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TWO YEAR ANNIVERSARY Two Years ago, on the 21st of April marks the Anniversary of Carthago. What started off as a joke between friends in the fledgling SPQR and Egyptian Empire quickly escalated into the ever risky plan to merge, originating the place many of us are happy to call our home. We have no doubt, experienced a great amount of hardships in the course of our existence. Questions were raised at the time, as to whether we'd be able to survive our very first Global War, NPOLT, one in which many alliances in both sides did not. Despite that, we've since then exceeded the expectations of friends and enemies alike, choosing our own course when we decided to switch sides and knowingly paying a heavy cost as a result. We stand today as a testimony of perseverance, celebrating our history, the people we've met along the way and our many accomplishments this year. Although belated, due to many of us being throughly busy with IRL obligations, we'd like to invite you to join us in celebration for a few events we'll be hosting, throughout the month of July: ----- Opening Ceremony (10th of July, 21:10 UTC): At the start of the celebrations, there'll be a radio show hosted by yours truly and officers, where we'll talk about our past History, the current affairs of the alliance, our allies and our expectations for the future. Taking notes is recommended, as this will be on your next exam (we're hosting a Kahoot). After that, we'll likely drift off to games such as Jackbox, Skribbl.io, etc. I may be hosting the movie "Hamilton" on Sunday 11th (more on that in our Discord). Art Competition (10-17th of July): Each participant will submit a drawing, painting or GFX artwork of an Elephant of their own design. We'll also alternatively be providing a ready-made drawing, which you can print to color or edit as you wish. Submissions will be posted in a separate channel, were the winners can be voted on. Submissions should be sent to Raven21#5083. 1st Place - $50,000,000 2nd Place - $10,000,000 3rd Place - $5,000,000 Chess Tournament (11-27th of July): Participants are required to pay a $5,000,000 entry fee and sign-up on Challonge, where the tournament bracket will be hosted. Registration will be closed on the Day Change of the 10th. Entry Fee: https://politicsandwar.com/nation/id=60766 Sign-up Link: Click Here! Winning Prize: $200,000,000 Betting on Participants: Audience members and Participants are allowed to place bets on who they believe shall be the winner (in the form of P&W cash), with a minimal amount of $1,000,000. Upon the conclusion of the event, the pot will be proportionally split between those who correctly betted on the champion. Assassins' Guild (10-17th of July): A nerve wrecking game of murder where each of the participants becomes a stealthy assassin. They must survive the night by correctly guessing the identity of their would be killer(s) and by using an assortment of tools with which to kill other assassins (and innocent bystanders) at large in order to earn or lose respectively points and win! As the match draws to a close, a golden snitch will be chosen at random, successfully murdering it will mean an instant victory. If you'd like to participate, DM Daveth#0674 or Billy#0136 on Discord. Registration will be closed after the end of the opening ceremony on the 10th. TLDR; Blame Sval. Friends or enemies are welcome to attend, come have fun! https://discord.gg/WAK7FWDkf8

It seems like there's a lack of trust here between us, friend. As I said in the post, I fully intend for this to be a two-way discussion and also that I almost certainly wasn't right on some things. If I can openly state my intentions here: -I don't do FA. If it sounded like I was making this maliciously, I wasn't; I was actually asked by several people from your side to do this. -I put all my cards on the table. This is what I learned to the best of my knowledge, and I think it would've been dishonest for me to hide anything OPSEC when that was only relevant during the war. -I'm putting this out here fully knowing that some things could be used against me in future wars. And I think that's okay, because my hope is that raising the level of milcom throughout the game will lead to more fun and fair wars. If you don't believe any of that or still think I'm trying to sabotage you or something, I apologize, but that's your prerogative I guess; otherwise, I would be happy to hear where I went wrong.

A good write up. It appears from the outside that the former HedgeMoney elements of Hollywood wanted to make some kind of change and have a fight, but they did not have a lot of options. As TKR would have had some bones to pick with Rose, they were probably the easiest target to assume. That said, t$ chose not to assume anything, and I wonder if Rose wanted to attempt some sort of detente by not arming up, because I just cannot see them looking at a map and assuming that they were not an extremely likely target to be hit due to the nature of the alliances and their structure in Hollywood. I gave Rose a Low Pass on the alliance tier rankings from a recent post because I know Rose is better than what happened in GW18. Would a fully-milled Rose, along with Oasis and the half of Mystery that entered, have been enough to beat Hollywood? Maybe, but I suspect it would have taken longer than the length of this war to do so. Is the appetite there for that? Extremely large coalitions take a lot of planning to be successful with, and, I suspect due to the circumstances of Hollywood's "surprise" attack on a not-totally-prepared Rose, that was not what was on display here. I think Hollywood took a risk here, and at least in the short-term it accomplished a lot of goals for them and it was worth taking. I do not really buy the narrative of secret treaties between Oasis and Rose, mostly due to what Oasis has stated about their philosophies of the game, and the fact that the meta has changed to some point. If you want to have some concept of minispheres, which we can debate to whether it is good or not, then we have to accept that there will be times when some of them fight and some of them do not. We have not broken the mindset where if there is a major but not truly global war, that we will sit in a period of peace for awhile. I think Oasis and the parts of Mystery that entered felt that pressure to actually fight, because they might not know where their next chance will have come from. For them the upshot is that they can reset several narratives, get some fighting in, and make the argument that nearly everyone has fought and so foreign affairs can have a mulligan. Is that good? We have reached a point in the game where at certain city levels the player base is small enough to mean changes in competence and performance really matter. This is why there are alliances that have very outsized performance relative to their numbers, and some where you just expect better from them and they fall well short. Whether we care to admit it or not, like most games and sports the rules and mechanics matter for determining who is successful within them. It has been said that the next global war, and its circumstances of who fights, how it starts, what the peace terms are, and all, will define the meta of the game for the long-term. I buy that.

