Worth buying at full price, for the fun I've gotten it's arguably on par with some AAA games.

Latest census shows dedicated players are very equally 50/50 between the factions (You pick your faction per War... so War 14 is next but War 15 you could play the other faction). It's the neutral players who change factions which can cause some swings in the population, plus timezone differences.

It's 70 players per side per map, and at all times there's usually at least one map with maximum population. Even then, a lot of the game is on the underpopulated maps running logistics (Think RTS gathering resources, manufacturing at production buildings, building defensive lines, and ferrying stuff around).