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idea is to be the better option, not the jealous girlfriend crying about poaching is cringe and all your members should try and join kt

Hello Orbis, We know how much you love drama, and we aim to please. Yesterday at 11:56 AM server time, we initiated the first of three wars targeting the leader of The Infinite Empire. As included in the listed war reason, the impetus for these was active poaching. Not long after the initial declaration, Black Skies (the protector of The Infinite Empire) launched a series of counters on The Order. Before long, all three current Liberty bloc members were hitting Order members that were not included in the original conflict, and, in fact, were not fighting at all. A quick history for you: 1. Infinite Empire founding, Imperium-TEst merge: The Order is a recent merger between The Imperium and Terminus Est. The former Imperium head of IA, MH_speedy, (https://politicsandwar.com/nation/id=206609) founded a breakaway faction known as The Infinite Empire. When he initially founded The Infinite Empire, he had our full support to the point of The Order, including an offer for protection. Naturally, like any decent protector, we set up a few rules: 2. The First Poach: Just hours after I had explicitly asked MH_Speedy to not recruit from our ranks, he messaged Cheese Chan. The message says “Hey The Infinite Empire is merging with TEst to form The Order. I can get you into IA there. If you don’t want to join this new alliance then you can join me in my new alliance”. This is an attempt to poach Cheese Chan. Our biggest concern was the blatant offer of a position in IA before even saying if he didn’t want to join The Order and clearing it with us. Along with Cheese Chan, it was likely that Froon would've been poached too, given their friendship. MH even acknowledged this. 3. The apology: Naturally, we reached out to MH after the fact: During which,he shared logs of another poach: After attempting to poach at least 3 members, he apologized and even acknowledged he was poaching and that he would take it back if he could (and presumably by extension never do it again). We felt bad for him, so we forgave him, a few weeks later things even went back to normal: 4. Additional Poaching After repeated attempts to resolve this situation diplomatically, there was another attempt to poach. This time it was from our applicants list where he says TIE reached out. 5. Our Response: After exhausting all other avenues, we decided to declare on MH and only MH. Before long, however, we found counters from not only Black Skies, but also The Coal Mines and Schrute Farms. These alliances were countering a legitimate action, which was in response to aggressive and repeated poaching attempts of members. This was also explained to both TCM and Schrute Farms, in addition to Black Skies. They declined. 6. Further escalation We then offered a de-escalation diplomatically to BS, but we rejected a nonsensical offer to pay reparations for their illegitimate counters. Now, Schrute Farms and Black Skies have further escalated by hitting members who weren’t even part of the original conflict and have broken the NAP. Tl;DR For the reasons outlined above, we recognize that a state of hostilities exists between The Order, and The Liberty Bloc (Black Skies, Schrute Farms, The Coal Mines) as well as The Infinite Empire /s/ Vader, Mac, Boyce I told you @Prefonteenmy spoilers don't work

Wait what. So if I am reading this right...a merger was pushed through without much consultation with your own members, and then you attacked your own former members when a few of them formed their own AA and discussed with their own friends about joining them in this new AA. At the same time considering these same members were given no choice in the matter or were barely informed of the merger at all? Do you think you "own" the members of your alliance? 🤔

Since TO has made there case finally to the great audience of orbis. Its a fair time we gave it a go. As many of you know, TIE was formed as a split off from the TEst and TIm merger. While the kinks of the merger was being worked out MH prepared his alliance. Including reaching out to some friends to get there thoughts on the merge. Including odin who was going to leave the game. Everyone else was only informed of TIE and decided to join on there own accord. (See logs below) Also here is a link to previous threats sent by vader if interested https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jD4ZutY4NGIw_FywUwJT4N504BNgTaC9X0j6jVrwyj4/edit?usp=drivesdk does anyone know how to read war logs? Pls go look at BS war log. BS countered than TO hit BS heir. https://politicsandwar.com/alliance/id=7635&display=war tldr: micro debunks macro

IDK chief. When the guy himself says he wasn't messaged by TIE it looks like you're making an excuse.

