Relative Faction/House Millitary Strength...

[McNeo]

The BHG Core and Coalition made your list but the Zoners did not?

Collectively, the Zoners have a lot of resources. Not to mention TWO battleships and TWO cruisers (and don't even go there with the Corvo. It's a cruiser, not a liner.). Say what you will about Zoner caps not being for combat. From what I remember reading, Zoner caps are supposed to be incredibly powerful - weapons of deterrence.

Not that any of this matters since we're talkin' hypotheticals.

And that's the reason why I've never acknowledged the "it's a well-protected research ship!" argument.

If we're doing the numbers thing:

Gallia: 100,000
Liberty: 70,000
Rheinland: 50,000
Bretonia: 30,000
Kusari: 20,000
Corsairs: 10,000
Hessians: 8,000
Outcasts: 7,000

Truth be told, I'd like to switch Rheinland and Kusari on that list. Rheinland was a spent force less than two decades ago, burning all its reserves and mobilising absolutely everything. But the real reason for this is that "The Road to Rheinland" Corsair news articles (1-3 are vanilla) totally discount the Rheinland Military as a viable force from the point of view of what is essentially a pirate faction, attributing the true threat to the Red Hessians instead.

When us Corsairs did an ingame event of this, we lost (mostly because Dboy was on their team and not ours), but we also did it wrong. Our target was New Berlin, but the vanilla target of this was Dresden, to destroy the heart of the Hessians and end the stalemate in the Omegas.

However, after quite a few years of what I really consider artificial strengthening of Rheinland through a lot of people essentially believing its a very cool house, we've ended up with a house that has gone from the edge of military (Road to Rheinland), social (mass migration of the rich from Stuttgart to Los Angeles) and economic (nomad war) collapse to one that is apparently able to muster more than a token resistance to a military force designed to murder two houses at once.

I also disagree with the idea that the Outcasts, Hessians and Corsairs wouldn't be able to challenge any of the houses. None would win an offensive war based on pitched battles, that's a safe bet, but they are all so entrenched in their areas of influence within the houses that the authorities would have to expend a vast amount of resources to remove them. This is the same idea as Rheinland trying to remove the GMG from the Sigmas; the GMG waged a defensive war and was thus able to win. Had they tried to wage an offensive war, they would have lost very quickly. There's no RL comparison to make either; modern-day terrorists are disorganised and poorly equipped, and middle-east militaries aren't much better. Gadaffi was using Katyusha rocket systems to try to stem the social unrest happening in his country, which is what Stalin was using 70 years ago. Here, in FL, there is no technology gap between the lesser forces and the greater ones.

Oh yes, and I don't consider the nomads a force even a hundredth of how strong their players say that they are. They got owned by one guy in an Anubis. Or a Starflier in some cases, but those are like 20 minute speedruns of Super Mario 64. And why do nomads have shields again?

Alas, that's the way the world turns.