I do wonder what might have been had Mesh gone all the way and made an alliance with the Monsters. Instead, she had a short dalliance with the idea and then rejected it as she did not wish to sacrifice her populace. She wanted Monster help without offering them any benefits. To be fair, if I recall rightly they did ask for Mesh to abandon her democratic heritage for a single reliable King the Monsters could work with during invasion, but in the face of annihilation, was it so unreasonable?
At any rate, Mesh couldn't bring herself to support the Monsters proposal. The small contingent of monsters that had gathered around Twillen and the monster lord that brought them disappeared even as the daimons advanced. I think it's interesting that part of the decision, aside from appointing a King, rested on the loss of strength that would go with sacrificing half of Mesh' populace to the monsters, but rejecting monster alliance is essentially what condemned the entire populace of Mesh to blight and destruction.
Did so swiftly swallowing up Heen and Mesh essentially deliver an unassailable daimonic dominance over other factions, human or otherwise? All the factions seem to gain strength from taking human regions and bleeding the local populace dry and almost from the outbreak of Invasion, the Netherworld had most of Western Beluaterra under its thumb. Due, almost entirely, you could argue, to the intransigence and short-sightedness of Heen and Mesh in their respective approaches to the Invasion.
My understanding was that the different factions had different recruitment methods. Granted, the result was the same for undead and monsters. The undead killed to create more undead while the monsters used people as food. Daimons didn't seem to need to depopulate regions to get reinforcements. My impression was more that they had a limited number of troops to draw from and/or a limit on how many at a time. Almost makes me think of Starcraft...(Daimons = Protoss, Undead = Zerg, Monsters = Terran).
If I remember correctly Mesh was destroyed before the blight had appeared or at least after we had already rejected the Monsters. Certainly before we understood what it meant.
As the Daimons tore through Heen, the Monsters had split their forces with most in the south and only a smaller group around Mesh. Those Monsters were defeated quickly by the Daimons.
So, my opinion is that it wouldn't have made a difference in the end. The Daimons were determined to destroy Mesh. Even if the Monsters had sent more troops Mesh was going to be destroyed by the Daimons or by the Monsters using our lands as a feeding ground for their young.