If I don't own them, how am I supposed to sell them? My mate @Dwight k Schrutetaught me all about that.

Pal, this micro war is nowhere close to be a «GW17»

breaking news someone who participated in something bad denies participating in something bad. Shocked! Shocked I tell you.

Guilo bringing up his girlfriend unnecessarily: Guilo failing to make a logical argument and mentioning girlfriend for the 100th time: Also Guilo: Weird flex but ok...

We humbly declare our existence almost a month after our conception (because like why not) The Abyss is a micro that has emerged from TCM, spearheaded by myself, Village, and ACNobody. Our High Gov are Merky Mo and Blade. We find ourselves to be one of the more capable micros, with a tech department worthy of a top 50 alliance and an experienced gov. We also offer a very flexible tax structure to cater to individual's needs and playstyles. For FA, please contact myself or ACNobody, or you can open an embassy in our discord. The Abyss (TA) | Politics & War (politicsandwar.com) https://discord.gg/WRpZzmZXYT

I mean no. Debate can be had if it was poaching, but TO considered it poaching, so they attacked the person responsible (Not the people who left) which is the norm for anyone getting caught poaching, you hit them once, and walk away with a notice not to do it again.

oh looks like ive mistaken the Order to be a TIm and TEst merge but it seems to be a TIE and Test merge my bad. last i checked the proof given had nothing to do with that guy but rather two other examples. Feel free to disprove those, or hold your peace.

Have I mentioned that I lift yet?

It never ceases to amaze me how few people understand basic language and definitions. This had to be explained on RON last night as well. In the corporate world, poaching has a different term - he's hunting. Same basic concept. The thing is, all it is one company trying to yoink the employees of another. That's a broad definition, and it's the same for poaching with alliances, it's broad because the manner of ways you can achieve this broad. It be can blatant and direct, which is the only version these micros can think of. Thanks for re affirming to the rest of us you have absolutely no critical thinking skills. As I demonstrated to someone of that opinion last night, poaching can very easily be many degrees of subtle. How subtle it is, does not ultimately matter, they are there with the purpose of trying, whether trying hard or barely at all, to convince a member of one alliance to become theirs. It's a very simple definition. It's a broad definition. It's a broad field with a littany of tactics because it's literally social engineering, a field there is so much too. Whether or not an alliance cares about you doing it varies, but if you're some tadpole here thinking all the bigger older alliances are making up this poaching thing for an excuse to punt you for being annoying, it's been a CB long before you got here, and it's been the functioning understood, literal definition for a long time. Now for the future please learn how language and social interaction and communication works, so that people don't have to explain basic concepts to you in paragraphs while you're sitting their flailing around about "I can't believe MY actions had consequences!"

The issue is that – whether or not you agree with our stance on poaching – MH continually broke the agreement we had regarding his alliance. That in itself is actionable and justifiable for slotting him, but I still think we're missing the larger point. If Liberty had been competent at FA, this conflict would have been handled long before it ever got to this point. Instead, they rejected our attempts at mediation, continually escalated, and dared us to blitz them. Then... they expanded beyond the counters. While we hoped to resolve this, they turned this into a war.

Agreed. This has to be one of the weakest CB's I've seen. Get your membership involved. Give them a good reason to follow you through the merger. One of you says they're free to make that decision, but apparently MH_speedy isn't allowed to leave the door open to joining? You expect your protectorate to just stay silent? It's bad enough that you're forcing no-FA rules, but trying to avoid poaching by instituting a gag order is pretty awful. Does anyone actually acknowledge your leadership of Pantheon? Nice DOW in support of non-allies in a failed alliance.

how is a micro bloc gonna start gw17

Poaching is bad, poaching has consequences.

Best of luck in resolving the conflict one way or another! Hopefully this proves a lesson about poaching...

