I just experienced so many players leaving in my area (outskirts of ocean 54, so probably people that started 1-2 weeks after the world started). There seem to be two reasons:
1) People from older worlds joined this world with some friends, trying to make their way. They were either unsuccessful, found it boring or had some friend who left, so they just quit and left their cities to die as well.
2) There are a lot of newly started people who built their cities up to 3-4K points only to find that the game wasn't for them, and then quit.
3) Experienced players who are looking for new world to play around in, and don't really commit to any worlds. A lot of players left when Chi started because of the lure of new opportunity and a speed 3 world.
It's quite sad as more people around definitely make things interesting. For the same reason, I would never capture a city for a one-city player.
Glad you're sticking with it, QCI TCG. Omicron was my first world, and I got eliminated after a few weeks. I was rank 15 in my ocean, but a big alliance bunched up on me (
tale is here). I then restarted to get my revenge, only to find that the alliance who had dominated the ocean early on were now being bullied by a well-established alliance that moved into the ocean. I ended up wanting to support the alliance who I restarted to get my revenge on. Then it occurred that the big alliance wanted to capture my city, and since there was no morale in that world (luckily), all their big players were able to pummel me. I made sure only to defend against the conquest attacks in the beginning, but I couldn't stay up every night, with attacks coming every day, every hour of the day. I made 15.000 battle points in a week of my 5K point city, and the attacks were starting to relent. If only I could get a short break from defense, I could make six or seven cities on nearby islands, making sure that I could easily defend future attacks. However, since my defense had thinned on, I was hanging on my a thread. Then one morning where I had to kill a conquest attack, I woke up late (having developed a immunity towards my alarm clock waking me up after too few hours of sleep) and was only able to call back my defensive army two seconds after the colony ship arrived at my city. Since dying took most of my battle points away, this was too big a hit to my morale, and I had to finally quit the world.
Since your city is still quite small, your chances for now are still quite decent. I hope you're focusing on defense and enlisting militia - you should be able to make quite a lot of battle points if someone tries to farm you every day. Have you read my
defense-guide?
Let me know if you ever desperately need resources for a colony ship to get out of there