Apologies for coming late to the party but figured I'd just confirm the official stance from Fallen (warning - includes some hard truths and opinions, but I'm inactive so i don't care anymore
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Early Strat 4 was actually quite fun. We had an alliance similar is size to the UIF and actually looked like we would be able to fight back although we always knew and accepted that full conquest was always unlikely. Then the fail started.
First we had Kinngrimm pulling every small clan that ever existed into his alliance thereby unofficially making them part of the Anti-UIF. They were never part of it in our eyes and we wouldn't have lifted a finger to help them, but other small clans couldn't know this for certain and so they themselves felt the need to join the stupid block war. It would have been nice if all these other clans had fought amongst themselves. There was certainly enough room for it with the current Strat mechanics but unfortunately the usual paranoia kicked in.
Then we had the Templol greed in taking over Yalen. We took and held Veluca to hinder UIF trade. Templols took an isolated corner of the map that was completely cut off from their other fiefs for nothing other than e-peen and it cost us.
Meanwhile we had the utter lack of Merc organisation. Haboe at least tried but I guess with it being Mercs it was always a no-win situation. In the end the only Merc armies that made it into the Uxkhal war were the ones that Coalition members picked up and led ourselves. When the Mercs finally did get organised they started a war with our own side instead pushing yet more clans and resources towards the UIF.
This was quickly followed up by the utter incompetence of gifting over half the resources of the Anti-UIF to the UIF through capped fiefs. Suddenly we went from an even footing with the UIF to being completely out-resourced. Naturally these extra UIF resources came straight at us and we had the month of hell where it wasn't just 1 battle a night, every night like at Uxkhal, it was 2 and sometimes 3 or even 4.
Put simply - people burned out. Moving crap around the strat map has never been fun but the XP and the battles used to make up for it. This was no longer the case though and activity plummeted. We tried to find new people willing to take on responsibility but they either weren't up to the task or didn't have the time for it. This is still the case in Fallen. We haven't had a real Leader for months now and it shows on the cRPG servers.
This is why we are burning our resources - if we try to fight on all we will be doing is feeding yet more resources to the UIF who will use them to stomp other small clans. Giving resources to small clans would have been a nice option but quite frankly it would have been a death sentence to the clans. The UIF would have just gone for them next and I doubt there's a small clan out there capable of actually holding onto the resources long enough to do anything with them. At least with Segd we were fairly certain that he would honour his agreement to use the resources on XP battles which we could join in on. We hoped that this was a sign the the UIF was getting bored itself and starting to break up. Maybe not to the point where they would actually attack each other, but at least to a point where they don't have to hold each others hands when taking a piss. Clearly we were wrong. Thanks for trying though Segd
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