I haven't looked closely at any of the numbers, but--if it helps--the math seems off as it relates to money needed. For context, I currently have about 150k points after spending maybe $100 (and not all of that even went to speedups). I'm still sitting on about 26000 more points in speedups as...
Adding to all of the stuff above, and for context, we were matched against a 30v30 lineup which has a Space Age L260 base in the #30 spot. Our guy at #10 is his peer in our lineup, more or less. War in progress, current score 85-9. Good times.
It appears that the technique, in practice, involves a highly specific strategy of doing it as blatantly as possible over several months and without much worry of punishment at all.
Our #1 (Space Age, level 304 with a Bazooka Sentry) was cleared by the enemy #18 in our current war, after many of their bases also increased and decreased in age at will during Planning Day. Good times
The war matching is also being actively manipulated via code (likely in an effort to exploit this Space Age weighting issue mentioned above), I just don't know how it's done. Yesterday we paired with a Russian alliance (30v30), immediately after being paired we saw they had 29 Space Age bases...
There was a period (maybe December? January? Somewhere around there) when EVERY matchup was even, all of our wars were won or lost by less then ten points and everyone had to burn through troop tactics to remain competitive. I imagine it shouldn't be hard for Nexon to revert back to that...
Worker-hours remain the game's most valuable and rare resource generally; with this, it seems very difficult to justify any strategy that does NOT take advantage of an instant Town Center upgrade.
Romans isn't really +1 HT, though--it's +1 HT *minus* whatever you take away to make enough room to fit that HT. It's an extra fifteen spaces for advanced players; I can't think of ANY fifteen-space troop assortment that comes close to the value that Germans bring. Even if it WERE twenty-four...
Adding to what is above re: if a building upgrade finishes--the extra workers also disappear when other university researches finish (you'll find that a portion of newly-freed workers end up joining whatever the extra workers were working on, so the numbers start to balance and bring you back to...
The mismatches will almost certainly be posted here more often than they actually occur game-wide. Surely Nexon has a better way of seeing which alliances face each other?