... dude, utopia is still around? Wow i stopped playing it ages ago and thought it went the same way as a few other browser games i played back then ( i think one was called earth 2040 or something)
I used to have a fair amount of fun Playing one called Imperial conflict, the politics/infighting was rather intense and really added to the experence IMO
And one i liked called extroverse, which was based on Imperial conflict and never really got past beta, usually low numbers of players but the game was basically finished and very fun, only real problem was that the game usually had rather fast turns that encouraged obsessive playing (10 minute ticks)
Someone made a reskinned german version called drowned world which ran 1 hour and 20 min ticks, it was very well balenced and had races like dwarves, elves etc, i played it a bit... ok i'm ranting now, what i actually meant to say was that i never had any good experiances with evony, you waste many hours a day for weeks building your infrastructure up doing nothing more exciting than staring at spreadsheets( albiet with low quality graphics) ajnd then as soon as you leave protection you get roughly molested.
I've played lots of browser games and evony is the absolute least balanced.
personally i find games with some kind of arbitary limit on who you can target tend to work quite well, do you attack the guy half your size 3 times Till your fleet is exhausted, or wait till the guy your size is weakened by another war and attack him 20 times, or do you wait till that guy 5 times your size has his army marching (you can tell when wars are occuring by watching systems change hands and watching networth jumping around. or by test attacks) and attack him 40 times?
er...... /Rant