Oct 12th 2014, 0:26:20
Well, perhaps I'm a bit harsh on you in particular. There are people that come on here and fluff about this every few months.
Alliance, Free For All, and Team are your alliance-based servers (although Team has teams of up to 5 only), whereas the others are solo servers.
If you want to find success in Alliance or Free For All, the best way is to join one of the alliances or try to start your own (but start with making a tag to put your countries in and let everyone know who you are). As mrford said, there's so much possibility for one person with 16 countries to do serious damage, so for the most part, we're a bit suspicious of untagged countries, especially if they seem to have an aggressive build to them.
If you want to play solo and don't want to tag up (or aren't planning on playing multiple countries) you're probably better off playing one of the other three solo servers.