Roquentin

They aren't surrendering right just yet. They're agreeing to it as a final condition. They know this. I already outlined the reasons they don't want to agree to it which mostly have to do with their internal morale being based on not losing, so they're saying if they say that it's a lost war ahead of time, they will lose morale.

It's not the same at all. The unconditional surrender required them to take a leap of faith on whatever terms Ramirus would impose by agreeing to it. No other terms are imposed by conceding the surrender/defeat in this case. It's not a black box that they sign ahead of time and I've gone over and over again over the actual examples of unconditional surrender because unconditional surrender means they have to do whatever you say and give up fighting. The difference in support is different as well as no one supported Ramirus because no one wanted to set the precedent of agreeing to a black box of terms they do not know about. The alliances that peaced out in this case had no intention of fighting a real war and/or disliked their allies beforehand for not winning in a blow out victory or other reasons or they had severe internal issues like TUE. Most of the alliances on our side do not want to waste time arguing who is winning or who won so we have consensus. The fact that multiple big names in the other coalition have stated they are not losing and have reasons to hold out or that it's a bargaining chip, it shows they think they are doing well enough to continue and our side doesn't feel it needs to indulge that type of thinking. The scenarios have nothing in common with each other and it is the height of sophistry to tie them together. Your post and Kastor's pretty much are outright lies at worst and severe misinterpretations at best.

I wasn't talking about final terms but in the past some have been levied like big reps by some of the alliances. I was mainly talking about the threats made earlier on about scorched earth, last chance, and the fact that there was a deliberate effort to muscle people into cancelling treaties, which has happened multiple times. Basically, when people are confident enough to say, this is your last time fighting, it's severely problematic and they made it into an existential struggle. There's also a level of viciousness that has been shown by some people on the other side(not necessarily the same ones who had received large reps in the past) where they have tried to cripple people before e.g. repeat hits on vulnerable alliances, delighting in those attempts to cripple them economically, acceptance of rogues challenging the other side to do something about it knowing they couldn't hit all the alliances harboring the rogues, and demanding cancellations and the behavior exhibited earlier on shows it didn't go totally away. Like they've said that's all in the past and it's me not letting go, but the attitudes shown earlier on did not indicate that was the case. I mean i'm talking in an in-game sense. Those are the stakes you set for the war. We're able to keep it going, so simply having the stance of admission of defeat/surrender as a final term being a precondition isn't that crazy of a demand. Given a lot of people on your side feel you haven't lost, it might be a waste of time for whoever is dealing with it if they have to deal with another side that doesn't think it lost.

The alternative is them forcing their views on us. It's of no benefit to us. They have to budge and show some humility because they made it life or death. We didn't do that. They made their stances clear on it and this response isn't particularly harsh in the slightest. They've shown they are prone to excesses when they feel they have an edge and we can't really say "yeah, that's totally fine guys, good game white peace". The people on our side who left simply just weren't wanting to fight a real war from the get-go, which was the issue to begin with. In most cases, they were either people who traditionally bailed quickly, newer alliances with no staying power, or people who were looking to ditch their allies and find new ones either way because the war wasn't won fast enough for them. There's no way to retain people who only stick if the going is good unless you're curbstomping 10 to 1 99% of the time or at the very least you are always doing better than the opposition. It followed the traditional pattern of less committed peripheral alliances dropping out due to lack of internal prep and/or cutting their anchor allies loose. KERTCHOGG knows a lot of people just can't handle real wars so when they were doing well, they took advantage of the fear they could instill and some alliances even went under their protection until it wasn't safe. It's not about trading people in, it's more if people can't handle stormy weather, you're gonna lose them either way and most of KERTCHOGG has been in way worse shape than the alliances that dropped out.

Rare amanda show reference in 2019. You're old.