UPN Election results We in the UPN has just completed our mid-year election and the UPN government for the coming 6 months is as follows Hansarius: Prime Minister Cora McStrap: Chief of Staff Noreen: Minister of Internal Affairs Cora Mcstrap: Minister of Foreign Affairs Cameron Axley: Minister of Finance Sealteam6: Minister of Defense Matt2004: Minister of Communications Failure: Minister of Development Alliance Elders: Altheus, Hansarius, Matt2004, Jared95 ,Malichy & Noreen

Was not a great plan

Why is this in alliance affairs lol

uuuuuuu god this is so late, life keeping me busy, and now everyone's gonna complain I'm talking about GW18 again T_T Gonna keep this short because the post is gonna be long enough as is: during GW18, there was always something that felt totally incongruous to me: why was it that at the end of the war, disputed territory only fell around C20 when every conversation I'd had with friends all the way up to C30 had them expressing shock they hadn't been taken apart completely? tl;dr here's what I thought Roasis Inc could've much improved on in order to push up to that range. Discussion is welcomed; all I live for is war, after all I'll start at the very beginning and push my way forwards: Rose militarization: To this day I cannot understand why Rose didn't militarize even if they were confident they weren't the target. This is especially coming from the richest alliance in the game where losing a minimal amount of steel or money from building and decomming is basically a drop in the bucket. What makes this even more baffling is we saw the notifications of them switching to 5553, expecting a full build for 2-3 days at the very least, and yet later we learned they were only instructed to max soldiers and planes. Why soldiers only??? Poor round 1 beige control: By the end of round 1, E404 was zeroed. CoTL was zeroed. Guardian was half zeroed and under serious fire. tO was zeroed. TKR was struggling to stay afloat. Oblivion was half zeroed, and the rest only went all out because we expected to die in a round or two. Everyone on Grumpy was on 4-6 wars trying to bail people out, and even then it wasn't quite enough. Instead, what happened? Everyone slowly started getting huge amounts of beige time. There were the numbers to prevent it from ever happening, and yet from the ashes we were able to give the order for anyone above C20 to remax military and start pushing. If this was NPO we were talking about, one alliance member aptly put it that there'd be no escape from the cycling machine. In that situation, there would've been almost minimal need for a planes-only strategy and pushing upwards would've been 10x easier. Late/weak do-not-beige order: In the end, the order to not beige anyone in HW was too little, too late. This absolutely should've been implemented at the start of the first round. Furthermore, it seemed like most people didn't want to follow this order -- I heard post-war far too many times that the competent ones were putting in the work to drag people down, only to be constantly and consistently frustrated by the incompetent ones blanket beiging on all wars. Additional do-not-peace order: A minor addition, but this should've been added along with the do-not-beige order (case in point: Grumpy slotting the same Immortals guy like 15 times). Accepting peace frees up crucial slots for attackers and leaves defenders with open slots that are much easier to be sat on by people with lower military. I offered peace to pretty much everyone I fought with during the later parts of the war and the number of people who accepted peace was pretty comedic. Building ships: A lot of people in Roasis Inc, especially in Oasis, continued to build ships even after all of their other military units were destroyed. This hurt the war effort in almost every single way -- they were max shipping low-infra people on raid wars (a total waste of resources), beiging people with ships with no regard for beige cycling, and also putting themselves in range of larger people who could zero them a lot easier. Meatshields: There is no denying that Rose, Oasis, and Mystery all contain a large amount of bloat from useless members and alliances. In peacetime, maybe this is for tax farm reasons or something, but during wartime, these members and alliances are not only free stats but also detrimental to the war effort as a whole. Weakest link theory: I think the reason why meatshields are so useless is not something people like to talk about a lot: a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. There are multiple reasons why: -Having HW members being slotted by meatshields allows them an incredibly easy time to fight back and rebuild to prioritize saving other members. -HW members can always target meatshields in order to farm stats and resources that Roasis Inc need to rebuild post-war. -They can also be targeted if HW members on say, zero ships, want a very easy way to stack beige from meatshields who don't know how to beige cycle. -Overall, they offer very little offensive or defensive value and waste space, time, and resources that would be much better utilized elsewhere. Lack of milcom leadership and talent: I have pointed out frequently that if the milcom govs between HW and Roasis Inc were switched, Roasis Inc would've almost certainly been able to push up to C30-35. Ultimately, this is due to a faulty priority of recruiting low-quality members or meatshields over recruiting and training good milcom leadership and talent. Quantity has become a bit overrated as of late: people often forget that even a small amount of quality can go a long way. Poor coordination: In a war like this, I like to attribute three different types of coordination available, intra-alliance coordination (within a single alliance), inter-alliance (between alliances within a sphere), and inter-sphere (between different spheres). Roasis Inc struggled mightily with all three bar a few alliances: Intra-alliance: although coordinated counters against HW attacks did happen occasionally, this was rare. More often than not, members would only attack one or two at a time, leading to a weak and dispersed effort that could be dealt with almost immediately. Inter-alliance: after the relatively coordinated blitzes early on, this was also sorely missing. For the most part, there was minimal communication between attacks, beige, and so on. HW compared to