A quick history lesson:
Strat was supposed to end.
I was rebuilding my merc army when Goretooth of LCO attacked the third member of my 3 man faction, thinking he was going to reinforce Jack_1. I went for revenge, but Goretooth quit by the time I got there. We took villages trying to draw him out, and finally found him in a crime fief with 100 men. I attacked and took his gear.
The Wardens of the North kept on attacing LCO, even though they were AFK. I found that boring, so I attacked Acre, the only remaining active faction.
The Starks went on an AFK attacking Rampage, thinking strat was finished and thought it would be funny to grab a lot of lands.
Acre surrendered, and joined my 'Kingdoms of the North' faction. We attacked Dutchy, and he surrendered and joined us.
We attacked the Wardens, the last strong faction (Starks were just dicking about).
Dutchy and sJimmy rebelled with big clump of armies donated by the euros, so I rage quit (as I promised sJimmy I would do). I do kind of regret it now. After that, Acre got kicked out of the steppes.
Starks start playing more seriously, get attacked by the Wardens while Dutchy declares 'eternal war' on Acre. Starks surrender, I marry Not So Innocent Virgin, and I bring Acre, Merchants of Curaw, Starks and C-Bots into one empire. We fight Dutchy, but with his weekday NTS and sometimes forgetting to change it on the weekends, no one wants to attack him much.
The Curaw incident happens, and HCE goes to war with the Wardens. To make things more interesting, I bully the council into going to war with the Hounds as well.
SO PLUMBO, WHAT FUCKING AFK FACTION DID I, OR KotN, OR HCE EVER ATTACK?
And most castles or cities were taken with one or two sieges, except that hell hole Durrin. And yes, we have always admitted our average fighter isn't as good as most of our enemies. But we won some and we lost some. And we had fun.
Plus we would have attacked more, but it takes a while to build up armies. Especially when NA autobalance was fucked up and people couldn't handle more than two or three rounds before they left in disgust. Plus I was against the idea of people having to hand over their hard earned troops to other people. Anyone who built an army should be able to use it.
Remember, we were trying to get people into strat, so we thought we'd try make it fun for them. So we ran our faction a lot more casually- for us people enjoying the game was more important than winning.