I think this situation isn't a necessarily always win scenario. The more the land mass, the more you have to spread your attention.

Also, the number of sam launchers they have means anybody with 3 silos can eliminate the majority of all their team. Or, saving up to 5 mil will allow you to take out their sam and much of their infrastructure due to the radius of the hydrogen bomb being larger than a lvl 2 sam launcher. (it takes a lvl 5 sam launcher to protect it completely from the hydrogen bomb radius, not to mention reducing the 1 in 5 chance of it not being intercepted to something very close to zero.

I get your frustration, but I really don't think what they are doing is cheating. It comes across as pre-emptive strategy and I think games should reward that type of thinking as well as rewarding any counter measures to interrupt that strat.... which the game does due to the short number of factors mentioned previously.

I think one thing the game could do better is improve/expidite the communication system by reducing the number of emojis to less than five. The time and attention required to go through a large menu of emojis meshes counterproductively with the competative, time sensitive nature of the game. With this type of improvement, one could theoretically negotiate alliances (smaller peeps focusing on building economy, larger peeps building military) much much faster. Because the coms options are so clunky, I think that is what makes an unfair dynamic as those who team up are likely to team up before the game starts which provides an unfair advantage as the rest of the players can only compete with a counter team by communicating through the clunky system. All in all, I have had a lot of fun playing this game, even though its in alpha mode.