i'm active about 4 hours a day except on off days. it takes ~3 hours to farm and i check in every couple of hours. i've seen a ton of very active turtles. i know because i've taken their cities. i don't see much to be gained by being on any more than that. you can't perpetually farm. it takes a considerable amount of time for farms to re-establish mood.
you should have any possible threats cleared out to around 8 hrs or more if you are a good player or take the proper precautions against attack when you are offline.
There's quite a lot to be gained by being on more then that, especially at the start. Once you hit max farming then your activity does not quite need to be as high, but for the initial week or two then it does help, plus it gives you significantly more chance to spot incomming.
i should go after targets i know i can't beat? we're not the pirates of penzance. i attack all of the targets within my range that are not in my alliance or are not allies. i'm usually in the top ten so it is difficult to attack targets larger than myself.
That would be stupid, as is splitting the players into targets you know you can beat, and those that you can't. There's rather a large gray area between the two.
Morale, iirc comes in when you are 4 times your opponents size, therefore even if you are top 10 there should be a significant number of targets you can hit without being penalised.
it means on a morale server you stop bp farming at about 10 cities and start spamming city festivals to conserve troops. it means you can't assist smaller alliance mates with their conquests offensively. it rewards players that sign in once or twice a week. the players that spend about 3 hours a day aggregate are not the ones that whinge about morale unless they are very poor players. you can become quite a good player averaging 3 hrs a day so long as you farm and farming can be spread out through the day.
i got to #2 with 28 cities on theta which is a morale server. i have certainly been able to do all of those.
Then uh, why at the start of the above paragraph are you moaning about not being able to bp farm, and therefore having to adapt your usual strategy?
It doesn't mean you
can't do any of that at all. It means it's more expensive to.
And no, the less active players aren't the ones that moan about morale, as it benefits them. The ones that moan about morale are the more active players that suffer when they attack the less active ones. Even with that small amount of time online you have to be able to split it over the day as you state, which a lot of people can't do.
i'm #4 on Xi right now. the only players larger than me to attack are either in my alliance or in other oceans far from my cities. fortunately it is not a morale server so i can "pick on" all of those poor players and inactives.
See my point about when morale kicks in.
So Xi, you have 110k, that means that you can attack (without penalty) approximately the anyone in the top 200 players. Thats a fair few targets, even after excluding ~50 players from your alliance.
At the end of the day, there are a number of worlds without morale, and there are a number of worlds with morale, no one forces you to join a morale world, if you want to play 2.0 without morale then you simply have to wait for such a world to be released.
There are obviously players that either like, or aren't bothered by morale since morale worlds fill up, just like non morale worlds do. As long as morale worlds are played then morale will be part of the game.