I’ve been thinking a lot lately, there is no real incentive for war in this game at this point. All of our reasons for war have been OOC based. I believe this stems from all major alliances adopting the same policies(no raiding top 50, switching to color, maintaining peace, etc) There are no mechanics for the game to successfully bring out war by itself. To negative those who would come into this thread and say “to keep your enemies from growing to fast, to stop a whale-tier alliance like Grumpy from dominating a tier” when have we, as players, consistently and fundamental used that without ulterior motives being at play? All in all, the game needs more features that would force or give reasons for alliances to go to war. Something needs a buff, or resources need a cap or to expire over time through degradation or something, to make alliances feel urged to do things. what were other’s thoughts on this matter?

The Dominion proudly declares its existence! Founded nearly 3 weeks ago, The Dominion became a reality with the support and blessings of The Commonwealth. We provide new members a choice of several preferred tax options which cater to their own personal nation play-styles. We may be a small community at current, but we are determined. We have endured the first 3 weeks of our existence and we will endure for a millennia more! "Victory is Life!"

Poggers, also, who is marco?

It's funny cause Alan's an idiot and nobody's going to care because they're all micros but damn that's a laughable justification for hitting someone to set the shenanigans in motion.

Can I be leader next? Pls

Dwight style

Nah man, just don't get caught. Some poachers get rolled, others get their alliances rolled. Yet others make an alliance from this. *cough cough* Soup Kitchen 😉

Quack man bad

Certainly doesn't look like poaching to me, just macro entitlement. Mergers are big changes for the communities involved and shouldn't be done without the feedback and support of your members.

Polo

I'm sorry, but if your alliance is merging with another and someone decides that they don't want to do that and approaches other members to say if you don't want to go through with it come with me, that's not poaching. To even plan with the notion that everyone is going to make the move and for no possibility of some members going off to do their own thing would be a failure of planning. No matter how much time beforehand was spent on getting the communities interacting, all it comes across as them forcing people to merge. And to top it off by attacking the guy, petty. Not that it isn't enjoyable seeing a !@#$ like Alan get his teeth kicked in, but wouldn't have been hard to find a more legit reason.

We gave members two weeks to get to know their TEst counterparts and were ready to back out at any time if the membership pushed against it but guess what? They didn't and The Order was born. The real reason MH left wasn't because of the merger, he wanted to make his own AA for months and was waiting for Imperium to get to a stable point before leaving; he agreed that the merger would do that which is why the entire thing started amicably. The Infinite Empire only started claiming it was because of the merge once other people started assuming that was the case. This is also an RoH, not a DoW, and should not be read as a CB but an explanation of how things escalated. Yes, we slotted the leader for poaching but it was Liberty that escalated this when they started attacking uninvolved nations and that's why we're here.

Context Crunch was planning on going to swamp and Odin was going to straight up delete his nation and quit. By "poaching" They were staying in the game and in quack until you casted us aside. All of those who joined TIE did so of their own free will and in the case of Crunch, Odin, Obi-wan, and Dumpstercan they asked me to join. You do not own your members like property. I've one more screenshot I'll have to post in my next post but that has to do with I'm Alive who came much later.

tf is it blurry smh. but you can see right? This could be just human error. Boyce May have be mistaken by "Yeah" for his question. But, Reading it. "I didn't know how to respond to "Did they Message you" "Because I didn't know if "No They Didn't" was a good enough of a response. Still sus but eh

Feck destroyed panth a day early this could of been fun....

Sorry, we're not interested in turning this war into a dogpile.

Is this supposed to be a rick-roll?

@zigbigadorlou Sorry Zig, but I disagree with you a bit on this one. I'm new to the alliance and the game in general, but my personal opinion is that if Speedy agreed to those conditions while he was in our alliance, it's no different than if he had accepted a loan from us and then bailed. We'd still ask him to be bound by the rules he had agreed to initially, and if he refused, there would have to be repercussions. This should be doubly true if he's going to the head of a new alliance; if you're going to be a leader, your word is held to a higher standard than normal since it includes those who you're supposed to represent. In this case, the condition was that he wasn't to discuss this new alliance with other members actively and he did so anyways. So he broke his own word and there has to be some kind punishment for that. At least, that's my take on the situation.

