I find the world configuration to be influencing alliance style and tactics and team organizing principles which is very interesting to me.
Perhaps it is the world speed (3), which seems to encourage certain types of tactics to emerge leading to more individual driven fighting, and alliances which are working groups more than organized teams. A few observations:
1) seem to have more individual fights, with some support from the team either ad hoc or after the fact.
2) people seem to be willing to throw men into attacks and defenses more carelessly versus slower worlds (my first world was a speed one world).
For example, with a slow world I saw much more of the winning teams using organized ops with more care and precision, but perhaps they had to. Farming was more critical to gain resource advantages needed, as were good use of spells. It took so long to rebuild nukes and favor, that you didn't want any of it thrown away. Also, you needed to organize the team to not lose cities or battles as they really mattered.
For example, CS attacks would be very likely to face active defense unless you were very close, so colonizing or penetrating an island was very critical. Good players could almost always dodge and time a snipe, whether offensive or defensive. So you had to plan your run to assume either both 2k of defenders within 10 sec of the cs or a back attack. If you cleared the city ahead of time you knew it was unlikely to rebuild, so that worked for inactive players, but good players could defend a city many times with all the warning time. Accordingly, timing had to be precise and we used double cs attacks to foil the snipes.
Speed three seems to me to allow much more easy wins by studying a players down times and by using surprise or brute force, as you can win by catching even an excellent tactical player when the defender is not online from decently far away. Likewise team help is less likely to arrive in time, so the forum posts about incoming cs or attacks are less organized or precise that I have seen. Do others also observe this about the teams?
Overall though I have seen the teams that I expected to rise to the top pretty much get there. More merges will happen, but really it is up to each player and team to shape this worlds end. DA certainly seems to encourage diversity, good play and fun that I see.