..didn't cure cancer, didn't go back in time and prevent obama, didn't fix strategus, didn't... oh, sorry, i got carried away.
1) How and what do you scout with 100 man armies moving about?
2) We bought as much gear as we could afford with the gold we had. Protip: it is really expensive.
3) What good would an army do us?
4) What gear in what fiefs?
5) As for diplomacy, you really have no idea, we have had talks with oh so many people.
The fuck-ups were some micro-management issues and the fact that we all got settled in the center and grew a bit too attached to those fiefs.
We read the situation just fine, you fail to understand how things work in strat. We never could defend our area against UIF, never. The advantage in resources and manpower is just too skewed against us. The problem was that they caught us a bit short of ready to leave and we overestimated our capability to withstand the first wave - or rather underestimated the capability of UIF to throw more and more armies at us and their movement speed.
You never got onto the group skype chat, so you can't really claim to know what is/was going on regarding the ongoing events and what influenced many of the things that were done. The forums simply can't be used for live coordination.
Once again, unrelated to Mercs breaking a non-agression pact and ganking a non-hostile faction, instead of fighting UIF.