It's already hard to take down a nation with 10 cities more than you even with air being good. You only have 3 defensive slots on them to use and a lot can go wrong. If the idea is just to make them all powerful, then that's a huge issue. The problem isn't balancing units if the goal is to put larger nations out of reach. There are plenty of ways to make each unit better(like tanks counting for a lot less score and being cheaper to make, with cities counting for more score), navy defending itself only against air, and so on. It would make more sense to buff or increase production/decrease cost of missiles instead so people can resist more if they're zeroed out. It makes sense for one conventional to be better than the others rather than rock paper scissors. Air was made powerful and the utter failure high casualties were put into reward taking the initiative in fighting at an individual disadvantage to facilitate this. That doesn't mean it's the best set up, but war would just be in the favor of larger nations is air is nerfed. We've had conventional as the end all be all of warfare, but if people aren't happy with how it plays out, allowing for more unconventional options is the best way so everyone can still have a fighting chance to do something. These last two wars are the only times where larger nations have had to fight to similar degrees as smaller ones, so nerfing the only way to take them down will entrench their advantages and encourage the maintenance of cartels of big nations.

This doesn't make any sense in its current presented form. Larger nations can field way more units in ground/navy in less time. If any of these are implemented, then it's making it impossible to fight someone bigger than you and that's the main reason air is more powerful as it's the only functional way the game could work to allow updeclares to be viable. Otherwise, it's just a game where the bigger you are the more will you will dominate, meaning a super small minority of players can dominate the rest a la DBDC. Only way it works is if ground/navy have to be maxed over 6 days as well and suicide ground attacks 3 on 1 work the same way as suicide air. The updeclare range restrictions would have to be removed too and this is only for the one where air can only target air. A larger nation can just buy out of range by double buying ground/navy/air a lot of the time as is. The only way to even keep them down is because air can airstrike those units. The rest are just unworkable. I don't think it's the right solution to the overall problem either way though.

That was mostly a shitpost but I guess the reference is too old.

Cool. I mean some people think it's more harmful to us for it to keep going, but it's not true. Like feel free to war forever if you don't want to admit you lost. You'll find people will stop minding it and just let you keep doing your thing. The strong will survive. This guy knows what he's talking about. If KERTCHOGG has no interest in the war coming to a conclusion, foreverwar sounds pretty sweet. The only cure for war is extreme war.

Yeah, this is basically the gist of your side's arguments against it being a surrender negotiation instead of a peace negotiation. 1. You claim to lose leverage by admitting the war is lost before a final agreement is made. 2. You claim it's unconditional surrender even though by definition it is not unconditional surrender as you are not bound by any terms you don't agree to or know about after disarming unlike confederates in the American Civil War, Germans/Japanese in World War II, etc. 3. People on your side won't fight if they think the war is the lost so you don't want to say that.(idk why since people have fought knowing a war was lost before) 4. You're winning. These are the main reasons why people don't want to move forward without the precondition.

Well let's see if this holds up since this is a big change. Is DTC going back to Oblivion after or ??

I mean, the fact it derailed into just blaming each other for the lack of trust means the topic has kind of outlived its purpose, but there's no real moderation here in terms of it going off-topic but the issue is civility has been lacking for a while. I wouldn't be opposed to ending the discussion, but most of the trust issues are the root of the impasse and one side has basically had the platform to lay the blame at the feet of the other so it's ultimately just giving a counter-narrative.

