I have through studies of the kds I have had the pleasure of randoming/trading into the last ages discovered that there's no new players anymore. There's only vast hords of people coming back after breaks of 4-5 years and doing an age or two and then leaving again, so the player material is more or less the same guys as back in 2003, but they're taking shifts playing.

The bieffect of this is that you get alot of really stubborn, not really up to date veterann**bs that run most of the kds.

My kd this age, who for some very strange(and sad for utopia's state) managed to end around top30 last age, reelected an old king that immidiatly declared that we all should be 700 acres 5 days oop for warring purposes. I asked him why, and he had no real answer. Basically, beeing the same size had the advantage of making us all more or less equal sizewise ;) As you can see the argument is somewhat of a catch-22, but auggests that kings below top20 this age base their strats not on facts nor strats based on numbers, but old things they've picked up, but never understood.

I then traded into another kd that decided that the best way to war was to have everyone grow to 3k acres through dicing and then start warring. And if we all sat really quiet and had huge defence noone would attack us. Having decided that dicing myself through wave after wave of freebie attacks on us would be a bit tiresome I left.

And landed in a kd with 5 active players and a demand of using irc. They had pimp, they used the ingame forum, yet unless you idled with the 4 others on irc, you had to leave.

So in my experience most kds are managed by old veterann**bs that have picked up ideas over the years, failed to adapt them to changes and who enforces them blindly. The No-pk in war rule is a sign of the same.

Now I am in a new ghetto where the king write everything in caps lock and insists on everyone updating their pimp info every 12th hour and have had 3 rollcalls thus far :)

It's become a curous game this, it's a postapocalyptic game ;) Where small bands of survivors band together with dimishing resources and knowledge is forever lost and only remembered through myths and strange rules }:->