and another company can claim it as if it were never controlled. You would also have to put some kind of timer on leaving and joining a new company(maybe you could only do this once a week or so to keep a company from shifting players around to bypass the system)
Now the reasoning:
I’m still very much enjoying NW with almost 2k hrs played and I see every intentional effort the devs are making are in good taste (Let’s leave out those unintentional ones 
). But there is one aspect that I’ve watch completely kill one server (Themiscyra) and potentially another now that we’ve merged to Yaxche. This isn’t really a bug, but more like an exploit in how the territories work.
A little back history here just for clarification. On Themiscyra our server health and population was so healthy that when the devs gave out transfer tokens, HUNDEREDS of refuges flocked to it. And for good reason! We had a large population, but not so many that que times were a problem. Wars were fought regularly, MOST territories were changing hands on the regular, and there wasn’t a real ‘dominant’ faction. I believe this is how most would define a ‘healthy’ server.
But then we saw a large shift when a streamer with a couple of hundred players/views joined the server. They took advantage of a mechanic in the game that the developers overlooked and started taking territories using ‘sister’ companys. These sister companies were mostly just shell companies with very few actual players, but this allowed them to bypass the system balances in place to roll for territory declarations of war without suffering the reduction of declare chances due to already owning territory in their main company.
Now this alone probably would not ‘kill’ a server. But add in the fact this new player base is also pretty toxic and there is a big problem. Maxing taxes in territories, being toxic in general chat and just being toxic in general ect. Very few want to give a toxic player a time of day and will choose to leave the server, given the chance, or just stop playing all together. This aside it’s obvious that this was not how the system was designed.
This system was put in to place to make it much harder for one group/company to take over multiple territories. But creating a shell company with 5 or so players(maybe even less) they were able to effectively keep taking territories without suffering this reduction in chance to have the declare.
I watched this kill off one server. One server so healthy it was chosen as the place to merge multiple servers with the first set of mergers. It died so fast, that with the recent merger we were moved into Yaxche. Now I’m seeing the same thing by the same group of players happen here… and this server is becoming more toxic as well…which will lead to less people wanting to play as it happend with Themiscyra.
I’d hate to have to transfer off the server just to avoid a large group of toxic players exploiting.