The only thing relevant to your decision making to know what was the best decision was that you were in a perpetual stalemate with little viable way of breaking it. You should have made peace even without access to any of the information I had. I was also referencing a different issue and a different time when Merlin made his offer. Of your three options, you could either make peace, fight a stalemate, or attack Coria. You chose to attack Coria which is fine, but since no one wants to fight a stalemate, I'd have chosen to make peace. Even assuming I didn't know any of this information.
The northern war was lost once the southern war collapsed.
Your analysis is accurate as far as it goes, but the problem is that it has the benefit of hindsight and it seems to me that your memory about the sequence of events at the time is hazy at best, though I suppose I could be the one who's wrong on the particulars.
At the time in question the stalemate didn't appear to be perpetual, and Carelia hadn't yet collapsed. Half the rationale for what was done was to get Tara off the western front so that the pressure on the Empire from that side could be increased and possibly help Carelia catch its breath. Obviously that's not how it worked out, but at the time we still thought there was a chance that we could turn things around and break the stalemate in our favor
with Carelia's help. As for Merlin's offer, I don't recall ever hearing anything about it, so again, irrelevant to Hammarsett's decision making.
