Hello guys. I am former marsian player. My native language is russian but i hope, that you uderstand what i write here:)
We really have 60k registered accaunts, every set in game register around 10k players. But of course Mars and EE not a very good places for teenagers who like Mass Effect, Assasin's Creed and other games with beauty graphic. Schoolers play 100 turns and close game, becouse there are not pictures of wild hot girls:)
Most of newbies just barbarians who don't know how to play and don't know how communicate in game. They build rainbow and happy when they see themself in top-1000. So there are around 250-300 players who know how provide country. Most of players we get from russian social networks, right. But last month Ashkael and Dev repair Facebook applicanion which was broken around 2 years, so i hope that we get some new english-speaking players too
Our community - very young. Current community lives one year i thinck. For example when we made our alliance we had only 7 players. Novadays we have around 40 active and 20-30 members in vacation mode) All of them play just half year, there are not much vets. We had big problems with teachers, strategy developers and coders in our alliance at the start. But now we wrote good online servises and bots which our members made:
Online Union calculator for example:
http://sfunion.ru/prompter.aspx (russian so you may have problems with codepage)
Clowns with Guns made very good hosting site for alliances:
http://www.xeqtion.com/
News:
http://www.marsnews.net/mn/show/warReport
Main problem of main games EE and Mars - bad social support. E-republic also have bad graphic, but they build good social network with convinient forum, newspapers and twitts. Second problem - gameplay. You can netting and you can warring. Not a very rich choice. I don't recruit new players in our nettgain sets becouse they bored fast. Landgrab, landgrab, build labs, build labs, tech, sell on market - and this algorythm every day. After 10-20 days newbies ussualy runaway from game.
I like improvements and innovations that developers of EE made. Good job. I hope that EE devs could make gameplay more interesting.
The biggest different of mars and ee - community. Here is stable community with advanced diplomacy, traditions but small amount of new players There is something like Wild West. Frontier. Marsians dont like talking they prefer diplomacy with guns also i thinck what our alliancies much stronger than ee alliances;)