It doesn't really matter. There was enough justification as Pop said to hit you If anything, your previous taking advantage of them was the problematic aspect in the first place as it was just based on someone new getting hit hard(lol). Limited involvement in a coalition war is pointless and they don't even care about those niceties. They're happy to get the targets as raid targets ran out. Well there has to be some reason people don't want to take your word for it. Maybe it's because they've been told similar things in the past and then people revealed they weren't actually representative of TKR's opinions? Smith and DIo aren't comparable. Smith has been at the forefront of TKR FA before and definitely has Adrienne's ear. He was a public face of TKR for mulitple years and people still see him as such. Dio has had people's ears but he's never been at the same stature as Smith with regards to shaping FA or being perceived as the face of NPO. The leadership has always been out there and Smith in all likelihood has provided Adrienne with tutelage and guidance and he has been prominent via Smofftopia and other things showing his involvement in FA with TKR's allies. Um, she's used the fact that she may have not intended to act right away in the war as a way to qualify her statements. All of the reports were she'd act whenever it was time and it'd be soon after she locked BK down or after she beat BK. She may have been looking for a bigger opening in the future if she wasn't 100% confident, but the sentiment was there that there was enough tension for her to pursue it and an NPO in relative isolation while TKR would be riding high off a victory and renewed political capital and perhaps even a mondo Chaos merger, was just too much to stomach. We didn't have decent relations with KETOGG lol. They knew about the plans to hit them but they were all attributed to me solely so it was going to come out that I was pushing to follow them either way. They didn't know about the individual grudges some people had but were already aware about the composition issues I had with it so they also jumped on that knowledge after and it became "Roq is out to get us and kill us off and he manipulated pwoor little tS into everything. He is awful and we hate him". As I said, KETOGG hasn't really cared about my concerns since they aren't beneficial for KETOGG to care about. It's in the way KETOG's interest to consolidate its power in the way it wants to as they had pretty much deliberately been collecting heavy hitters. They don't owe me anything and they've never operated in such a fashion. The part about Fark is more about not entering sooner as the situation would have been avoided by entering mere days earlier when it would have been better to do so as there was quite a bit of enthusiasm for fighting and I don't think Fark cares as much as you think they do on that since they mostly were trying to prevent WTF from being alone in that obligation. At the end of the day, we've already proven we didn't have it as a goal to pixel hug while everyone else burned and have gone above and beyond to bring about a satisfactory outcome to the war. We didn't use anyone as a meatshield. If anything, we are the ultimate meatshield but the idea of being a meatshield is stupid anyway in this game. The main players on our side will usually take the biggest hits baring super high infra in smaller alliances(usually accounts for discrepancy) and less experienced players quitting. As for Chaos, we don't really have anything in common with Chaos at all and the hostility would still be there with us in an especially vulnerable position. Chaos was also up in the air with possible disbandments/mergers and the only people who clashed with other groups were likely to take a back seat in mergers, so it'd just be your gov which courted every other group. The rose claims are specifically because they know have to prove otherwise. Everyone else aware of it thinks what I do and I was even told the new leader had pledged to do away with the shadow gov. Rose cannot be considered wholly separate from KETOG until the issue is dealt with and every government will find itself dealing with the claims of shadow gov being in charge. I'm sure mhearl and others are fully aware of this. Just because I have the balls to write about it here doesn't mean it's not a widely-known thing. I already put forth a lot of examples where we had to cover for tS who were living on easy street instead of just doing what was in the immediate interest of BK and others. They snapped the cord when it became clear they were seceding from N$O unilaterally by signing additional alliances under extremely unacceptable circumstances and it could no longer be done. They always had priority over other alliances as long as they didn't try to override our ability to defend ourselves against actual threats. We posed enough of a deterrent to coalition B to not pursue the grievances over a bunch of things much sooner and they had typically felt their hands were tied by our presence. When we could no longer justify fulfilling such a role, what happened happened. Ultimately, before we entered BK faceplanted on the defensive and everyone knows that they had already sold their infra, so BK wasn't exactly riding high either way. Simply the fact that everyone thinks that Aragorn can be an !@#$ at times(even himself) just doesn't override all other strategic interests. Helping someone who isn't easy for people to get along with is sometimes simply better than facilitating their destruction and risking worse people in a threat sense coming to power. The TKR forum post specifically says they will continue to collaborate with their former allies(two of whom were already paperless for over a year.) If you had created Chaos without TKR, you would have retained the standing as an outside of the box maverick type group that CoS/SK had before allying TKR, so it's not my fault you made yourself into a target that way. You knew it would be shots fired. These aren't actual peace talks and besides, peace is a lie and WAR IS REAL(a few people will get this reference).

Okay, so both of these indicate TKR was approached. Then the actual announcement says that too You could dismiss this part as just being for the comic's sake, but it fits the rest. So what am I missing here?

Okay, well sorry for name dropping you if you're offended since it was kind of over the top to do it out of the blue. I didn't really think about how you'd feel, just was more to illustrate someone can be thought to be a puppet regardless of their gender and that it's not a "she's a girl lol so someone's pulling the strings" thing.

Yeah, I'm totally alone in the perception that you were a puppet as Rose leader.

I mean we could want to expand our demographic, but we'd have to give up too much of the brand's identity to appeal to the forum most likely. It wasn't on purpose but it was just the easiest one I could think of tbh. I sort of realized it was kind of awkward after the chauvinism comment. I guess a better one is we don't want advertise our hip hop album on CMT? We don't take our craft beer to an alcoholics anonymous meeting?

