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It doesn't matter what we do to change military costs, buildings effectiveness, improve the benefits of attacking vs. defending, or try to change people's attitude in general. DPA and OPA will still be constantly rising throughout the round. It's a universal law of Utopia. Let me explain.
In the beginning of the round, all provinces buy some defense because they expect the other provinces to become hostile later. So far so good :) When protection ends, people start attacking eachother. The targets are right from the beginning those provinces that has the lowest DPA. This is natural, because low DPA means landfat, and attacking landfat provinces result in higher gains.
A little into the round the DPA will stabilize at some point 20 DPA (say), because provinces that get hit will raise their DPA, and because the word goes around that 20 DPA is standard right now. (People in general will do/pay anything to avoid being considered an easy target)
Attackers will, in an attempt to keep attacking, raise their OPA to 22 or so. This will after a little while cause a new raise in DPA, and so on and so on. This is the universal law: That for each ACTION there is an equal and opposite REACTION, and in this case it applies to Utopia.
Halfway through the game or so, draft rate and utilization (in the old days draft rate only) sets a natural limit to how much DPA and OPA can be further strengthened. Since every province has to have higher DPA than OPA, it follows that provinces can no longer attack provinces close to their own size. And so they look for smaller targets. This is where we start complaining about the rising DPA.
What happens if we lower the cost of offensive troops? It would improve attacking economies, but it would not affect the DPA race.
What happens if we make Homes house less people? Or more people? None of those would affect the DPA race (but they might change building strategies).
We can cap DPA and OPA, sure that would stop the DPA race, but hardly satisfactory in a strategy war game? (Imagine a province with less than max DPA - what a giveaway)
The ONLY thing I can think of that might work is if we put a stop to random grabs, and have kingdoms fight only one other kingdom at a time. Let me explain that. It would give a province the option of *sometimes* compromising defense, because its enemies would be a strange looking bunch of 25 unequally sized provinces, and not this statistical 'bulk' of 50,000 provinces, all closely monitering its DPA around the clock. In fact this might introduce the element of military tactics into Utopia. - Nasrudin (5-Oct-2000) | 
