Well, those numbers I got from the first Thalmarkin versus Melhed war, which is already quite a while ago but did strike me as too easy for the Thalmarkin (40 nobles) side. It was from before the region rebalance iirc so I'm not sure how helpful that actually is. If you've still got those data, Thalmarkin had the same regions, about 30% less population, relatively weak RCs and Melhed had everything east of the mountains, south of the river, north of Marpii and uber RCs.
I have been taking that experience into account ever since and it's pretty much the reason we decided not to just attack one realm anymore but design a way to even out the odds.
There's also Luria on Dwilight, there may be other factors but I believe it's mostly the noble amount that is winning this war for us.
The thing is, everyone has enough gold nowadays, so every extra noble you have is pretty much an extra 1000 CS to add to your army. Only if you lose do you then run into gold problems.
I think Melhed had poor density, which influences the outcome significantly. For example, D'Hara's odds against a realm with 40 nobles would not drastically increase by adding nobles there, because they already have 26 nobles crammed into 9 regions. Though it isn't so, most of these estates should be pretty much optimizable. Melhed would have gained a lot more strength with more nobles, however, as the land could have held many more knights, thus giving the edge to Thalmarkin. The regions Melhed had might have had good base stats, but could not be optimized due to low density, thus providing a mean income per knight that probably wasn't all that much better than Thalmarkin's.
