Yea the merge was denied b/c we felt (and rightly so imo) that we could get the members with no strings attached from a merge. The idea was to break upnthe tribe, snag members and leave a large buffer between us and the rest of the world. It was pretty crappy but it would have worked, yall in a pretty fragile state and we meant to take full advantage of it. No sucessfull tribe does anything without having something to gain, we just forgot our goal.
The orginal plan was the eat IRN, we had some really good guys in the south but not many. We needed them to create a strong core of provinces then after a month or two we would ship in our world 9 vets that lived on the northern rim and use our native southern members to support their long range ops to increase our pressence in the south and slowly take it over. However when IRN merged in with Elphames tribe (sorry the name is still escaping me) it killed the entire plan. I feel the whole thing fell apart due to me not being as available as I was on world 9 to push our aggressive agenda and it turned into a tribal hugs thing.
We had a solid council, between the three core members I was the aggresive one, Xumi did a lot of diplo work and fireball was a excellent spymaster however when I left idk if there was anyone left to pull the "kill everything, drink beer" switch. The failure of Hi. is partly my fault as well, if only we had the time to devote to the game that we did on 9 I think it would have been more competitive however I dont want to take anything away from COS, played a good game and would have been a fantastic tribe to play agains. They will undoubtedly win the world, sorry for any spelling/grammar mistakes, writing on mobile.