There are indeed plenty of discussions of the subject and descriptions of bad games.
Consider the case where one nation expands to a small/moderate size, then just sits there. You ignore them because you're involved in a series of wars, all of which you win through considerable skill and cunning. Your empire expands until you're apparently the inevitable winner. However, it turns out that the turtling nation has been doing nothing but building clams. Every turn he's just loaded up his turn file, forged another couple of clams, recruited a couple of commanders, given last turn's new commanders clams, and moved everyone into his capital. He also put a few domes up over his capital and summoned a load of chaff so the walls are all but unbreakable. Over the course of the game his clam income has allowed him to forge clams faster and faster.
Now at this point you're sure you've won. You certainly deserve to have won, with all the amazing battles you've fought. But in fact you're probably screwed. You've got a "huge" gem income of several tens of gems per turn, but clam boy has more than a hundred and growing. His S9 pretender has woken up and is wishing for gems every turn, then using the water and nature gems to make more clams. You declare war on him and capture all of his provinces apart from the capital in a single turn. But that hasn't helped you at all! His gem income remains almost unaffected. He can sit there as long as he wants. Eventually he will just summon a huge number of SCs (having empowered mages to get the required paths if necessary), equip them all and storm out and massacre you. Before then he could wish for a load of Armageddons so that your gold income is destroyed and it really is just a battle of gems. The longer the game goes on, the greater his advantage, *despite* the fact that you own almost all the map and have played much "better".
This happened lots of times in real life and eventually people got really annoyed.
Edit: An additional factor is that gem gen income doesn't show up on the graphs. So you don't know what the clamming player is doing. You might well assume he's just lost interest in the game or is a noob, sitting there doing nothing every turn while you conquer the world.
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