The war from the beginning should have been close to a stalemate, maybe favoring Arcaea a little, but not much.
I'd say favouring the southerners, myself, given that Ohnar West was steadily losing. They shouldn't have been, of course, and that was a surprise to Jenred, but it became evident pretty quickly.
Zonasa's long refit times really hurt Aenilia as well as Kindara's relative inaction. Although combined Aenilia and Zonasa may have been stronger than Arcaea, Arcaea benefited from her position close to the front. When Zonasa was on her long refit, the Aenilians didn't stand a chance. I think they could have done a bit better in defending themselves and I really expected them to put up at least 10k CS in defense of their regions, but alas, 5k CS was all the Aenilians could really muster. A real pittance compared to the days of Orphen and Tharion when just the regions of Nahad, Idapur, Ornaz and Erahol fielded 15k CS. Ah... those were good days. Anyway....
They had to dump a
lot of gold into rebuilding the walls and militia in Nahad, especially given that Arcaea frequently took all the gold in Nahad and Ornaz.
On to the point. It's true, there were a lot of mistakes made in the last conflict, on both sides really. I wouldn't claim Arcaea's tactics to be great by any stretch. They were simply more effective than Zonasa/Aenilia's. They could have sacked Idapur long before but stuck to attempting TOs of Nahad and destroying production in Ornaz. With Ipsosez producing food (well, until a replacement Duke couldn't be named anyway) Aenilia was always going to be able to feed herself. Plus, at least early on, Arcaea stretched a bit and left herself exposed to counter attacks. Some of the early victories Zonasa scored could have been a bit more level I think.
We were anticipating having better luck with the TO's. Especially the first one, when we had good sympathy, our whole army ready, and Aenilia out of position. They had some good luck on a couple of suicide attacks that broke the TO's, and then we couldn't quite manage to take the region before Zonasa showed up. I still think if we'd had one more day it would have been different, but that's the way it was. A gamble, and it didn't work. We'd have been much better off ravaging Aenilia rather than trying to TO Nahad, but there was no way to know that. The absolute most painful thing Aenilia did for the entire war was steal all the food in Hupar. Arcaea's food system is fragile because most of the production is in the north-east and most of the consumption is in the south-west, and that starved 30K out of Topenah.
But as far as Zonasa's errors, I wouldn't pin any of them on anyone or anything in particular. Just with every trip north it seemed something would go wrong. On the early trips, Zonasa did not have a very defined goal. It was unclear what the war was really about (as Jenred was quick to point out, the premise for the war was dubious at best). So Zonasa marched north for the sake of marching to aid her allies in Aenilian (who kinda had grounds about defending Arcachon, although Zonasa really didn't care about Arcachon. Pretty weak stuff, but meh)...
They didn't have justification by defending Arcachon, actually. Xarnelf had already signed away that right after the Talex incident, which is why he based the whole thing on being attacked by the infiltrator, which was on
very shaky, as he was violating his own sworn word (for the third time) and violating Cathay's territory after being refused passage put the whole thing on even worse footing.
So Kindara never really did anything. I mean, they 'marched to the defense of Aenilia'. Which is what Zonasa always wanted to do, but given that Arcaea used those stalemates to shuffle nobles from the front into refitting... it really hurt Aenilia/Zonasa more than helped. Erandi tried to explain this to Tissaphernes, but to no avail. Unfortunate.
Kindara had a few high-level nobles strongly objecting to the war (I know at least two Dukes did), and Tissaphernes thought Xarnelf was an idiot. She felt obliged by Ziode's actions, but didn't like it, from everything I saw.
Lessons learned: When moving in large groups, always take things slow. Also, when evenly matched, attack as far away from the enemy's capital as you can. Make the enemy stretch to defend herself. Marching on Larmebsi did wonders to destabilize Arcaea's Southern regions (Talex, Hupar, etc...), but given Arcaea's quick refit times due to the proximity of their capital, it was clear Arcaea would always come back to defend her regions before any lasting gains could be made. And finally, this is probably the most important lesson learned: Have an endgame in mind before marching to war. You can't plan a course of action if you don't know where you're trying to get to.
Southern alliance did have predictable tactics, which made Arcaea's response a lot easier. And most of the time, we got information on Zonasa's movements as soon as they happened one way or another.
Good war, though. Had me biting my nails more than once.
