Why does ZK use a server in Canada?

I played BAR on a European server with a ping of 150, and also played on a US server where I had a ping of 300. You can see the difference and it's huge, there is a delay between commands for units. It got to the point where playing on a US server is not profitable in terms of micro. At the same time, micro in BAR matters only at the beginning of the game, everything else is irrelevant, you just throw a bunch of units and it does shit. In ZK, micro always matters. All players from Europe have shitty ping by default.

For what reason is there no support for 2 servers, for example USA and EU?

quote: In ZK, micro always matters. All players from Europe have shitty ping by default.

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Serious answer: I do not think that ZK has the required community size to split across two servers.

quote: I could be wrong, but my understanding is ZK games are peer to peer without a dedicated server as a middleman, so your ping is dependent on your connection to your opponents.

There is a dedicated network servers that mostly manages sending the issued commands to the other players. The server does not run its own simulation (so in that sense there is no dedicated server) but everyone connects to a server to send his own commands (think of mouse clicks) and receives other's players commands at once.

This way the server can also save the replay (which basically is the list of commands players issued in order, which is why the replay is quite small but you can't just go to a certain time: you computer must (re)simulate everything that happened before). The server will also check if every client is "in sync" - based on a checksum - it detects if for example one client's simulation is not like all the others. The odd one will get a "sync error message".