This is partly true, but not the entire story. Nobles are essential in war, but so is resources gold in particular and quality RCs. The number of nobles alone is just as bad a metric as regions, how many of the nobles are active, how many are in armies, how effective are those armies?
This. Having more nobles is more powerful than ever since it actually affects how many regions you can take but other than that if your realm of 30 nobles only has 10 active nobles, having 30 actually means very little.
Perleone, despite having more nobles than Nova and Alara, couldn't fight them head on due to their lack of gold and RCs. When they finally got gold and RCs, of course, they steamrolled both but I think realms on EC are mostly well equipped with gold and RCs.
