Why are we fighting?

Tordenkaffen wrote: Why was all of this never preemptively sorted out between the alliances? Out of the half server that has now declared war on NC, surely it would be posible to find a matching number of opponents to give NC their much awaited war, instead of this bs where friends write to you and express their anxiousness at being placed into war with old friends, neighbours and people you haver never had anything but pleasant discourse with. To Halcyon - many in your own alliance feel they have no lot in this war and are merely pawns in a chessgame. This war is unfair to them as well as your allies who have always had your back, all of which you stab in the back with this maneuver. I respect your viewpoint and your right to retain it, I really do, and I would wish this business could have been solved diplomatically, but I dare say that if you are so righteous in your crusade against NC as you let on, you had instead of declaring war, joined another alliance at war with NC for the duration of the war, not dragged a lot of people into this debaucle against their will. This ordeal is just unfair to a lot of people I find.

KillerPoodle wrote: geofrey wrote: I'd also like to point out that the Coalition (of awesome) extorted billions of gold in the form of war reparations from the first part (cause this is the same war?) of the Evil Soup War. I admit I have no way of knowing where all that gold is and what cause it has been used for. Well - Dark has a bunch but in general the reparations were nowhere near the costs of the war in the first place so no-one ended up any richer in real terms.

KillerPoodle wrote: Well - Dark has a bunch but in general the reparations were nowhere near the costs of the war in the first place so no-one ended up any richer in real terms.

If you do not mind, for anyone that doubts (and because I didn't get to reply to Grego in the other topic that got locked, who more or less said that gold and equipment was a gain), some numbers.

Over the course of that almost 6 month war an average human player that was very active in the war (let us place them at 8 towns) could have lost the following hypothetical numbers :

50000 T2 pikemen
20000 T2 archers
30000 T2 knights

I think that you will all agree that it is a very reasonable (or even low) amount of troops for a 6 month period, but let us take even this quite optimistic example. How much do these units cost. There are of course price fluxuations but back then the cost was

1950 gold for a pikeman
2700 gold for an archer
6190 gold for a knight

This makes the cost of the above troops
50000*1950 =   97.500.000 gold
20000*2700 =   54.000.000 gold
30000*6190 = 185.700.000 gold

Sum = 337.200.000 gold And this is only ONE players' cost, with the most optimistic of troop loses.

And then people used to say back then that asking for a 150M gold in a peace treaty was "too much", but hey it is easier to be intimidated by a multi-digit number and shout "wolf wolf !", than actually grab pen and paper and do some math so I guess those complaints made sense in some way.

If someone claims that those numbers are hypothetical or not correct then I will just point out that the number of troops in most battles were nowhere near so low as in the example, so I can only imagine the billions in cost incurred by the people that did the actual fighting from both sides.

So, no, none of us got richer. And, no, obviously, we never had that in mind 

geofrey wrote: I'd also like to point out that the Coalition (of awesome) extorted billions of gold in the form of war reparations from the first part (cause this is the same war?) of the Evil Soup War. I admit I have no way of knowing where all that gold is and what cause it has been used for.

Well - Dark has a bunch but in general the reparations were nowhere near the costs of the war in the first place so no-one ended up any richer in real terms.

Gosh, this truly unfortunate situation seems eerily familiar. But I can't awkwardly recall the exact circumstances.