22b my bad

A war built country can take down a non warbuilt country, yes. But the netting country is very much likely to have much much more money available, and sure he is more vulnerable, but sometimes just throwing money that the problem does work if you react fast enough. Having some defenses increases the chances that you can react quickly. For instance, a typically 200k land country, with 1b+ food stockpile at this point, could drop his land to 5k acres, max his tech, and can bulldoze through a typical war country. Sure, you have lost everything you accumulated, but you can fight, and you will be a beast to kill. Ive done this before, you gotta do what you gotta do. But you have to at least have some defenses, as that costs them time, and makes kills harder, and you can break almost anything they have in the short run.

Your potential strategy of killing the smaller clans to remove the chance of building up to hit you, is completely incorrect however. They will likely do almost as much damage suiciding over the set/sets, and you will still have to have military to defend, and spend turns to hit.

This is partially NBKs fault, as we were fighting IMP for a year, along with anyone who just felt like suiciding, which reduced the amount anyone else was getting seriously hit, until we made peace. After that The netters kept doing the same thing not worrying about defenses, while the people who wanted to attack countries, targetted someone else.