Its a combination things, its common sense, Bite we're far more prepared, more active accounts (however these accounts are active, VPN, sits, new players or just people playing it as a tribal support account, its irrelevant) more PP spent helped the preparation massively, you've not had a barb in your core for months, solid dense frontline's that we're all built up ready to go, then the important thing is not wasting nobles on barbs and inactives when trying to fight a war like cereal did, instead of getting PW's and making VPN's to keep them alive until new players can be found, happens in every tribe its just the nature of the game for people getting butthurt about it, I don't know why you would, why so defensive?
Bite took the offensive the entire world, better frontline accounts like bob, cool, cortanna, david doing there jobs, we had groot, doctors, tag I guess, the best defense is a good offense, Don't think I saw cereal commit to a proper op that often, Likely because half of the backline was nobling barbs and doing nothing, several accounts not even sending support out for months.... As I said yesterday it was groups of people working only in there groups or by themselves and doing nothing else, there was no tribal thing going on, (atleast in the time I've been here, might of been different earlier) activity win's as you said, But I think alot of the tribe just ditched before things even got going properly, Most of them are now playing other worlds, so activity had little to do with it, they just didn't want to be here likely for the above reasons, but that's just my take on it.
Bad diplomacy, Bite played to win, cereal did dumb stuff like backstabbing there allies (although there is a more complicated story with that) while bite did there job and supported them. cereal leads had a thing of threatening people randomly to get what they want (As if that's ever worked), or so several people will say, I know they did it with chitwi, but he was Bite from the start in my opinion, But not like cereal gave him a choice in the end., I mean some of the shit they did to me while been in cereal, they we're a lulfest, and yet I still did my job and got like 20mil ODS with a 100D villages, kinda shows how a large part of cereal was doing nothing for months.