The cabal design seems pretty terrible. Empire needs numbers to be enjoyable, 60+ player count. Tribunal needs lots of players so there are always people in cities. Scion and Entropy seem like a time sink to get a character going in those. Battle, outlander and fortress seem like cabals with pretty clear missions, reasonable induction processes, and workable with the player count. But those three have little inherent reason for conflict.

I'd say there needs to be a simple evil cabal, or maybe a chaotic neutral/evil cabal. When I get the time I'm going to start a chaotic neutral/evil cabal hell bent on pillaging and plundering the lands...the BANDIT cabal!! yar!!

I played Nexuns, and the problem I saw was there never needed to be more than 1 or 2 Nexuns to swing the balance, but there would be hero mobs. At that point Nexus became the imbalance.