Alright, I get that the information about your player numbers provided by your then enemies might not be entirely correct, seeing as we didn't have a neat player count like we do now. Regardless, it did not seem like the 5 clans that were talked about in the audio file were confident about beating you with anything less than the full support of those 5 clans, so I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have had the slightest chance on their own. Not sure what made LLJK so fearsome then, it clearly wasn't player skill they were worried about, but an alliance seemed neccesary for survival of any of those clans, simply because LLJK was in a seemingly different league, power-wise.
Not supporting any of the cheating, lying and backstabbing, if that took place. But seems like that first alliance was formed because of a threat as much as the LLJK-UIF alliance. I just don't really see why them forming their alliance was so much worse than you forming yours.
Simply put we beat up Acre in a fight and took their fief, and claimed dominion over Shariz and that section of the desert. The shogunate, remembering us from Strategus 1, did not want to have us as neighbors and called in the support of several smaller clans to become puppet states in this area, to squabble amongst themselves after we had been evicted.
It was honestly pretty close, despite 3 of the 5 clans not participating any more than showing up for the fights. With 5 vs 1 it would have been much more difficult. The northern empire didn't do much but that was mainly due to large issues on the homefront.
SoA was our insider, through the leader of the SoA I learned about the plot. They did not help the Shogunate.
The Northern Empire(ATS, Hospitaller, Occitan) brought a 1000 man stack down to fight, I believe they fought at least two battles but they did not send reinforcements and left or were defeated.
The Pecores probably contributed the most, and if they would have waited to start the war with a more solid industrial footing they would have been in a much better position.
The shogunate contributed, but from such a far distance it was slow and they did not invest much in the venture.
The VRN, SeaRaiders, Acre, and other small clans were knocked out as soon as their army even fought a battle as they had no way to replenish their numbers or equipment. The Sea Raiders never even bothered to fight, but constantly had a 1,000 man army ready to attack our southern villages.
LLJK was able to secure victory via many defensive advantages and being able to outlast all other competitors. The villages around Shariz are all very close together, and you could transfer troops/gold/equipment between them without even leaving the fief. Resulting in a daisy chain to put what was needed where it was needed, to more efficiently fight 3 armies at once. Fighting on the home field also gave us a ping advantage, though in those situations the Northern Empire did contribute a lot of mercs.
LLJK also had a large pool of mercs, paying Chaos, FCC, and others to fight for us. In a situation where our battle roster was hacked and we had only LLJK players (and one merc), we lost. Despite having a ticket, advantage and almost the same number of players. With one single goon receiving a score of 0 kills and 50 deaths.
In situations where LLJK was set on the offensive, we mostly lost. It took us months of sieging the Pecores and forcing them to fight at 6am local time 4 nights in a row (the third night was cancelled and delayed a day due to chadz) before we were able to win. And they still managed to cause problems for us after losing their fief, like some terrible french insurgency.
We were also able to snag castles and Shariz in silly fights of 20 men versus 60 due to outright bribery.
We basically won by default since everyone else gave up and Shogunate home territory had been invaded.
Strat 2 was probably the most fun, and I hope Strat 4 has a repeat of those events.
Though the battle i remember most fondly was probably in strat 3, when the HATE clan attacked a 300 strong neutral village with 900 troops and lost.
I can't say much for numbers, but we definitely did not have that many active ones, we had roughly 10 people per fief grinding troops/gold and with 5 fiefs that would put us at around 50. And we had to squeeze those 50 and hound on them daily to turn in their gold and troops to the village so the local lord could transfer them to the three main armies commanded by myself, Gaga, and Smoothrich.
