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Palsada

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Everything posted by Palsada

  1. Uh, it was 1480 words, 8277 characters. My WoT was 2932 words, 15999 characters. Alan has rookie numbers, he needs to pump that shit up.
  2. I would like to add I am 2/2 of alliances subject to my wall of text dismantling and their leaders either quitting or rebranding.
  3. Intro 637 days after my last forum post, here I am again, getting out of yet another toxic relationship. On a basic level, any relationship that makes you feel worse rather than better can become toxic over time. Toxic relationships can exist in just about any context, from sports teams, to the boardroom to relationships with family members. In this context, I had the misfortune to find myself in two toxic relationships at the same time. One with Alan, and one with Black Skies who everyone in Orbis seems to love to hate due to Alan. In stories like these, there is no one who comes out looking good. And there will be those who will say I am throwing mud now that I have left and that I am saying that this is all the fault of Alan. And they would be right. There are two sides to every story, and this is just my side as I experienced it. I'm sure others will have their own side, and they are free to express it. The Merge With that out of the way, lets get to the parts you actually care about. Why? Why merge with Alan and Black Skies? Was I unaware of his reputation? No. I knew about his reputation. Many people messaged me about what a foolish mistake I was making. One would need to be deaf and blind to not know what one is getting into when working with Alan. The answer as to the why is rooted in hubris. I, Palsada, thought that with one hand on the wheel, as 2IC, could curb his worst instincts. Play the good cop to his bad cop. And while I did have a handful of successes in this relationship where I feel like I may have achieved that, I did find myself underestimating just how unilateral Alan could be in decision making. I never fully had one hand on that wheel. At best I could try to grab at it and try to steer us back to the road of rational decision making after Alan had already swerved to the realm of the mad. When one is going over the details of any merger, and any working relationship, it's always going to be sunshine and rainbows. I thought I had learned from my previous experience in the Empire of the Romans and tried to put in safeguards in order to have better conflict resolution and a more harmonious working relationship for when things were going to get tense. The problem with this is that when you are not ever a part of the decision making process it's hard to have conflict resolution. I would simply find out about things that were happening when others did, in announcements to gov and to general membership. While I would get an explanation afterwards, it was always a fait accompli, a done deal, and what exactly can be added to the conversation at that point? While there were some half hearted attempts to "resolve" this as it occurred, this one man decision making tendency only became more entrenched as time when on. I do give myself a little bit of credit though. I did negotiate to have the PRIU bank kept separate until February 2024 in case we ever wanted to reform. Little did I know that trying to reform would be considered poaching. The Guides So what? Many alliances have one person driving the alliance direction and decision making. As long as government is functional and everyone is happy with the decisions being made, what is the problem? Well, there wouldn't be a problem. Unfortunately, that wasn't how Black Skies was run. Black Skies was run by guides and...The Handbook. Albeit, the latter only came into existence on the last day of me being there but it was the stray that broke this camels back. More on that later. Now I have nothing against guides. Guides are useful tools, great reference material and a good resource for government to have. But imagine going to school, and instead of a teacher, you have a book. Imagine starting a new job and instead of being trained, you get a book. Imagine whenever you have a question, the sole response you get is "reference the book". Whenever a situation pops up, reference the book. Failed your test and you want to do better? Reference the book. Want to know what exactly you would be responsible for in your job? Reference the book. That was/is Black Skies in a nutshell. I've been in quite a few govs since joining this game, and I will say this, Black Skies is probably one of the most dysfunctional ones I've ever had the misfortune of trying to navigate. Again, I was in Empire of the Romans. Let that sink in. It wasn't dysfunctional in a way I was accustomed with, like backstabbing govs members, outright incompetency and favoritism like all good Roman governments. This was far more insidious than that. This was having a Boss/Teacher who has it in their head exactly what they want you to do, but never communicate what exactly that was. They tell you to figure it out/reference the guide, and