this was like night and day: if someone got hit, we knew almost immediately, and could search for people between alliances almost immediately to deal with it. No one was left on their own. Inter-sphere: This was almost certainly one of the largest factors that ultimately cost Roasis Inc a victory. Most members never communicated or fought with those outside their spheres, much less had any idea what the other spheres were up to. This also extended into milcom leadership as well -- it took weeks for spheres to learn to adapt the same strategies, resulting in a disjointed and confusing effort. Inter-sphere coordination on crossing over enemy spheres: At the very beginning, it was Oasis focusing HM-side, and Mystery focusing TKR-side. Obviously, there would be an inevitable point where spheres would have to cross over and hit the other side. This should have been and was entirely in Roasis Inc's court on when to call this. Prior to this, Oblivion was forced to ignore all Mystery targets in order to bail out HM on Oasis, and the same was true for basically all other alliances from both HM-side and TKR-side, severing a crucial line of communication all while both sets of gov were still in the very early stages of integrating HW together. This should've been taken advantage of, and when the crossing over eventually happened, should've been a massive and coordinated effort. Instead, wars began weakly trickling over from both sides, and this gave us the time to integrate the sphere much quicker and begin finding people much quicker to counter wars that were previously being left alone. Early blitz on Oblivion: This is the first of many potential turning points I observed. There was a period early on where Oblivion was heavily targeted for a few days. Ultimately, after some lightning fast counters (mainly from Guardian <3) that saved our asses, Roasis Inc decided to give up and focus on other things. The thing is, they didn't fail because they used a flawed strategy, they failed BECAUSE THEY GAVE UP TOO EARLY. In fact, y'all were so close to figuring it out that I was already preparing for the worst. After day 1, I was down to about 1300-1400 planes out of 2100. Even with building the maximum every day, I did the math, and with constant suicide dogfights (I was in 9 wars, for god's sakes) and 3x spy planes every day, I would've been melted. From there, it's only an issue of have the wars expire and then drag me down, down, down. Instead, the only person who bothered suicide dogfighting me after day 1 was Tyunka (shoutout if you're reading this), and the spy attacks stopped completely as well. Similarly, a fellow alliance member who'd been blitzed had some seriously botched counters launched to save him, and instead the guy who could've destroyed his planes completely went inactive for almost a day and had the plan fall apart. Even if I hadn't been taken down completely, I was totally out of service for a few days because I was forced to claw my way back up to max planes. I found this entire situation incredibly ironic -- it was one of the strongest displays of inter-sphere coordination I'd seen through the entire war, with the best strategy that could've been brought, meaning they had all the puzzle pieces there. If only they'd figured this out for us, who knows what they could've done to everyone else. The strategy: In the end, it was quite simple, really. You don't need three larger guys to pull you down. Sometimes, you just need three somewhat smaller guys. Sometimes, it's two smaller guys and one larger guy. Finding these people should not have been an issue. Target the people who are the most overextended, or who by being zeroed could free the most people. Even the zeroed people on a daily buy of planes can kill a non-insignificiant amount, to the point where often a target will be forced to beige them in order to protect their own planes (I experienced this firsthand). If no counters roll in, they're toast and you make progress. If counters roll in, you keep focusing them with suicide dogfights and 3x spy planes, and they're toast again. You don't even have to go planes only for this to work. I actually cannot believe that something this easy to understand was only implemented minimally. The flawed initial strategy: From what I hear, for whatever reason Roasis Inc decided to start their focus upwards and work their way down. When you are fighting Grumpy, this is literally the dumbest thing you could do. In fact, this was very obviously HW's strategy the entire time and should not have been Roasis Inc's. Flawed focus and difficulty maintaining focus on all objectives: Throughout the war a few alliances kept certain measurements or percentages as goals in order to fulfill a strategy. Aside from the fact that this was totally not done in HW (after all, statisticians do tend to lie), these were often the wrong objectives entirely, and often also ignored damages to their own side when trying to espouse damages done to HW. Furthermore, they often lost sight of both flawed and correct objectives, pursuing other plans or declaring aimlessly. Planes only: Even though planes only is a strategy, there's no denying that it's a bad (and outdated) strategy. Because of score changes and tanks destroying planes, someone with max ground will usually be able to beat someone with max planes. This is especially true when people are trying to declare at impossible numbers (like with a 7-10 city difference, for ex.), but even otherwise, TKR and tO's experience in The Last Ride told us that we should almost always be prioritizing ground attacks and eliminating ground for this reason. Later in the war, some people (especially Camelot) decided to get rid of soldiers entirely and quite literally go planes only -- I assume the strategy behind this was to reduce score even further and also get targeted by pirates instead of HW, and it worked to an extent, but for the most part soldiers barely affect the score, and we realized this pretty quickly and were able to switch strategies in order to make dealing with this even easier. Early round 2 on CoTL: Not long after Oblivion was getting targeted, CoTL began to reach max mil out of beige. The milcom head was completely absent for irl reasons, and for a day or two they began sending out coordinated counters against a reasonable amount of people. There were two significant risks associated with this