You're telling me that members aren't just cattle to be milked money and res?! Impossible! Next thing you know, you'll start telling me that people don't have to give me peace even if I say please.

Pretty sure it isn't poaching unless the alliance is actually formed. If speedy was asking people to join the alliance before it was even made then he was asking for founders and I see nothing wrong with that. It's not like new alliances with more than 1 member just magically happen to get the extra members after they've just left their old alliance. Asking people to join before officially forming your alliance is nothing new and it isn't poaching. Poaching is asking members of another alliance to join your existing alliance, not asking them to be founders. If he poached after he already made the alliance then fair enough. Otherwise your CB isn't quite valid.

For an alliance to fail at keeping old members is no ones fault besides the alliance that lost its members it means your community was not what they were after so hating say like 7 people for leaving is honestly a display of bad leadership just accept it and move on i pray TCM finds a new bloc all other things considered

As a minor point here, this has been standard TKR policy to have prots not sign external ties. We commit to them fully, and we provide FA services until they develop a reliable FA team (which isn't easy for most micros and a really common source of failure). We've got a pretty good track record, which TIm was a part of and Vader experienced personally. It's only natural for him to use a tried and true method versus the hands-off, sink or swim attitude a lot of protectors in Orbis tend to have towards their protectorates.

I had been unhappy for quit a while in the Imperium. Only after we left did I truly realize how unhappy I was. I almost deleted in December. I'm not on to say stuff about people under normal circumstances. I was taught if you don't have anything nice to say don't say anything at all.

Here's what I find relevant about this post: Haha micros go boom. Don't care why, it's just good to see.

Jesus, it's like I've met my doppelganger. Fine points dear sir. Fine points indeed. I would just like to add that much of the criticism aimed at democracy in games such as PnW and CN comes down to the notion of elections and how they are typically misused and/or abused. The typical "democratic" alliances are pretty much nothing more than the usual tried and tested elitist alliance model where instead of meritocracy (nepotism most of the time), we have the veneer of democracy disguising yet again another elitist model where a few key individuals with the right connections make the decisions as per their own interests and thoughts. Very rarely do we see an outsider come in and shake things up in either the typical meritocracy or the so called democratic AAs. Most of the time it's just easier to form a new AA and avoid the trouble of debating it out with the gov of an alliance. But back to elections. Sure, the leaders of an alliance have been elected, and that's the issue. The same bunch with the same guiding ethos tend to be elected over and over and they tend to make decisions which cater to their own interests be it treaties, taxation, government structure etc. How many of these so called democracies actually put the actual decisions to a vote? How many gov leaders considering a taxation change actually put the proposal to their members, give them the relevant information and likely benefits to arise from such a taxation change and let them make the decision? Not many I believe. So what's my point? It's not elections which make a democracy but adherence to the principles of democracy which matter. Namely collaborative and consultative practices, open and transparent discussion and genuine efforts to build consensus. Also, I also find the logic that "democracies don't work in this game because the few AAs to have attempted it have all failed" to be particularly amusing. I reckon at least 95% of the alliances claiming to be merit based have also failed, some spectacularly so, but you don't see anyone using that logic against them. Indeed, a few of the alliances I've been in over the years which employed the utilisation of democratic principles have been pretty successful. Early tS (as partisan will know) was quite democratic internally in its outlook with most of the old guard and experienced members, even outside of gov, being involved in the discussion making progress with their viewpoints often making a difference to the final decision reached. Arrgh is another example, perhaps the best for that matter. Sure, they don't fit the traditional mould of a democratic AA but their adherence to members having considerably more say in how their alliance operates, individual decision making power and open transparency sets them as pretty unique in this game. I doubt very strongly anyone could make a reasonable case to say arrgh hasn't been successful, indeed, they have outlived easy 95% (probably closer to 99% if I must be honest) of the alliances in this game. So yeah, in short, I don't believe effective democracies are inherently inferior. I do believe they are harder to achieve, implement and maintain but I also believe a fully functioning democratic AA employing democratic principles is inherently superior in every category to the traditional meritocracy model. A knowledgeable and active membership base engaged with their alliance's direction, passionate about their alliance's interests because they have a real stake in the alliance prospering? That's unbeatable and no cookie cutter elitist model alliance with a majority of their alliance membership excluded from the decision making process with little stake in the alliance's success will ever be able to match that level of engagement.

