Darka spreads propaganda against CE all the time. It's not so great to be on the receiving end, is it?
Before Eston's surrender, Darka was fielding ~30k CS, and Eston was fielding ~20k CS at most.
After Eston's surrender, I've seen Darka field as much as 50k CS.
Unless every single Estonite knight joined Darka while I wasn't looking, Darka was withholding reserves from Eston.
And don't tell me the difference in CS was from new nobles. They can't recruit that many men.
That depends, are they newly created, or did they emigrate? Also, I will point out that my brand new, wet-behind-the-ears Cagilan noble with all of 20 honor and 4 prestige is, as of this very moment, fielding 45 archers with 527 CS, and that's not even as many men as he can field at his maximum (the military advisor says he could recruit up to 50). If they're not trying to field Cavalry or SF, new nobles can recruit a plenty big unit, provided they are well funded enough to do it. And Darka's got more than enough funds. As far as character numbers go, you can plainly see a recent spike in Darka's numbers. They went from 74 five weeks ago to a high of 88 about two weeks ago. As of the most recent statistics available, they still have 86.
I sincerely doubt Darka ever kept anything back on purpose; it's simply human nature to lose interest in a war when you're routinely marching 5 days to even get to the front, as Darka was when they were fighting in Hammarsett. My bet is that some players were simply apathetic and didn't bother to put in much effort to march with the army or recruit up to their maximum due to the tedium of the experience for much of the war. Perth is right; the situation now that Eston is defeated is much more urgent and close to home, and Darkan players are responding by being more engaged. And then there is the increased emigration/character creation for the reasons others have specified, and those characters are surely engaged or they wouldn't have come in the first place.
