but it involves a lot of waiting
So go find another game. This is no "hurr durr I click you first, me better!!1!!" (no offense, but the combat itself is rather simple). There is much more possibilities with every new player included, if you can imagine only that the more they are, the better they can rush, it's a little sad. On contrary with just few people around it's more about random generator, regrouping from respawn, etc. Clearly artificial limitations and not "skill". Though would you really butcher the game combat system to make it faster? It's almost unique to have game where combat is based on positioning and not egos.
Anyway it's not just about the quality of optimal matchup. TC should more importantly think about server population. I don't think it's cool if every guy can get few friends and go TC, but it shouldn't just result in everyone working together to gain massive advantages.
I think that optimally there should be artificially balanced (somewhat helping to eliminate gear/manpower advantage) warzones yielding nice enough rewards, while Town controls being relatively long term and more social/minigame based. Taking over a town should then be result of long preparations and every one of them being memorable event. This should make sure that there is enough of ego action going on as well, because more people will use those warzones than attempt to TC. This should be good, if you ever want town control to play some social role. Though there should be some way to eliminate or reduce the profit from TC that would make rich richer.
Still, there is a need to discourage players from banding all together to completely outtake minorities from the system. This will probably work good by making several cities easier to take over, and more rewarding for "weaker" groups.
Right now if some small force gets Klamath, they either get facerolled by bored people, or they will lose it in matter of very few days - essentially killing any economic and social profit from the control.
I would really like to see the control being longer term status, and social part of it being more important than economic boost. But nothing to be achieved without other massive changes, as there is little to do than to kill or craft, and it's much more profitable to just kill everyone you can.
Remember this is just my opinion, so you might not agree with it. But just say, why would you really play just TC if there was more balanced and more complicated (like announced landmines and stuff), while also not killing of social part of the game, even though most of pvpers do not care about it anymore.