strategy, neither of which Roasis Inc exploited. First, these counters were mostly only sent with two people assigned to a target. This meant they were zeroed quicker and could've had time to coordinate with their own counters to take down CoTL members. Second, almost everyone was overextending to do it, meaning Roasis Inc (as per usual) had the numbers in order to punish the overextension. Instead, I only heard of a minimal number of counters, of which mostly were dealt with quickly. In short, CoTL were able to come off with a string of victories relatively easily and with almost no cost. Speaking of overextension... Targeting overextended targets: A lot of people post-war remarked that Oblivion seemed much larger than it actually was. The reason for this, I think, was honestly really simple: we just picked the people involved in the most offensive wars against non-zeroed militaries and hit them, and so by strategically picking the best people to counter instead of any rando with a military, it seemed like we were larger (in reality, we were only 12 people rofl. 12 people can only do so much against a coalition of 1000+). Roasis Inc had the opportunity to take this and apply it on a far larger scale. Instead, I saw very little correlation with attacks versus offensive wars, and therefore the people doing the heaviest damage were allowed to continue doing the heaviest damage. Disagreement on strategy and inter-sphere milcom discontent: The larger issue was that for the most part, Rosesphere, Oasis, and Mystery never really figured out how to work beyond their own spheres. Each were pursuing their own goals that didn't fit with the others, and as a result it was easy for all the spheres to start blaming each other for their failures rather than coming together as a collective team. For example, early on, it was quite common for Oasis to be going max military, Mystery going planes only, and Rosesphere waffling in between the two indecisively. Ultimately, they realized what they should've already known far too late: any collective plan is better than no plan at all. Big egos: A lot of this, simply put, I think was because there were too many people unwilling to compromise outside their own beliefs and plans. It was so difficult for people to realize their own faults and that they were targeting the wrong things that in the end lots of people clashed with each other and ended up regressing any collaborative support that would've boosted the entire coalition. Weak opening spy blitzes: I was assigning HW spy attacks throughout the war, so I know this better than anyone. For the first week or so, Roasis Inc spy attacks were horrendous. I will give Rose a pass on this -- we zeroed them and their allies immediately, meaning the best spiers were out early. For the rest, few people were actually launching attacks, or if they were, it was Locutus assigning spy targets, which you should almost never be doing. So, HW was killing 3x as many spies per member as Roasis Inc, and we were beginning to grind the spy war to a halt because of it. It was only because DtC decided to personally assign spy targets by messaging everyone in the entire coalition that y'all got your asses saved. This front should've ended much sooner than it actually did. Poor spy coordination: Something that absolutely should've been done was a better tie-in between traditional milcom and spy ops. Once HW was near zeroed on spies, the priority quickly shifted to spying tanks on the highest whales and spying planes on a limited range where it might matter. While this did result in a massive amount of tanks being spied away, ultimately it didn't contribute much to the war goal and the net damage wasn't any more than a few days or so of total revenue for alliances with tanks being targeted. Instead, if Roasis Inc had learned how to properly updeclare, many more spy attacks against planes would've been directed in a larger range of the tiers that mattered -- this would've mattered a great deal if Oblivion had been constantly targeted rather than left alone after the first two days or so, for example. And with better communication between milcom and spies, milcom would've been able to pinpoint the most important targets to be passed over to spy ops. Camelot spies: I heard through the grapevine that Camelot was conducting their own spy ops separate of DtC's operation. While this probably was more directed towards coordination between milcom and spy ops (and probably was the source of spy ops against Oblivion), overall, this spy effort was weak and far from the strength they displayed while in Rosesphere. I think Camelot should've worked together with DtC in order to combine the best of both worlds here. Arrgh: This is a minor point because Arrgh is mostly missing these days, but Roasis Inc also could've taken advantage of Arrgh stacking beige time on their mid and low tiers in order to build up. Knight's Templar: KT was almost certainly a thorn for both sides in the war, and they'll probably be pretty happy with that, but Rose proved especially incompetent at dealing with them: first, by being incapable of stashing their offshores and not dropping massive amounts of loot, but also by becoming so singlemindedly focused on getting beige stacked by KT that it hurt their war focus altogether. At one point, this resulted in Rose literally declaring more wars on KT in order to try and get themselves beiged than actually declaring war on HW, and several people got nation striked for this and had their wars manually peaced out as a result. Poor mindset and giving up too easily: All this culminates into one overarching point: Roasis Inc started this war with far too dismal of a mindset and gave up very easily (especially Rose). People always underestimate this point: mentality is everything. It dictates how much effort you're willing to put into each element, what goals you're trying to pursue, what strategy you're going to take, and so on. As a result, because Rose thought they were totally outnumbered and beat down, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy, and they ended as poorly as they did because they didn't bother trying, even when they had many opportunities to. Similarly, because Roasis Inc as a whole set their bar exceptionally low and took a line at C20 as the expected result, it hindered them from being able to push any higher. This is opposed to HW -- even