TEARS I DEMAND AN EXPLANATION!
Honestly?
We got bored and changed our minds on what we wanted to do in Strategus.
All current and previous relations still stand unless noted or we changed our mind which may or may not include a public notice (Teutonics are still a valued ally, obviously, as for everyone else you can freely speculate as you wish or contact us for possible clarification or wait for us to make a clarification if we deem it neccessary).
Us getting bored? Only on Coalition and Fallen forums.
Us and Teutonics? Very much so.
I'll elaborate on the boredom a little bit.
NA Fallen is small. Very small. As we've talked about elsewhere, we were entirely alone this Strat, excepting cross-border trades and that we one time went into EU lands to buy equipment from EU Coalition (paying full price). We never actually used that equipment in any battles, however. Everything we've used to this point has been accumulated on NA side alone.
But we're small. When you're small, there's still a baseline amount of work that has to get done to operate effectively and few people to spread that work out to. We're mostly older players, graduate students and full-time workers. Average age is around 25-26. The "input" of work wasn't matching the "output" of enjoyment, especially since so much was done by so few (SmilingDaemon and Tears specifically).
We've kept it a secret until now as it could do us no good to release it, but at our peak membership we were only 22 people large, but that dwindled down to only 12 quickly and then about 8-10 for the past month. And calling those 8-10 "active" is being extremely generous- real life called, from our families at holiday season to busy days at work to graduate student final exams, so we had more important priorities.
Let's rewind a minute.
We felt a surge of malicious pleasure at our attacks on KUTT, and we were further enflamed immediately thereafter by the four other clans that followed suit in declaring war against it. We kicked into high gear and the small group of us put in a lot of effort: ensuring we had supplies in time, getting our traders into safer routes, managing our scrambled traders to pile gold to buy gear on the EU side, and more TS-hopping dealing than I care to think about.
Then what? It took our legion enemies two weeks plus to actually attack us. I'm still not sure what the hell took you guys so long. But we had the fun battles we had long hoped for, despite the uncertainty of our situation.
But instead of the post-battle high, we still didn't have the manpower to mount an offensive without getting pummeled by the wandering hero_party, Occitan, Chaos, or Pale Horsemen outside of Tilbaut. With no enemy willing to attack us, we realized that we simply didn't have the interest in devoting all the time it would take to make an effective counterattack work.
So we said to hell with it. If we get the inclination, we'll move some of our resources into dicking around on the NA side, but I wouldn't count on it. Until then, we've decided to say "fuck it" and bank our assets with our EU brothers who can surely put them to use fighting more interesting enemies.
Said another way, we got bored of the content of the game. When all we can do is defend and nobody will attack us whatever the reason may be, there's no content to be interested in.
"What does this mean for me?"
This also means NA will probably un-diversify from our current setup: 8 of our 10 players are melee'ers. Which means we'll go back to being majority NA archers. Why?
It was simple, really. Back in January 2011, NA consisted of about 6 players. Fallen was led by Loki, an NA guy, but most of our enemies were EU, and we usually fought on EU servers. For archery, ping matters far less, so the six of us decided to go archer as everyone else fled the nerfs from early January. We found a way to make archery work, and our trick was blindingly simple: teamwork. The NA Archer Death Squad was born. Our EU counterparts are actually mostly melee, especially counting in the HRE (who are basically Fallen, but separated because they speak their native German). Fallen_Cyber, Fallen_Bazinga, Fallen_Torben - all three are some of the top melee/cav players out there. And that's just a sampling.
NA Archers were the natural compliment to EU's melee prowess. Not convinced? See the Summer 2011's 50v50 tournament where we went undefeated.
But now we don't need to fight our own battles, we'll be fighting in other people's, from EU Coalition to NA friends. We don't need our own NA melee anymore.
NA Archer Death Squad is coming back, suckers. 8-)