If you have really bad political rating from abusing prisoners and/or raping people everyone else will hate you and team up against you regardless of your military power.
In the second turn? These are mostly factions that I did not have a negative relation with. Political rating in the top 3. Military power has nothing to do with it. I took two of the independent villages, but the other factions do that as well, no rape, no torture, no prisoners. I think it was just because I was one of the five or so that managed to get five cities.
It is also a bit of a self propagating mechanism, 8 factions attack you, which makes them angry, which causes them to smash the propaganda button. Which makes others hate you, which causes them to smash the propaganda button.
This is all made worse because any coalition member is allowed to teleport troops to any other coalition occupied city.
I managed to make one ally who became the undisputed MVP because there was no opposition, directly after the coalition ended there was a huge cluster fuck as there where 16 armies on 4 tiles with almost no allegiances. The one who managed to commit the most war crimes was immediately the target of the next witch hunt, now in a 12 party coalition (nobody invited me lol). So now two thirds (!) of all nations are laser focused on this teleport kamikaze stuff, instead of border disputes, developing and expanding.
My point is that the whole strategy part is dictated by this coalition thing. Like in Risk you would immediately scream "EVERYBODY ATTACK THE BLUE TEAM" and then directly shift to "NOW EVERYBODY ATTACK THE GREEN TEAM".
I think it would have a place late game when there is a nation that starts to steamroll the map, but this is bullshit, especially since the player cannot participate. They also get these bounties out of thin air which is weird.
I think the game would work fine without coalitions. That's why I am asking.