Hey I mentioned what I disliked about other people too! Don't forget that. KERTCHOGG: holy and pure everyone else: orange man bad

iirc it was CoS inviting you not it being based on a survey. CoS butted heads with other alliances in the prior war. CoS signs TKR who has tensions with those same alliances. See the picture? Why would KETOG be a vehicle to hit Chaos? I've known that it was in the works for a while and that Chaos wasn't typically seen as their primary rival. Citadel is a different thing all together since it was more like a way to not get chained into wars from what I can tell. Chaos had tensions with alliances and specific grievances which have been cited. The whole "delightiing in players leaving", the Valinor raid, etc. There's enough tension with the actual alliances where it would make sense. I mean, it was denied by Ripper after but Manthrax said before that Chaos was in part a reaction to perceived excesses by certain people. I don't know what she said, but ultimately it was just too little too late after a solid week of sniping. Also no, they got upset because they already had those prejudices and weren't fond of NPO. It's sort of dancing around the issue. I never signed up for a one and done deal in terms of people like GOB/Guardian having to actually do more than one round of war. I'm sure they have the ear of the government at times and shadow gov is a very real thing and has nothing to do with me being a male chauvinist(i'm not but that's where you were going) . Some of the best puppets have been male like Redarmy and Dynamic. There are plenty of shadow gov influenced alliances like Rose. Ever meet the guy who has more power than most gov officials in the game but has no high gov title? Um, if you antagonize someone you want to keep out, then it means you want it to happen later on and think they won't react. Don't provoke someone if you don't want them to hit you. Not really. I was getting tons of heckling and the people who wanted to dismantle BK aren't traditional friends and don't have any common goals. There has been a BK hate bandwagon for a long long time looking to leave the station. Making it seem like the logs provoked a spontaneous reaction is just ill-informed at best, disingenuous at worst. There is no other logical target. Here's the thing: the basis of the relationship is shared interests and mutual goals. The initial idea was to do a war to bond the sphere and the target was decided on as KETOG for a variety of reasons. By adding GOB/Guardian, it was essentially the same thing as the TKR/Guardian/GOB/TCW combo. They also had links to Rose and intel on Rose's internals that made it even more powerful, so a war to test the sphere's capabilities against a powerful group was the best way to do it. tS didn't do much of the lifting in Knightfall after the initial round so it would have offered an opportunity to shake off the cobwebs. Some in tS had issues with KT and it was posited it'd be a logical hit to do since there was some resentment towards them and TGH over past issues. The sphere had agreed on a plan and the plan ended up going to shit when Kayser disappeared, the leaks happened, etc. rather than just letting it go forward a bunch of BS ways to bandwagon on BK were proposed that would have offered no benefit to us and empowered others. An inaccurate version of the N$O plan leaked and people were calling us out, so it's in for a penny in for a pound. The idea behind just doing the gob/guardian thing is it was supposed to be meant to escalate and it wasn't conveyed to me the intent was to avoid escalation at all costs. As for Kayser, again, mutual goals, mutual distrusts, and so on. If we have an agreement we don't trust TKR and a common view they are looking to be top dog again, then if someone changes that last minute, the relationship is problematic. No mutual goals, no ambitions, no common targets(wishy washy on KETOG) = pointless. Condescension, last minute changes, accusations of leaking, accusations of covert treaties made to justify pulling the rug out from under us, etc are just manifestations of fundamental dislike from tS. Obligation isn't the same as expecting someone who can make a difference to do so. Everyone knows a situation where the other blocs are in a more powerful position is bad for us. There's nothing in common with them. They want to entrench their advantages and entrench others disadvantages. It's more an ethic of reciprocity than obligation. If I need help and only one group can help make a difference and we have common rivals that we can't beat on our own, then I'd expect them to jump in against the greater threat. I'll be frank, I recall I was super resentful when I found out TEst made the deal with Pantheon in Silent War since I was hoping for more of a shake up in the war. Eventually that coalition went on to roll TEst and there was no one left. TEst was fine getting rolled on its own, but it splintered after. We can go to the Paracov situations as well where one party would pass the buck to the other but neither could get the job done on their own and each individual failure led to more resentment of the other. It's not the same as Fark at all since people rolled Fark already earlier in the year and Fark isn't a coalition warfare proponent. We don't have anything to offer those blocs. With allies, it's more of a tS issue, as there's no common interest due to the damascene conversions upon Kayser's disappearance, so the relationship was devoid of anything that brought it together and there was no interest there in bridging the gap in a strategic manner. Other people allied to tS had different thinking that wasn't all or nothing. This idea you have where everyone else thought KERCHTOGG were on the road to making the game great again is wrong though. So to move off tS and talk about the other blocs: They don't have anything to offer us. We have nothing to offer them besides staying out they can roll BK or rolliing BK ourselves. Those are both counter-productive actions because they lead to nowhere good. See the problem? We have no common interests or goals, so appeasing them does us no benefit and is only injurious to us. Their worldview is one where what they want to do is not something we stand to benefit from. Same reason why most alliances on your side don't have any particular concern for the issues we brought up with how they do things. They see it as balanced on their end and they can have their connections and use them to kill off the mid-tier swarms and for me it's just they like having rodeo clowns and jobbers to beat down on, entrench their advantages, and like to isolate alliances they don't like by encouraging peripherals to ditch so they have a comparative advantage. These are two irreconcilable perspectives. You're thinking of everyone being a neutral observer and it being that type of PR when it's about target demographics and interests groups. If we're a menswear company, we're not advertising in Cosmopolitan.

