Just finished reading through all these pages. In between replacing my bullshit-detector several times I almost choked to death laughing. So many Strat experts giving us their collective wisdom on how to wipe inactive and terribly weak UIF in no-time. Right.
Between Grey Order and Druzhina alone are 50.000 tickets that need killing, behind huge stone walls. Our last survey is already around two month old, so numbers were lower. But even then we estimated (a somewhat optimistic estimate) that wiping Druzhina alone would require 100.000-150.000 tickets and 75+ million gold. Based on average losses against heavily defended fiefs of 1/3 more than the defender loses. If anyone thinks you can really take a well stocked castle or city, defended by a player faction which knows their strat, in one go or even get consistently 1:1 or better K/Ds you have no clue about Strat at all. Maybe some people should take the reaility of the current Strat mechanics into consideration before they so graciously advise us with their brilliant plans how best to press the "I win" button.
Which leads me to the next funny fact. How many of you dick waving forum strategists have ever tried what we are trying? Taking down a faction the size, skill and with the resources of Grey Order or Druzhina have? No one, not even the UIF itself. Apart from the Strat 1 grand templar feast, which was pushover more akin to looting a corpse then fighting a war, all UIF ever did (with the exception of the DRZvsFCC war in Strat2) is roflstomping isolated weaker foes with overwhelming numbers and resources (f.e. DRZ&friends vs Mercs in Strat 3).
And of course there is the issue with the UIF running their trade and their armies with the help of organised large scale cheating. For all we know this has been going on for two years. Way to go!
The Shu Han issue is less black and white than our resident forum warriors make it out to be. After Occitan decided to go back to NA and the entire area from Yalen to Veluca was basically up for grabs without a fight, we warned the Templars not to grab all these fiefs, maybe except for holding the city and Marras Castle, not primarily because we are so kind hearted, but because they were overextending thereby reducing their overall efficiency and just looked greedy. We did help Shu Han set up in the old Bashi lands, talked to our allies to leave them in peace (some were a bit itchy about so many of them being former Nords), gave them the village we had in the area, told them they are welcome to buy gear in our lands, turned a blind eye to them trading with DRZ, after all we could not give them an alternative with our s&d already allocated, and made a NAP with them. Around one week before this war started I was talking with Bagge on Steam about future possibilities, we even touched the subject of the Templar lands, and if us being in an alliance with them was not enough to predict our reaction it should have been clear after this chat. We are still not hellbent on destroying you, but we won't let an attack on our ally go unanswered, not only because we need them against our enemies, but also on principle. We would be pretty shitty allies if we did not help after being asked. That said, like always we tried to consider all possibilities and entertained the thought to let you two duke it out for a while. Although it would have been rather unbalanced, and not in the Templars favour.
I really don't expect any of the resident heroes to even try to look at what is going on with a more realistic approach and a less biased black&white attitude, but in the end we don't really give a fuck about what anyone of you writes or thinks anyway.
