That's one thing some players just don't understand. This game is not about winning. It's about making it interesting for everyone. Something Astrum and Morek players will never ever understand.
"You play in Astrum/Morek, therefore you don't understand the game. You should all just quit so the rest of us can have fun."Huh... wow. Not even a broad brush can apply all that paint all at once. You'd need, like, a 480VAC power sprayer to deliver that much.
Look, you were doing great in your first few sentences. At least in part. Then you tossed in that last zinger, and lost all credibility.
BattleMaster is a quite complicated game. It's about a lot of things. In a way, it
is about winning. And it is
also about losing. And also about that squishy, vague area between these two extremes. You can win all kinds of things. It's the triumphs and the losses that give the game so much meaning. without the consequences to your actions, the game would be bland and boring. It would take the grandstanding and soapboxing commonly seen on the ruler's channel, and spread it out across the entire game. We'd all be marching back and forth across the same tired landscape screaming about how your father smelt of elderberries, knowing that no matter what happens, we can't
really lose anything of importance,our enemies will always forgive us.
One of the key facets of BattleMaster is the fact that
your actions have consequences. The butcher
will present the bill. You
can lose everything. Make the wrong choice, and your entire realm
can be wiped out. This is the spice that makes the stew worth eating. Would you really want to play a game where no matter what you did, your adversary always stopped
just a hair from wiping you out, and let you recover your strength so you could just do it all over again next week?
That brings us to one of the other key facets of the game: The actions that you take now
will come back to bite your ass in the future. The game has a persistent history. Little insults and minor struggles can blow up to be major conflicts. Each little poke of the stick may be small. Put them together and they add up to a whole lot of pissed off. This goes both ways. In this war, Astrum did take the shot, and wiped out Asylon. Now you have a lot of pissed off ex-Asylonians who will probably spread out, and take those grudges with them. I wouldn't be surprised if several of them eventually lead a push that slams Astrum hard at some time in the future, possibly wiping them out, too.
No matter how it plays out, whether your realm wins or loses, you need to take it in stride. Ride the event for all its worth. When it's done, move on somewhere else. Regroup. Rebuild. Bring the fight back under a new banner. Or raise your old banner again, and show them bastards that they made a mistake.
But don't come here onto the forums complaining about how the players on the other side are mean puppy-kickers who steal candy from babies. Keep all that acrimony in-character.