I fully remember the iron lock that Enweil once held in the diplomacy of Beluaterra. No one dared do anything if they thought Enweil would not approve. And when Enweil marched, entire alliances trembled. And Enweil could decapitate and destroy entire realms with a single campaign lasting a matter of days. I remember well the sudden fall of Fowagher. (sp)
It reminds me very much of the iron lock the Cagilan Empire and Tara once held over Atamara. Between those two and their Federated compatriots, they held something like half the continent and had locked it in a web of alliances that made warfare all but impossible. After all, who could do anything when the top four nations in the world could simply curbstomp them? Not that we were really that powerful towards the end you understand. The rot of nothing interesting to do had set in and even maintaining noble lords was hard due to the falling noble count. And this was when we could still have two nobles. Tara for instance couldn't send out a 10k armor when I became ruler. We would have lost pretty much any war with any of our border realms back then. It took me months and a good general to bring the army around again to be able to do something, but even then it wasn't powerful enough to break a tough city with a major militia presence. Remember...in the two noble time period with months of preparation...we couldn't do that.
Breaking the Cagilan/Taran alliance was probably the hardest thing we players did. And honestly, the Cagilan/Taran alliance had done what was supposed to be impossible. We WON the game of BattleMaster. Over a period of years, we broke every nation that fought us, turned more into federated partners and alliances, and bent an entire continent to our will. It was amazing. And it was devastating to the game. We had to end it to breathe life back into the continent. The continent WAS dying even for those of us on the top. And those on the bottom were probably at least as frustrated as non-Enweilians were in the era of Enweil on BT. So we as players made the OOC decision to break the alliance, put together some IC reasons to do it, and sparked the biggest war seen on that continent in years.
The death of the Cagilan/Taran alliance was as good for Atamara as the death of Enweil was for Beluaterra. It's a shame we never got to see how things worked out for Atamara after all that work...but...such is life. We don't always get what we want. *shrugs*
