I played a similar game (Rise of Kingdoms) for three years, and I agree that the sense of community is a compelling reason to continue to play. When you're in a top alliance, the shared commitment—both money and time—creates an environment where relationships can really flourish. It also drives a great deal of drama and creates great stories. There are certain conditions created in pay-to-win games that can't be replicated in games with fairer monetization models, and those can be a real draw for some people.
> There are certain conditions created in pay-to-win games that can't be replicated in games with fairer monetization models, and those can be a real draw for some people.
Doesn't need to be "pay to win". It might be free, but reward the time commitment or regularity. But it has to matter to the player in some way.
Back in high school, we felt the similar draw and had some similar stories wrt. OGame - a space-themed browser MMO (kind of like dumbed down Stellaris, but with no animation and everything taking hours of real time to happen). There were "alliances", formal and informal. There was exploiting game mechanics to gain the upper hand. Scheduling attacks so that the fleet arrives in the middle of victim's night, hoping they aren't crazy enough to be logged in then (not like us). We paid with nothing, except our own time and attention.
I imagine there's a lot of former OGame & Planetarion players who still dread hearing an IRC tone in the night knowing it'll be someone either waking you up to say "you've got incoming!" or "send your fleet!". Planetarion still has quite an active community but unsurprisingly they've geared it to making sure people don't need to survive on 3 hours sleep now.
Yeah I remember a similar game around 2000-4(hazy on timing) called EmpireQuest[0]. All text, ticks happened every few hours. Planets, ships and alliances. Similar time investment.
