What happened to Roleplay?

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TL;DR: What happened to it? It was pretty popular back when I was a kid.

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Alright, I've managed to play this game again for couple of months now. It's really cool as I remember it to be through out my childhood. Although I remembered something recently. I've never been a competitive guy nor was I good player. Hell, I probably had at most 10 online matches. Rather than this, me and my friends used to play 'roleplay scenarios'. Let me explain to those that don't remember/know:

-You could become whatever you wanted (barbarians, empire, colony of a bigger empire [if they were fine with it], little town, tribe, etc..).

-You'd create a standard map with your desired population and size.

-You would take however much time you wanted to play the game and advance through the ages.

-While doing all of this you'd be in a call (or chat) with your friends (or strangers). You would communicate depending on the seriousness of the game (it would scale from 'mess around' to 'realistic D&D' game levels of seriousness depending on the rules and people you're playing).

-Any kind of trade, building (outside of your [not literal] borders), alliance, war, supplement would be discussed and wouldn't happen without it getting accepted by both sides (unless you wanted war!).

-You would have to play with whatever the current situation would be. Maybe you'd be very slow at your advancements so you would be considered a primitive tribe in-role. Maybe you'd be really fast and strong so most of the kingdoms would be bound to you.

-This would continue until people wanted to leave (or win [pretty rare from my experience]).

It was pretty fun and it actually felt like you were leading a kingdom which sadly I don't get the same feel from the actual game. It generally feels like a little camp site you build before you attack your enemy. When you have all the time you need though, you could create a campaign level of a city that geniunly feels like a city. It was so fun!

It was somewhat popular back when I used to play it. I don't see any lobbies like that anymore. Did the community die? I mean I've seen some posts and stuff but I don't even know how many of them actually did it.