Hey man, dont give them the inside secrets to strategus. Let them keep their strategy of non-aggression in the middle of a war.
Right, so you want us to divide our troops and equipment up so that we can put up a fight at each village? I sure as hell hope you're not involved in any strategic planning for your faction/clan/kingdom/alliance. Well considering you're an enemy, I do hope you're involved in strategic aspects of your armies movements.
To put things in perspective you are 5 clans (ATS, Eastern Tsardom, Hospitaller, Occitan, and Lost Legion)
ATS and Hospitallers are both pretty big. We have maybe 30 active people (at most) in Hospitallers, probably closer to 20. ATS is probably the biggest clan, I'm not sure how many people they have, but it's certainly under 75 or 100 (probably way overshooting there). Occitan and TS are both pretty small clans as well. I don't think we have the numbers that some other factions do (especially not when those factions have a 4 and 5 strong coalition with each element being as big as all of the northern empire).
so it wasn't overwhelming odds (certainly no more then when we were facing RuConquista, Mercenaries, Bandits, ARNOR, Brothers in Arms, CotgS, and Wolves as well as having several large EU clans feeding Mercs troops (probably to see EU beat the NA in the only war going on, while our largest NA neighbor didnt give a single troop or offer any alliance, wanting strict neutrality).
I wish we would have taken a stand for one side or the other...at least we'd have an ally in the fight. But I'm not part of diplomacy, I'm pretty new to strategus and the factions in it.
If we hadn't fought tooth and nail it would never have given Chaos the opportunity to join our cause and come to a peace treaty. By rolling over and dying you never allowed your enemies to weaken themselves to the point where hungry eyes on their borders started talking about joining the war on your side. You lost 2 major battles and ATS just gave up??? Of course no one wanted to join your side, what person would want an ally like that?
I don't think ATS gave up. After losing most of the troops and money they didn't have a choice to defend each village. If I was in a leadership role I would have been looking for allies (or at least to entice other clans) that are near our attacking enemies borders, that they could probably pick away at our enemies borders since they are engaged in our territory.
When you have 4 or 5 times as many enemies attacking your territory from all sides, you have to decide what is a priority. Keeping troops and money and equipment would be a pretty big priority to me. You might temporarily take a village, but our enemies are now overextending themselves, and leaving themselves open to their own rebellions.