It's a hit on the coalition, so there isn't a need to symbolically hit some empyrea nation first. You just have more of a robust presence where they are but they're fighting empyrea now as well iirc.

Because their direct allies aren't alive in those tiers so it'd be consequence-free practically and their direct allies would be less unnerved by it because they are more hardcore in terms of not caring. Same reason you guys like to put pressure on newer and peripheral allies so they ditch. We're going to deploy alliances where it makes sense and no good cop bad cop routine should stand in the way. You committed to each other for all intents and purposes in this war and I've heard beyond, so you are on the hook just as you benefited from your choice to align with them. You are going down with the ship to use your sides terminology. TKR/Soup = Empyrea Edit Nicer explanation: Anyway, so the Soup Kitchen was hogging all the carrots and lettuce and TKR is a giant carrot, so nature took its course.

tS is upset because they tried to box us into a corner because they weren't really seeing it in a military sense and assumed the deal would protect them/us forever and they also assumed we were leaking everything out in spite of various activities of theirs not seeing the light of the day. They let a dislike based on some incidents between them and BK overwhelm other considerations and in doing so tried to make us stay out for the benefit of the parts of the other coalition they wanted to be more friendly with. I mean the worst case scenario is it was intentional to keep us out, so our purpose would be served and then we'd be cut loose and that would explain the lack of worry about the power vacuum and lack of potential alliances to work with if we had to fight a massive coalition on our own.

Er, you're thinking KETOG not KERCHTOGG. KERTCHOGG inlcudes Chaos/Rose(lol) who have no formal links to KETOG. We didn't have any formal relations or coordinate policy. As I already said, they would have realized KERTOG was more or equally aggressive compared to Chaos if there had been. Hope this helps. We've worked with Arrgh on multiple occasions when our interests aligned. That's the main thing. We're willing to work with almost anyone if we have common goals. I don't really have an issue with Arrgh except that it mostly operates as an extension of KETOG.

Well if they don't give a shit about Arrgh(lol) then that's one thing, but the thing Altmoras is referring to is the spying incident. They only hit the other two after that. Um, he's not talking about that range. He's talking about the real low tier. With the micromeme alliances, they were let back into Empyrea. Empyrea is the E in KERTCHOGG, so all of KERTCHOGG is responsible as they have chosen to stick together for the forseeable future. Just like when we hit TKR, all of KERCHTOGG responded in full force even people without any treaty links to Guardian/GOB like Rose. So this is the precedent you set. Your solidarity doesn't only apply when it's beneficial. You are one giant bloc now.

He knows what he's talking about though since he was a government member in a different alliance at the start of the war. It's more the thing is I didn't come up with the idea flood the game with new alliances mid-war to kill everyone else off, which is how it's been depicted. The idea for GOONS has been tossed out about for a while and the only time I brought it earnestly up was before NPO existed since Sardonic wanted to implement some sort of new political paradigm and the game was fertile ground for that. Oh also few times ComradeMilton was asked why there wasn't a goons here and he felt it wasn't possible at the times he was asked. If they're choosing to die of their own accord, it's one thing, but there wasn't like a meeting where we devised plans to completely wipe all these people out by bringing in new alliances. They're kind of dying on their own swords.