Barca was given multiple opportunities to avoid death politically by Luria, but stubbornly refused them at every turn. Luria specifically made Aveston the last priority of major townsland/city regions to recover and even as the armies were marching into Aveston, was offering it a way out. It refused.
No you didn't. I never received any actual offer from Luria aside from Ambassador whatshisface being butthurt about us living in his precious Sun Hall and telling us to give up iirc. My demands weren't really that reasonable, but at least I actually made some.
Heh. I used to play in Barca and recruited just about 12 new players to that realm in the end (and those on their turn invited more players). The 'peace deals' we were receiving from Luria and through the Southern League were being stretched and stretched, so much that Barca was trying to fight off hordes of massive monster CS (I think we broke the record at one point). Even when Asylon was already in Corsanctum (and seemed to be making headway), Luria kept wanting to 'negotiate'. There was no option, the leaders of the realm decided we wouldn't die out fighting monster hordes, if we kept 'negotiating' about how Barca could 'just be helped by D'Hara (who was losing its core regions) and Fissoa' they could 'why don't your allies give u some regions', whilst 50% of the previous Luria Novan regions were rogue . If we had kept 'negotiating' we would have lost all of our already depleted armies and would have had to assimilate into another realm, or into Luria Nova itself, which would have been the end of Barca.
So we obviously had to make a move. The rest of the story is that of Luria Nova beating on a dead horse (we couldn't reinforce, kept being teleported back to the west, no gold, just plain boring in general) for several IRL months which has resulted in 90% of the second most populous realm in Dwilight to stop playing. Sad story. We used to have so many RP's and letters written constantly in that realm, it's a shame that OOC'ly people here don't realise that this game would have been better allowing Barca into the western tip of Luria and Asylon into what was Corsanctum. These were the most vibrant realms, guys sometimes you have to look further than your IC to save the game you are all complaining is losing players every day. Think of how much funner the game would have been.
Pretty much, we kept getting screwed the whole way over by players and game mechanics. Gameplay mechanic changes to allow us to actually do the migration thing mostly came about after we set off and were having huge problems with morale and gold, but for some people it was too late and we had no way of getting more money along the way and couldn't return to our capital. There was no way we could have waited any longer and indeed we had already waited too long, there wasn't great communication for the assault on Shinnen and it failed. A few players deleted their accounts or characters right after that. Lots of others were wounded or imprisoned (and then teleported back to the west until the devs made Aveston our capital (thanks!)) and many lost most or all of their soldiers.
Julius was seriously wounded and unable to reply to messages for a while so Erasmus seized his chance and usurped power, which didn't help Barca since he was still super butthurt about whatever happened to Saffalore (I honestly don't even remember anymore). His successor Kori should never have been elected either, terrible character.
It's a pity how poor the entire thing went, I think it could have been a lot of fun if the mechanics had been in place before we started but more than enough has been said about that already anyway, I just hope things in the future can work more smoothly
I've made more gold in one tax in Morek than I did in ~6 months or something like that last year in Barca. Aveston was pretty poor.