though our prospects were looking grim, we had the will to not take it sitting down to fight back, and we kept rebuilding even after a pretty bad round 1. This is why, I think, alliances like E404 were able to pull back a huge net loss of billions and end the war on a positive. Built-up nations doing nothing: One very pronounced effect of this was the number of maxed nations simply exiting beige without declaring any wars and getting promptly slotted by HW. There were always enough of them to coordinate and launch a few good attacks, and I know these people did ask, but most of the time milcom did very little to actually help out here. So, this resulted in a drop of defeatism spreading into a ripple, leading lots of the player base to give up as well. No damage strategy: Final point. In the tiers that were clearly lost and not worth fighting back in, there should've been a goal to deal as much damage as possible. This was true at the beginning of the war for HW anywhere C20 and under (and later pushed down) and should've also been true anywhere hitting people C33 or so and up for Roasis Inc -- that's why Lord Tyrion was able to get the most damage of anyone in Roasis Inc, for example. This strategy would've come with an additional benefit: if anyone wanted to stack beige time, they should've done it against Grumpy and not KT; Grumpy had almost zero beige discipline the entire war and that should've been taken advantage of. ========================================================================== Anyways, that's all I had on my list for Roasis Inc; feel free to discuss any of them, I don't imagine I'll be right 100% of the time. For the sake of fairness, I also came up with a few points I think HW could've improved on: Spy participation: For the most part, most alliances did a good job getting their members to fill assigned spy targets. However, there were a few where this was not so much the case. Higher spy participation would've probably allowed us to grind the spy front to a halt much faster, although admittedly that wouldn't have mattered a huge amount when fighting 3x as many spies. As the war progressed and it became clear we were losing, spy participation understandably dwindled. I think people should realize that no matter how few spies they have, there is always something they can contribute -- 1 vs 60 on a spy tanks op has a 50% chance of success, which is still honestly pretty good and has a net damage positive (and which is what I spent almost every day doing). Mindset: This is the same as with Roasis Inc. A couple people had some more dismal outlooks than others (and I can be blamed of this as well), and this probably did affect the war performance, but for the most part I think the collective mentality was relatively positive and offset any negativity. Initial HM-TKR split: As I said earlier, HM and TKR conducted their milcom separately at first, and this was a split that Roasis Inc could've (and didn't) take advantage of. Later on, this was much improved, but a few alliances did stick to themselves and their side of the sphere for the most part. Risky overextension: Fighting against any better coalition would've meant this would've been a big no-no. Lots of people (including me) were fighting far too many wars at the same time, which in a more competent world would've meant we would've been focused harder and taken down quicker, while freeing up many more people to fight, but in the end Roasis Inc didn't take advantage of this. Beige cycling: Although our cycling was a lot better than Roasis Inc's, it was still far from perfect. I'm not going to name names here, but I know for sure that Oblivion wasn't great either, although maybe this can be excused by the fact that there were always so many targets that we had to keep beiging and focusing them. A brief side note: props to TKR; a lot of people like to give them shit, but they were always careful about overextension and pushed everyone else to beige cycle, so kept it from getting much worse than it could've been. Grumpy: A brief starting note: Grumpy members downdeclaring super low was the exception, not the norm, and this isn't what makes Grumpy so overpowered or broken. For the most part, even though Grumpy hauled weight in round 1 and declared a huge number of wars to keep us in it, during round 2 and beyond they were mostly concerned with raiding resources and preserving infra, meaning for the most part they were mass beiging wars (to get loot and avoid nukes) and not decomming military or infra to downdeclare. I won't say it was a necessary step for them to do so, but I will say that Roasis Inc should've taken advantage of both of these things to stack beige and press for space. Decomming ships and infra: Beyond that, a lot of people weren't willing to decom ships (and later infra) in order to reach and push down. Again, this really wasn't incredibly necessary, but something something tragedy of the commons. I will note that I think TKR would've done this eventually had Roasis Inc not accepted white peace, and then we would've been able to push down a whole hell of a lot faster. ========================================================================== why did I do this to myself ;-; That was a lot, so just wanna end this on a brief positive note: Roasis Inc: Props to Weebunism for having the best intra-alliance communication. ASM for always being willing to suicide planes and updeclare to drag people down. Camelot for at least having a plan to stick to. The ppl who coordinated the hit on Oblivion for coming close (and Tyunka for pinning me for a good few days). DtC for being a spying god as usual. HW: Props to all the bloodthirsty peeps always asking for more wars and for being instantly available for counters. Guardian for tiering with us beautifully and bailing us out within the same turn of getting targeted. Ockey for being a good milcom teacher. CoTL and tO for decomming infra and ships to dive low, huge respect. E404 for clawing back the net damage. CC for being one of the best intra and inter-alliance communicators and having a strong spy war. TKR for keeping everyone principled and doing much better than GW16. BK for punching above their weight and being super solid internally. tl;dr fun war and I hope the next one is even better -- fighting against good milcom is always a pleasure even though it will definitely get me rolled :lmfao:

