I don't know what lew has been doing elsewhere on TW
His views and arguments have certainly improved over the last couple of years though.
Snappy's got a point too.
he obviously found out that mass pushing, families, perm sats don't win a war and they certainly slow those active players down and cause inefficiencies. So, yes they do slow the world down as does barb nobling.
The only thing that speeds up the game is pure war full stop. Don't kid yourselves, there's no easy way round it.
I have many times in the distant past registered the belief that the one and only serious factor in this game is TIME.
Not only how much you can devote to your account by also how efficiently you use it.
This is equally true whether you have 1 village or 3000 villages.
Sitting other accounts, keeping more than one account (in the same or different worlds), posting/reading internal and WF, messaging, plotting, building fancy nukes/defenses and most of all Skyping may be fun but also detrimental to your game.
Want the game to finish fast? Noble the enemy and when you're done make another enemy and repeat the process. In order to do that you only need to recruit wisely. No friends of friends - only dedicated players who spend time here and learned the few basics necessary right form the start.
When you cut weeds they grow back unless of course you take the root out.
This is the ideal. What happens in practice is that we hide behind tribes and tend to personal survival, control freak tendencies and climbing up OD and other fancy looking ranking tables to satisfy vanity or RL insecurities. All in the name of tribal loyalty, collective effort and friendship. Unfortunately I have seen plenty of talk but very little evidence of such qualities in TW.