Personally, I could never believe the reason that you told me at the time (it was too flattering), although I now think that was a part of it. I suspect that my reason for not accepting the explanation is that I couldn't believe that what you mentioned would have a greater importance that I thought it did. At the bottom, I always thought of Force as a small tribe that just wanted to have fun. Most of my players were very inexperienced and enjoyed playing a team strat game for the first time. In order to do this, I very consciously kept force in a sandbox and very carefully chose targets as they presented themselves. As a result, I tended to take a rather humble view of my diplomacy (despite the bravado in other places)...
However, there were several objective factors to target RB and not Force, perhaps they played a factor?
1) Your allies (WB) were in a war with them. Also, they claimed that they had evidence that we started started it by declaring privately.
2) Your council certainly didn't object to the decision.
3) Certain specific people went out of their way to "get under your skin." And yes, I did order them to stfu. However, GB was rather effective in getting a reaction.
4) Personally, I always thought that Beldin was unfinished business for HOT.
Objectively, keeping Force out of it:
1) There is an outside chance that SE2 players would have had a problem with it. There's a small clique there that I helped after Xig.2 fell apart and they didn't forget it.
2) I also had other friends on the council that, although they would never betray HOT, they wouldn't have been rather enthusiastic about hitting Force. Funny enough, HOT was the only family (aside from RB) where I had friends in the senior leadership.
3) A diminished confederation could still be useful to HOT in securing the SE. We wouldn't be serious competition, but we were still not TW or ATEN.
