look at the server list. have you honestly ever seen anyone on the servers such as "House of pain# 4 by iron soldiers"?? wouldn't it be better if they all invested in one big super-server?
You can say that about corner shops =P But they never combine into some huge hyper-market because they can't be bothered.
You cant combine all of them together, it would be a disaster If even now most clans are grinding against eachother... imagine if all of them were always on one server, and had absolutley no choice... The tention would build to such a point that you could BBQ Something from 5 threads away...
I don't think a super server would really be possible, with the server software being what it is now...once it is more effcient, and more importantly, can use 2 (or more) processors/cores, then a super server is worth it....but things as they are now, not much can be done to increase the players on the server, other than throwing memory and CPU time at it...which gives marginal returns.
I didn't mean you would begin a huge quest across the globe to find all the servers, then bring them together in some sort of underground frankensteinian laboratory and weld / gaffa-tape / electrify them together. or whatever combination you were imagining.... "IT'S ALIVEEEEEE!" no, I meant that all the people who owned these servers invested their money in buying a better, more powerful server. that would work, right?
Again, no. I'll elaborate on my previous post: Most "servers" involve multiple processors, and a lot of RAM. Doing servers has become a lot easier now with dual core processors. In past, multiple processors meant a bank of RAM per processor...dual core allows a single bank per 2 procs, and so on. So not, instead of having to buy a motherboard that can handle 4 processors, well...buy a 2 proc motherboard, and get dual cores. While THAT adds up to a good server, having dual core processors does not mean that the two processors/cores add up to a single massive processor....but rather, that each core is its own processor. A dual core processor running at 3 GHz does not mean the processor performs like a 6 GHz processor. Instead, each processor gets its own tasks...if a program is made to be multithreaded, that means it can use more than a single processor...so a single program can utilize X processors at once, to accomplish its tasks faster. However, if the program is single threaded, that means it can only use 1 processor at a time....and if you have 10 processors, the other 9 sit unused by that program. Keep the above in mind now, that the empires server software is only single threaded....so the only way to make a "super" server is to put the fastest processor in there you can find (you can make it dual core, but like I said...the second core won't get used...but its a good investment for when the empires server is compiled to be multithreaded.) In the case of simply throwing clock cycles at the problem....you won't get much of an improvement if you go from a 3.0 GHz processor to a 3.5 GHz processor.
Besides all the above some people like to set up their servers differently. For example some servers have the building limit turned off and others even change the research times.