Mate I don't even know you but half the things I've seen from you are you mentioning you have a girlfriend. You're almost as bad as another certain FA that got engaged when Snekman was beating them in a FA discussion.

UwU hehe

Best of luck they grow up so fast also yeet i trained Starfuze everyone who eats my time leaves why is this *cries*

The thing about P&W addiction is the game isn't addicting, its the community

This is the weakest CB I've seen.

To be clear, democratization doesn't necessarily mean every alliance has a voting structure, although this is the ideal. Openness with your members in a small collective can work just as effectively to engage people. To callback to ancient times, places like TOP come to mind. To refer to more recent iterations - CoS 1.0 was very open and communicative and it resulted in a very engaged community - sadly that went nowhere but the community while it lasted was very engaged. GoB may be similar, I have never been a member. To address your other point: I think if people have had a bad experience with democracy in alliances then it's likely attributable to bad alliance culture or bad alliance members. As an avid alliance hopper back in my day, the most engaging/interesting/vivid communities were those with some varying amounts of democracy and openness while the driest and desolate communities were authoritarian and obfuscated. It's easy to forget that the general membership of 99% of alliances only has access to half or less of the content that we gov do, it's important to provide content to them too. Lastly, getting rolled is part of the risk of paperless. In a narrow sense this is a bad thing. Paperless can leave you vulnerable. In a wider sense, you may have made the wrong moves or someone may have out-moved you. Think about how globals unfold today - How many smaller conflicts have been avoided because of static treaties that haven't been broken in years. Even the relatively new TKR-t$ treaty is a huge cockblock when you think about it. The game isn't necessarily only about conflict but obsessive treaties solely to protect your pixels definitely stifles the metagame nonetheless. I really can't begin to have a conversation in good faith with someone who thinks democracy should mean "voting with your feet." The general attitude of "if you don't like it, get out" completely ignores any other factor at play. I could hate t$ internal or foreign policy but I stay for protection, my friends, laziness, comfort, etc. so now I'm "stuck" in an alliance that I'm disinterested in because - quite relatably - I'm more invested in chatting / voice chatting / playing games other than PnW with my buddies than trying to become their political rivals. "Vote with your feet" is a lazy answer that doesn't actually address wider player engagement. This is a political simulator. People are here for politics which includes - votes, voting, elections, democracy. The reason paper fails is due to the nature of paper in a game meant to be alliance vs. alliance, not bloc vs. bloc. This isn't even a debate as much as people recognize this reality but fail to act on it because they feel their security would be threatened otherwise. Bold, brave leadership is sorely needed. A commitment to action and the interesting rather than security and slumber. Trying to train people to realpolitik is all well and good until you realize that none of us are IRL Bismarck. We're just nerds behind a keyboard. Some may be able to pull off some extent of it but most should simply be encouraged to lessen their paper commitments via pressure from the community. I think Syndicate itself would likely have picked a few more fights if not for treaties over the years. How many more hate their ally's allies? This is again reality rather than debate. We all know that one ally, maybe it's just one nation in an alliance, that we'd roll but they're either allied to someone we like or have enough treaties to shield them from harm. Yet we collectively suck this up instead of trying to hold each other to a higher standard. See above regarding the "vote with your feet" lazy argument. To address your actual point: See my reply to Ronny. A democracy only works as well as the people within the democracy. If the people fail, so too does the democracy. If dummies such as "Joe Schmo" win their election bid via a police force platform... well I think that alliance has bigger problems than one scrub becoming gov.