I played Travain for a while. It's fun, but still very civ style, and with a handful of issues (Which they may or may not have fixed since the last time I played).

Tick based as it is makes it fair overall for players of strategy games. You have X many minutes, hours, days before the next move, so you can plan and prepare. The negative impact, of course, is that sometimes you will be asleep, at work, or who knows when your next clear 'need to input action' tick is.

The groups are supposed to be somewhat balanced, but I never noticed it. Gauls are mid game, Huns are early game, and romans are late game. The problem being that if anyone with Huns is nearby... they will send a massive wave of soldiers to steal everything. And even with as many upgrades to your hiding spot (Which lets you keep supplies after a raid) Eventually they get siege weapons. Which lets them destroy buildings. Basically, the huns are the Zerg Rush in Travain. This is most notable when you're new or relatively new, and are near a person who's semi-pro at the game. I too was 'milked' for my supplies by a local hun as often as he could. Right up until i deleted my account for being unable to pay for everything for the past day. Since he could just keep sending huge waves of cheap clubmen.

Overall, it's a nice game, strategy, a bit of city building, planning... but expect to be completely owned by people who have more time online and much more experience than you.

I tried it for about a week in early December.  Then the holidays came and I didn't have the time to sit around waiting for trees to be cut down, or whatever.  So after the new year I tried to log back on (a challenge because you have to remember which server you were on!) and discovered that "due to inactivity" my account had been dumped.  The only way I found that out was from a few emails back and forth with their tech guys, they are wonderfully helpful and responsive!

But I don't want to put in 20 or 30 hours and come back 2 weeks later to find I have to start over from total scratch again.

That is the big problem, because you have to wait long periods of time for tasks to be accomplished, and as there are not a lot of other things you can do (at least early in the game), you are tempted to go to  other sites while tasks are being completed.

And it does appear that unless you are quick to build alliances as soon as your safety period is over, you will get zapped out of existence.  ;P