Why are you acting like you have 500 nations under 10 cities? The tiering is in this thread, you can check it, it's even in the whale tier but you have a big advantage in the rest, and with the blitz advantage and the double buy there's no way to win for us
You're not the bad guys for picking an easy war, every alliance is guilty of that, and if you do only that sistematically the others will form a coalition to kick your ass enough times to even the field, we all know how it works, how you chose to play the game politically is not a problem
But you're the bad guy when you try to deny the fact that you chose an easy war hidding behind the "Grumpy wasn't militarized enough" thing, what are you suggesting? To stay 5-5-5-3 even in peace time? Then what? You do the same and you still win because of the numbers