You say your attacks will make it so you will expand less? I say Pah. Reason: There will always be a bigger fish. Someone has to be on top, and people have to be lower. Thats duh. So the bigger person attacks the people around him and wins. The people below can't beat him because he gets more land. More resources, more funds. Everything. So literally, mathematically we do have infinite land. And as calculus would have us show, the limit as land goes to infinity of [f(x) being networth] it would trend to infinity as well.
The point is, it's hard for anyone to get up ahead. It takes weeks to add just a few provinces. Maybe a month before the difference from those provinces start to show a real affect. In that time, there's plenty of opportunity for the lower ranked people to get a group together and hammer the top guy. It's not possible to land lock in a day. Think of it like a situation where every gets 50k a run and now somebody starts getting 60k a run. It's going to take a while before that starts making a serious difference, and even if 60k to everybody elses's 50k makes a difference, two people with 50k could probably win a fight with him. Certainly within a few weeks of him making that jump.
I would certainly agree that we have infinite land. I wouldn't be opposed to finite land of some sort, but I don't see infinite land as inherently bad. I certainly don't see why it would be.
Now, throw a curb in there. Its too expensive to expand past a point. What happens? People fight.
What are they fighting for? Land so they can hit the maximum first? To what end? Land that they can't afford? Why in their right minds? Some other quantity - resources or something? That may be good, but you haven't proposed it. I've also not heard a system where the risk of fighting over resources is worth the risk of inciting a war, at least not something here.
I've yet to see how a curb on empire size wouldn't just lead everybody to HPR build to that limit, then HPR beyond it. Either the curb is just something that slows but does not stop empire growth, which doesn't provide any incentive one way or the other for war, and leaves us with infinite land (which I have no problem with) or something that chokes growth up hard at a certain point (i.e, 45 - 50 provinces, dependent on economy strength, and leaves people with no incentive for conquest beyond that point.
The problem I see with finite land is how to make it not favor established empires over newbies. Games that use finite land usually presuppose simultaneous starts. You could argue from games like Travian, I suppose, but Travian has near infinite, if not actually infinite land - I doubt you'd ever see a situation where individuals or clans go to war because there isn't room for peaceful expansion.
You could, I suppose, split provinces off larger empires to create new empires, but you still need a way to supply people with provinces: otherwise, you (could) end up with all the empires stripped down to "new empire" size and no way to add players.
You could add a certain amount of land for each player, but that land would have to be only available to that player: otherwise, it would be very much biased towards oldbies.
Ditto with making provinces come available from time to time for settlement - and especially so if those provinces were defended. Oldbies really have the advantage there.
I honestly think "infinite land" is the best way to go. Nothing to say we can't have increasing expenses, but something that presents a de-facto cap on what people can reach is a bad idea, from what I can see. Ditto for anything that would have the affect of A) Favoring oldbies in the acquisition of new provinces, and
encouraging attacks on newbies/weaker empires then oneself.
Seriously, though, it just involves changing parts of the code, not so much rewriting from scratch. A lot of the stuff that we (coughBEATLEScough) spent a lot of time coding is still relevant, including all the security and stability improvements.
