dictator and tyranny are war strats. people dont net with war strats, thats why you dont see many of them on solo servers. they are rampant on alliance servers in clans who war. Dict does have a buildings gained bonus, which makes it an efficient grabber, bur was recently nerfed and its not a large advantage anymore.

and the reason they have spied out is because you cant buy spies. imagine the suicider implications on an alliance server if spy ops just had DRs. even at min returns, if you had enough turns, you could still spy kill. it changes the entire dynamic of the game. the only way you could wall would be to drop mass amounts of land, and run turns.