I'm just going to comment from a perspective of a "pawn" in this. I was in NEW/HON/TIT whatever you wanna call it from a rather early point of the game. When the wars started (controlled by ADD and SUR) my closest allies were mass recruited by SUR and I ended up pretty much in a sea of red in my area. We lost the war IMO because of players like Attila who was probably already working for ADD who claimed to be experienced in war yet did not come up any plans for us to follow. Inexperienced players got slowly eaten up while leadership did very little to organize (again from a pawn view).
Eventually I ended up in a sea of red in the midst of SUR territory as many of my former ribesmates had jumped ship and started attacking us. Meanwhile Northarr kept talking about how important it was for us to donate to the tribe, sending daily tribewide messages about donating what we could. Eventually they told us the war would end and that they had found a sollution for it all. The sollution was to kick about 60-70 players that were still around and willing to play against this 5tribe alliance that had merged and keep around 20 players that Sephyrix deemed worthy of her glorious STD. (Seriously no wonder EMR is going down...)
Of course those of us who got kicked was pissed off since many had donated tons of resources to and coins to get the tribe where it was, some made new tribes for the sake of battling North and Aery for their betrayal to the rest of us while I was so deep in SUR territory I had to join them.
Then came a dull while with not doing anything / killing some stray SETO members before the ADD merge. Luckily I was just a territory away from EMR lands and was able to join the war. Though EMR tried a couple of times to attack us it was easy to repell the attacks counter. Not because we were many, but the EMR players close to us weren't as experienced as we thought. This showed when we finally started to organize somewhat our attacks and got the closest EMR players to quit the game. (probably more experienced at attacking people not able to fight back).
And now the world is back to being dull again. Sorry for the long post I just wanted to type out my perspective.
-Osten