Stormcloaks Or Empire (One Of The Three Certainties Of Life)

[Errorname]

Of course it is! Thats what happens when you lose a war. Losing is bad, thats why people try not to do it! I don't understand why people are having such a hard time wrapping their heads around this.

They lost because they yielded, and from what information we have that was probably a mistake. The Dominion do not seem to have been capable of maintaining their offensive, the Empire could have held out.

As far as surrenders go, the Concordant is incredibly favorable for the Empire. The only really nasty part is ceding land in Hammerfell, and ultimately they didnt even have to go through with that one. They failed to stick the landing on the Talos bit, but that isn't really their fault, Ulfric is just a complete idiot who can't play politics to save his life.

There was always going to be an Ulfric. Ulfric isn't just some random idiot who ruined a workable master plan, he's an unaware pawn of the Thalmor, and if he didn't turn out they'd have found somebody else because they were looking for the excuse to crack down on Talos and stoke civil conflict within the Empire, and there's a lot of people who fought and bled for the Empire who then watched them sign away Hammerfell and their Founder God over to their hated enemy, that's a good recipe for bitterness and resentment that the Thalmor could exploit.

So yeah, I absolutely blame the Empire for letting the Thalmor get that wedge into the treaty, because the Thalmor proceeded to use it to very effectively pry apart their coalition.

That's certainly one possible interpretation, but so is "what the Dominion could scrape together would have beaten what the Empire could scrape together" or "neither side would've won decisively and it would've turned into a drawn-out meat-grinder" or some other alternative. We don't know the numbers on either side and we don't know for sure who was the most ready to keep fighting (or "least unready" as the case might've been).

My instinct is that if the Thalmor could have kept fighting, they would have. Empire probably can't win, but the Thalmor can't either, so the Empire has potential leverage in the negotiation that they just utterly failed to use.