We are the ghost of PnW past, we are truly never gone.

lol this is so "get this off of my feed"

You don't have to respond to the whole thing. Just pick 2 or 3 of the biggest errors and reply to them. It should be easy if there's a lot wrong.

You still salty about getting destroyed in the last war?

i dont know what it says when you already admit that your minister of development will be a failure.

Yeah I had 5 offensives as Kan can testify, was doing great. I waited and waited for counters and I got so bored that I just spammed my nation link begging for counters in TI general chat. Low and behold it worked, and I got beiged 5 times while still having plenty of ground. Fun times. I certainly agree with you and the over extension on our side Looks at Boyce. All in all I appreciate this post, and I hope alliances on both side take some of this and apply it, really is good tips. I truly am interested in what you have to say.

Ah yes, I love waking up in the morning to see a forum thread, is it a new alliance? Is it a new bloc? War? Nop, just someone asking for a flag to be edited, gotta love it

That being said, this global war was the biggest nation disparity between two sides where the smaller side won. This should be good for Rose/Oasis/Mystery, when you win curb stomps its easy to miss mistakes made, and have your slackers hide. Fighting a losing war (especially one that you should have easily won) reveals a lot more about where you need to improve. Its one of those you learn more from a failure than you do from a success, or atleast I hope you do.

War flag? So it means there is dow incoming by HS, Right? Right?!

This is clearly a work of art too refined to be understood properly by us lowly peons. House Stark should immediately adopt this as their official alliance flag.

I honestly think the issues with the no beige/no peace orders were entirely about communication. If you have an alliance in your sphere who can't fight, let's call them 'unified pinkish nations' in order to avoid references to real alliances, and they're bringing more beige than an interior designer from the 1970s, good coordination allows people who actually know what they're doing to explain to this alliance's leadership the downsides of what they're doing and could even make a more unified milcom group for members to make beige requests to. It's the only way you don't end up with different alliances having different standards for when it is acceptable to beige.

or or or... just don't join an alliance is they squeeze ur pennies or whatever. Problem solved.

I don't really have much to say, but I figured I'd make a post here. After 2,000 days playing Politics & War, I think it's time for me to step away. The game just doesn't interest me as much as it did years ago. I've gotten more nation inactivity emails in the last year than I can remember. I won't be deleting, although I originally wanted to. I'll be going into vacation mode instead in case I decide to come back, though that seems unlikely at the moment. I'll continue helping on the wiki where I can, and I'll still be active on Discord. I wanted to say thank you to everybody who put up with my BS these last five years. From IRC, to Discord, to the multiple iterations of the National Affairs RP, and the alliances I've been in. I very much grew as a person throughout my time playing the game. Thank you to the Serene Sakura Union (though they're long gone) for being my first alliance in the game, The Knights Radiant for being my home for literally a few days after the SSU merger, Polaris for being my longest home at 1,280 days, and The Commonwealth for being my home for the last stretch of my time here. Side note: if anyone from Polaris sees this, sorry for being such an &#33;@#&#036;, though that's just how I am. I've realized just how stupid the whole thing was, and I couldn't care less about it anymore. If you want to start over, I'm down. If not, you don't have to see me again. That's it. Like I said, I'll still be active on Discord, posting anime memes and hentai in my personal server. Also, it'd be remiss of me not to use this post's title as an excuse to post this banger of a song. With all of that said, ja ne!

Congrats!

Did I not already tell you? SK is disbanded, so you do not have to actually go to war against them to claim the crown.

Valid cb

??? Any alliance worth their salt posts their tax rates on the alliance page. Could've always asked "What does 100/100 mean?" Generally I'd always clarify that for every applicant and ask if they were cool with it before accepting them. I'm cool 100/100 because I understand that in a command economy, smaller nations get more than they put in. Fine with it at larger scales too because of my worldviews. TL;DR Read the fine print. Maybe Alex could have a public tax bracket section on all alliance pages.

