In my post, and previously, I mention adding features that support "micro-competition" within the broader "there-can-be-only-one" game winning competition. Leaderboards would be the simplest, most uninteresting example. Of course I know going in that I'm not going to win the whole thing, but if there were leaderboards I could at least measure my results against my friends (or enemies, or neighbors) and have some feeling of "well, at least I beat that guy this time." You said it yourself, it's a game of hundreds of players. Does it seem at all reasonable or fun that one guy gets a "Congratulations, you win!" message, and 149 just get "You lose, try again next time!" after 2 MONTHS of playing?

Another dead simple example would be to have a large number of "awards" handed out at the end of the game, hopefully designed in such a way that the game winner doesn't get all of them. Even stuff like "Built Most Small Harvesters Award: JetJaguar2000!" would give me something to smile about at the end of it all.

As to your point about artificially limiting game play time, it's not an artificial limit if that's how the game works. If you refuse to play games that you can't spend hours on at a time, that's another issue. I think they could change the mechanics in a variety of ways that make the game slightly more "turn based" on top of the fundamentally realtime gameplay. There are also enough games being launched that if you somehow ran out of stuff to do in one game, there are plenty more to keep you busy.