Actually SS, the strategies on Primary and Alliance are quite different. On Alliance, you get to use tag protection and stay really low in NW (eg, 1m turrets on 50k land). This vastly changes stocking.

On Primary, you do not have this luxury, you'll need at least 20-30m turrets. This affects your strategy greatly, so much so that -expenses is the most useful Bonus, unless you go over 70k-80k land or so where then -building cost is better. This obviously has changed last reset where -building cost is considered better now with the new construction costs. Since you're on 30-50m turrets by the time you start stocking, this again vastly changes your stocking options - you're over 40m NW and you cannot use government changes, the last time you can use government changes is usually before your land goes past 20-25k when your NW is still below 12m. There's no such thing as a Theo destock - you have to be Theo all the way to use this.

Another example, on Alliance, you can build 380 CS first, then start your grabbing. No such luck on Primary, if you do this, you'll be so far behind the top indies that once they start bottomfeeding you on day 8 of the reset, you're not getting out of the hole without extreme market conditions (eg $70 food). The better way is to grow gradually and build 20 CS a day instead.

To be competitive on Primary, the goal is never to look land-fat, and not to fall too far behind and get bottomfed. To be competitive on Alliance, the goal is quite different, it is literally "get fat the fastest" followed by some stocking and destocking. Even the grabbing style is different - you want to maximise your gains on Primary from over 100 available targets to choose from (this means you judge their retalling capabilities, humanitarians is 1/4 on Primary), whereas on Alliance you want to maximize your gains by attacking at the right time (when DR exits) and when humanitarians is 1/12, you really don't have to worry about retalling at all.

On Primary, GDI works differently, so to be safe from suicides, you want to hit every country no more than once, so every country you hit, you don't want to hit it again in the future. This affects target selection, by the end of the reset, you'll have hit about 60-100 countries exactly once each, so maximizing your country is about choosing when to hit each country as opposed to farming a few countries multiple times until they hit 7 or 9 DR on Alliance.

Even if your country is in the top 20, if you look landfat, newer players that don't understand that bottomfeeding is usually more efficient (since getting retalled and getting land gains from the 1:1 exchange is worse due to high construction costs) will topfeed you.

The strategies applied are different on alliance/primary, but the core mechanics of how to run a good country that maximizes production are the same. The optimal way to reach there is very different on each server though.

You've never tried to play Primary before, you wouldn't understand this - at least Eugene tried a bit though he didn't really try at all because he had the same mentality that it is an inferior server.