Homie, you're in for a treat. Disclaimer one: I am currently in VM but plan to return in a few months. Disclaimer two: I used to be very active in Rose's IA untill a few months ago. Disclaimer three: Everything here is in my own name, I don't speak for anyone else. Now that we got that out of the way, I completly agree with you. Let me start off by saying I understand why @Alekomityens and @Suyash Adhikari defend their system, within the current rule set it isn't a bad one. I'm not blaming them (or anyone else with very high taxes)for what they are doing. But I too have wondered for a very long time if the current rule set is the right one. Do we want alliances to remove that much player agency? I have seen the econ / grant system of many alliances (because of friends, leaks etc..) and most of the time it involves a mandatory plan that lasts anywhere from weeks to months (or maybe forever). Do we want new players to be forced trough a 100/100 (or 90/90) tax rate? Do we want to remove all ability to do with their money as they wish? If they want to market flip (with varying succes mind you), is it fair to let alliances say no simply because of efficient growth. Do we want this game to be a pure efficiency machine in a way that makes it so new players can't play the game, but just have to watch it be played for them? I wanted to propose a "solution" for this a while ago, it would tie into the reworked "public opinion". The idea was "would the populace of a nation be happy that they are taxed 100/100 if they aren't given back enough in return". That public opinion rework never materialized so I never proposed my idea. I do think we should find a way to make 100/100 playing less efficient. I am not sure how or what, but i'm sure if we brainstormed about it, we could find some interesting mechanics that aren't just "cap tax at 20%". Next up, I think being more public about tax rates would be good yeah. In practice it would be hard because alliances have many diffrent tax brackets depending on how big or small you are, or if you wanted the alliance to pay for rebuild or what not. There are very few alliances with one tax bracket. That was my rant of the day.

Actually, I want to offer a defense of this point before people instictively downvote it: in GW16 Quack was on similar or better odds iirc (correct me if I'm wrong), and despite tS's heroic efforts at pulling the net damage back that was basically only the best they could do despite there being literally zero beige cycling going on (although I will say that TKR gave up way too quickly in that war, and was worried they'd do the same here). I think the grey area here was maybe a difference between tier wars and wars where one side is just massively outnumbered in every tier, but that would probably take some additional thought to fully expand on. Cheers for the response

Oh no on the contrary actually was very proud to see that 2 of the 3 individuals you praised are TI members. Its simply differences in strategy, one of the reasons I don't want to make a full post is because I already know I'm in the minority on a few topics For example (this is also a reply to Thalmor) , I will mention that I there was 2 entirely different fronts in this war (based on nation score /city count ) and that the strategy shouldn't have been the same for our c5s as our C30+s Secondly will mention that (and this is probably the most controversial point, any teir that "Roasis inc" had a huge advantage in (pretty much everywhere below c20 ) shouldn't have been under a no beige policy. I haven't been around for long but I have yet to see any alliance, regardless of competency, overcome a 3-1 or greater disadvantage. (Militarilly not net damage) and make any meaningful attempts at turning it around Will continue later as my phones at 2%

thanks xD

Agree with most people here; beige cycling is more about breaking the will of people already being beaten down. It not only keeps them down but also allows for others to move on to other wars faster, and also prevents them from building any military they can use to fight back and slow progress down. This should've been 100% true from the C20-C30 range, since HM's nations in that tier were the ones ultimately deciding the war from downdeclaring, but was equally important C20 and below especially since that's exactly where we were pushing down near the end of the war. Warchest is a minimal concern here; disregarding the fact that most nations only have enough WC to last one or two rounds, from personal anecdote I was making -2m net a day and the people who sold infra in CoTL/tO couldn't have been doing much better. Plus, being unable to build military every day without it immediately being taken out makes it so even if they did have a large warchest, there would be no point in using it at all. Also, I remembered that you participated in the blitz on Oblivion -- the Rose whale (Jaguar) who hit Arch actually had extraordinary odds to win that war -- one of the counters who hit him ran out of manus before the war even began and started it with an utter failure, and communication outside of that was honestly rather panicked as well. So Jaguar was well over the amount of planes needed to almost zero Arch out, and instead he went inactive for nearly a day and when he came back he was already zeroed lmfao (but even then, the suicide dogfights and spy planes orders on Arch stopped even quicker than on me).

Good.

Sup.

"is it fair to let alliances say no simply because of efficient growth?" Yes? Just as fair as the option existing for them not to do that? Why is your solution to a supposed (and nonexistent I might add) lack of player choice to.... Remove more player choice? If you hate taxes you're free to pick an alliance with low or even no taxes. They exist. TFP has no taxes, they're a top 5. How exactly is there a lack of choice there? Is it because most people wouldn't exactly accuse TFP of being a good alliance? Is that why it's omitted and this framed as some sort of great calamity of missing choice? Because that's the only way that makes sense, and I have to break it to yah, TFP being 0 tax and also not accused of being particularly good by many people, is not merely a coincidence. Other 0 tax alliances are either a whale retirement home or... Micros with a very limited lifespan. Goodness I wonder why that is! Golly, batman, turns out most micros actually DO run very low taxes. To their own EXTREME detriment! I don't say this merely cause I've always been a proponent of centrally planned economy, but also because, THEY'RE NOT ROSE. Rose, the gargantuan, ancient, and LOADED Rose, still know to tax it's sub c20s at what is it now? 80/80 or something? Richest alliance in the game or at least on par with t$ but still taxes out the nose. But of course Rose is already obscenely wealthy so these taxes are primarily just maintaining and growing that wealth while also loading city grants into the econ equivalent of a belt-fed machine gun. The United Armies on the other hand, I think it's always had a 30/30 tax rate, is probably to this day, broke as all shit. When I had my micro, they had triple our members and about double our city count. And then proceeded to make about 1/7th what we did, just in general taxes excluded, since I actually ran 100/0 outside of rebuild. And shit, I was broke too! So yeah, options already exist for alliances with low taxes. Most of them aren't very good. That's not a coincidence. Most of them straight up use their tax rate to boost recruitment, knowing alliances, like Rose, despite their obscene wealth advantage, do tax out the nose. I specifically never mentioned taxes in my recruitment messages for the same reason a micro running 20/20 DOES mention them. Cause frankly when your competition during recruitment is top 5s like Rose, TKR and even TFP with 0 taxes, there are not many options you've got. I played up the whole "hey we're pretty smol, smol tighter community gang yeeee" thing. As a last note, to that thing where it's straight up against the economic stability and wealth security of micros to be low tax, maybe you ancient leviathans could solve that one! I'm just saying the last time I heard of protectors investing in their prots was when IQ was around and did that. Hell I've never even heard of Rose doing it, ever. If your prots aren't worth investing into, ancient leviathans, why are you protecting then anyway? That's just never made sense to me. Oh well, Sakura's rambled enough for today.

