@ original poster. Here's a real answer to your question. A good benchmark for a player on the more veteran Age 1 servers is going to be ..... a 600ish att or more hero (instascouts at 709 is what my server considers a needed hero to really compete anymore), 480ish on politics so youre at 1 second traps for decent defense rebuilds( again 607 for instant traps is the more accepted benchmark here), 300k archers per city tohave a chance at defending against the 'warcities' peeps use porting around with, and of course the usual trappings of research, rank, and 9 cities built with no farms in them. That of course isnt even taking into account cheating through info sharing and other means so your accounts are covered 24/7 which is rampant on my server as the developers wont take actions to fix it lol

So in conclusion, no, social players cannot reasonably expect to ever do much, this is the failure of an otherwise good game. Have fun in Age 2 (known as the kiddie-version of Evony) or get someone to give you an alt account to use as those are again very numerous as devs wont fix that either lol