The difference is Chénier, I was being serious without need of idle boast and self complimenting auto fellatio as opposed to your passive aggressive sarcasm.
We knew it would annoy you more to just ignore your defence of Paisly entirely, as you seemed so set in the belief Aurvandil valued Paisly enough to warrant an attack regardless of the situation. We had you bottled in Paisly, which allowed us to raid Terran whilst you were too impotent to do anything about it, even as a combined army, we even forced Terran to return home by sea rather than land. It was a perfect strategic position for us, why bother attacking a low priority target like Paisly? Instead of securing Paisland and raiding Terran, to the shame of the allied forces in Paisly? Besides which, an attack on Paisly would have worked well for Aurvandil, as I recall you barely had any infantry on the walls, so once the Chevaliers reached the walls it would be an easy fight.
Quite simply we saw the effort you were putting into the defence of Paisly and considered it a great jest to circumvent it and render it quite irrelevant by not validating it with an assault. You don't value the stratagem behind it, you trapped yourself in Paisly whilst we held Paisland stopping you from leaving, then looted Terran at our leisure and left when we felt like it, leaving your combined army redundant for the entire campaign. Which, to us was both strategically sound (We trapped you in your own region and made you irrelevant for an entire campaign) and amusing (Thwarting your efforts and mocking them by trapping you in your own defence) and to an extent, it was done to antagonise D'Hara over their attack on the Provincia, it was almost a declaration of "We aren't even mad that you destroyed it, we'll recreate it when it pleases us not when you think we should" and as an extension, Aurvandil doesn't like to be predictable, and it would have been predictable to lay a siege any observer could have foretold weeks in advance.
You should remember, Mendicant likes to amuse himself with jests particularly in war, and Aurvandil likes to be unexpected and do something to the ire of their opponents, and of course, we feel perfectly secure in our current position to do this kind of thing, after everything we feel that we can drag this war out as long as we like though the longevity of this war thus far has been due to the impotence of our armies to bring a swift conclusion and Mendicant's diplomacy to secure peace. That said, another thing is, Aurvandil doesn't know why it fights, we fight because we can't get peace, but we don't particularly fight for any objective, but because we have to otherwise our enemies will take liberty of absence in battle, so our quite bipolar military policy in the war reflects that. We are an army that fights because we don't know how to get peace, which is no way to fight.
You could get peace by stepping down, renouncing your whole culture, converting to an extant religion, executing your current council, and swearing to become a republic.
Cheers!