Correct, there were two fronts - One where the war was under control and the second was where it wasn't. There was a shifting front in the middle which was the contested front. Only tier that neo-IQ had less members in was possibly the c40+ tier. C30-C40 had almost same number on both sides. C30 and below, neo-IQ effectively always had a 3 v 1 advantage at the least. What are you talking about? No one, not even the biggest whale is totally self-sufficient. Game mechanics blocks self-sufficiency. And beige cycling is never about not letting people get resources as it is always having someone on a nation to stop them from building military. I'd personally not want anyone to blockade someone while having them beige-cycled just so they can keep importing resources from the bank to be looted by the people cycling. Only time I'd want to blockade someone is when they have too much loot on them and we are cycling him. You understand "beiging" is what you are not supposed to do in a war right? Well guess what, your coalition actually did blanket beige people below c25 and lost the war in c20 tiers with a 3v1 advantage. And no, anything above c25 didn't need to overextend solely because you still outnumbered the enemy in the c25-c30 region and had almost similar numbers above that. About having more wars, this is because Immortals, Fighting Pacifists are lower tier alliances who enjoyed massively big advantages in their tier and were able to slot up people in that tier all the time and keep them slotted with orders like "Find people in range and declare". You didn't need to have proper coordination at all to do that. For the c20+ space, you did again enjoy advantages but the problem here is the people there were zeroed out and being well cycled/suppressed. The tiers where no coordination was needed was won, the tier where coordination was extremely needed was unfought, uncontested and unclaimed with no effort to change that anytime. Also I'd just like to say that winning wars isn't the goal of alliance wars-it's suppressing the enemy's military. What did I infer from your rant? 1) You have no war experience at all and this might have been your first war. 2) Seeing as you are supposedly milcom, you have no idea how to micromanage. Maybe fight in a "war" which isn't a dogpile for once so you can understand how literal shit the strategy you explained here was.

I agree with OP, taxes are the worst.

So is your reasoning primarily moral (like it feels scummy) or because it actually is scummy/alliances don’t need that tax? Btw if you feel as though the application process is too long please take that up with me or Jaden.

Great read Hidude. Honesty felt like I've read a proper book kek. And again, thanks for the shoutout! ✌️

Good Luck, I hope you decide to come back, sucks to see you go.

Removed the first nation, thanks!

Tl;dr for anyone not wanting to read a WoT Reasons why neo-IQ sucked: 1) Communication breakdown 2) Trash Milcom and members 3) Giving up and not knowing what to do Reasons why neo-EMC sucked: 1) Grumpy GoB Pixel-Huggers(the usual reason)

Great analysis, 10/10 read. As milcom gov for Atlas, can’t deny that was a few consecutive punches to the face but yeah, all of that was true. My perspective as being a minor part of coordination, in the beginning there was no plan. Sure, intra-alliance was well coordinated but Atlas isn’t the strongest Even with Atlas, I think we could have benefited from militarizing earlier and keeping our peacetime military up to par. That’s something I am tackling. (as ya girl just got promoted to high gov last thursday!) I can’t speak for other spheres, but due to how the wars were rolled out, i think the same lack of communication held true. Near the end of the war, communication improved tenfold. Props to Aurora for making this work. By then, I think it may or may not have been too late, or the rapid change from every milcom gov in every alliance doing their own thing to orders when used to a degree of power. That’s just my insider’s take. Pleasure doing war with you, hope the next is even better.

Many members from Roasis Inc didn't even know that war was going on and were begging for peace lol,that's what i experienced 🤷‍♂️

Huge thank you Hi-dude. Your spy ops sheets were actually what enabled us to elevate our spy game but I especially appreciate the shout-out. 🙌

Farewell Eva & good luck my old TCW Friend.

Don't be sorry, be better.

Permanent CB ;-;

The game sucked with you here, and it is fun now. I'm hesitant to start forgiving everybody who can put words together on a screen in a pretty manner.

As an new generation of PnW players enter the game, it's often necessary to make certain adjustments to fit the times and audience. As such, TKR milcom has experimented with creative ways to bridge the communications gap while trying to locate counters.