Also maybe worth adding that the current alliances in this world are for the purposes of killing C*M afaik.
I still don't consider that a valid strategy, over half of the tribes likely in that alliance/coalition/union aren't even fighting C*M, they are just sitting there.
and while you may be thinking "Well they aren't attacking us so we're good." you're wrong, only one tribe can win a world, every player not in your tribe is against you and every other tribe is working against you either directly (seems to be only C*M) or indirectly (the rest of the world), and I'm saying this to all tribes in this "alliance/coalition/union" (whatever else it could be called).
When you have only one target, your members have only one direction in which they can grow, and as soon as they reach a point where they can't grow in that direction (usually from running into an actual active member) they get stumped, much like LOL did early on, they wanted to focus on just TIB CRC TLI, but then they got blocked and pushed back, but never turned their attention to all the fresh meat behind them and beside them.
Resulting in their current predicament of not being in the top 5 any longer.
AWE wanted a world wide coalition against CRC and forced their members to only attack CRC, their members got blocked, couldn't grow and either left the tribe out of frustration or quit.
WAL same thing as AWE.
I don't rightly know what happened to TIB before the end, but I think they only wanted to focus on LOL, which made the rest of their members do what SoF is doing and eating barbs.
Which leads me to SoF, their members are being told to focus on C*M, problem is they Hugged too much early on, so (the majority, not all) their members don't know how to fight because all they did while hugging was noble barbs, and now we start pushing in and we end up with the stuff we saw in the other thread.
A.A, is rising in villages at a large extent, but not many of their members are even near C*M (which seems to be the only tribe they're fighting) so I can say for sure that WE haven't lost anywhere near that many villages to them, which means they gained them from somewhere, and if not C*M (their only growth option) it must be barbs...again.
All in all, I hate coalitions and alliances that require everyone to focus on one target, it ends up making the majority of players NOT on the front line mad and bored, and hampers anyone from any other options to grow except to noble barbs, which in turn encourages barbmunching (not that barbmunchers need any encouragement). In the end with the rule against merging now implemented, having an ally till the end is pointless you're just helping your future enemy grow.
Sorry for the wall of chat lol.