w1 seems to have been much more active in fort battles than other worlds. I guess people are getting tired of traveling all over the map just for XP. Because, as you said, they're huge, the opinions of their members represents a sizable sampling of the opinions of the world as a whole.
Really? I thought other worlds are similar to W1, with large for challenges fairly often. Which worlds are busiest with fort challenges?
Traveling the world is a pain, sometimes I had to travel to multiple places to fight, that's why I bought fast traveling gear and upped my horseback riding a bit before. Fort XP is doing better as we improve our fort fighting ability gradually, still lopsided battle occur and that hurts exp quite a bit.
People are reluctant to name all the empires that have crumbled from the inside, because appearing as functional is good enough for World 1.
Just curious; which empires are still alive?
It depends on your definition of "alive". Initially, people were building up forts, there were some fort challenges but by in large, people were spending their money and resource on fort construction. As some larger towns start to finish their fort and/or consolidated with other towns (case in point, CUFT, ETC, 0E0, LG, etc. recruited a lot of towns into their umbrella group). In response, some towns formed alliances (it's partly my speculation but it makes sense).
As some of those groups pushed others around, new alliances seem to have formed to counter the weight. We know some public err..."argument" occured between CUFT and some others. In the NE, Endless, Racoon City, and ATW group all owned some fort in those 2-3 grids, some large, some medium, some small. However, that fragile peace was broken soon with racoon city and its allies losing their forts to endless and to ATW. As a result of those fort battles, a new group was formed Endless and ATW became ETC, along with Lonesome Dove and some others, encompass about 6 or 7 grids of large forts at its zenith (some built up, some took from others from battle. I don't remember when Abandon Hope group joined ETC, if they joined at ETC's zenith, then ETC held at least 7 large forts, perhaps even more as I did not pay full attention since it was not that close to me).
However, as ETC expanded its power, both by fort battles + recruiting towns, others were alarmed by its presence and formed counter alliance. At its zenith, ETC seem to be able to field 2 fort combat armies, one full 128 people, another not as many but still formidable. ETC started to decline when it lost a fort to Shadow Brotherhood and lost another fort as it tried to counter attack and SB launched its own counter attack. ETC's attack was stopped and no SB fort was lost, the SB counter attack was more successful and ETC lost another large fort.
ETC also launched attack against IC's large fort to its west/SW/NW (depending on where you view, IC was a "sore" point as it was 1 grid that denied ETC's complete dominance of most of western grid (besides IC, only outlaw creek grid (I saw outlaw joining ETC fort battle a few times against SB so I assume they are on friendly terms with ETC), Shadow Brother's original grid, and 0E0 corulag (which was allied with ETC).
In the middle, Miestas launched attack against the Mine (west of Miestas) several times but was repulsed. Oatman (perhaps proxy for Miestas) launched attack against South Fork, a member of TW town and was also repulsed. The center became quieter for a while afterwards.
To the west, LG family dominated several grids. For a while, CUFT family also controled several grids but CUFT's power also created counter alliance, similar to what happened with ETC. In the end, CUFT lost some forts and seem to have folded into LG family (at least some towns did). I don't think any fort still fly CUFT flag because at least one group seem to be focused on taking out all CUFT fort.
I am sure I missed a lot of stuff, but I was quite puzzled by the seemingly sudden drop of fort fighting ability of 0E0 and ETC empire; hence I posed the question what happened to them. I have not fought LG that much to notice sigifnicant drop in their fort fighting ability yet.