when you didn't do exactly what they wanted you to do to the letter, you would get put on blast in front of everyone else and have them hint that you were going to fail/be fired. Oh, and take financial penalties as well. And lest I forget, I shouldn't gloss over the fact that almost every relevant document from MA to EA to recruitment was held by Alan himself, and not shared with gov so they had no idea how to make informed decisions. It was very weird to see Alan run his own recruitment program at the same time as new recruitment officers, have good results and instead of sharing how he did it, default to lets just fire them. Its hard to ask EA to hand out player safekeeps with EA not knowing what player safekeeps are and then get blamed for not handing out player safekeeps, but that's how things were run. I know this may split the community, but I am of the opinion that this is a game. Something we do for fun and enjoyment. This is not a job. We do not get paid to put in hours upon hours of work a week only to get chewed out for not completing a job to the specifications that people were never trained on. That said, I would try to act as a liaison between Alan and gov. When I would seek clarification in response to gov members asking me desperately what they were expected to do, instead of that clarity, I would get lashed out at as well. Just told to handle things, without having the faintest idea of how he wanted things handled. And as I took these vague instructions and did my best to pass it on to gov members, who would then get threatened with termination for not doing it how he wanted it done, I realized that nobody in their right mind would put up with this. And I was right. Member after member dropped out of government. No time for this, demoralized, just sick of the constant negativity in gov. I didn't blame them. I figured Alan would change his tune as department after department emptied out and less and less work got done. Surely someone has to learn from that, right? Right? Sorry to not keep you in suspense but no. Alan had a plan for that. I should do it. Apparently, if members quit gov because of how they are being treated, then its my job to pick up the slack. This differed greatly from my don't make it so person after person feels like quitting philosophy of how to run things, but I digress. When I refused, hoping against hope that he would perhaps find new gov that he liked to do the jobs, he just...did it all himself instead. As opposed to working with gov, Alan decided that he would just be gov. But if that was just it, I'm probably not writing this post. As most of you will likely know, during all of this something else was happening. That's right. Lets talk about war. The Wars War, what is it good for? Training. I'm not opposed to launching a war in order to train members on how best to fight, teach gov how to manage things during a conflict. That's not a problem. At least I didn't think it would be. But as I soon learned, one probably shouldn't do that while you're outside any major bloc and your name is Alan. Now everyone knows Alan isn't the most liked individual in Orbis. There are probably more leaders in Orbis who want to take a swing at him for one reason or another than there are horrible Marvel products since endgame. With that reality, the wisest course of action would be to keep your head down and not cause trouble because sooner or later another Alanfall would be rearing its ugly head. We did training week instead. We did training week...then got involved fighting Brofam. So slightly extended. Nothing that couldn't be handled though. But here is the problem with Alan doing most of gov. We didn't have anyone else doing FA. I'm sure this is a a surprise to everyone, but Alan doing FA is like watching trying to chisel the sculpture of David with a jackhammer. It is moderately entertaining but you just know its not going to end well. Brofam was offering a white peace, for what was in essence a case of wrongly escalating counters. Alan wanted terms. Much harsher terms. Terms Brofam would not accept. And then in what was probably the fastest case of Orbis Uno reverse card I've ever seen, Brofam signed with Samurai. Alan assured us Samurai wanted nothing to do with us. Mere hours later FSO, Nemesys, and to the surprise of probably nobody, Samurai, are hitting Black Skies. War week had turned into war month. Now getting zeroed in a war happens, but it takes a special kind of cognitive dissonance to call getting rolled winning. But that is what happened. Members up and down the alliance were beyond frustrated in getting everything they had worked to build get annihilated and told don't worry, this is called winning. Again, Alan running peace talks was like watching someone trying to do open heart surgery with a hacksaw. It's pretty telling that after Alan finally gave me the go ahead to take over peace talks, Thompson and I got it hammered out in about 5 minutes. So after billions lost due to another Alan caused war, members broke, alliance not much better, it was only natural that people were stressed and things were tense. It was in the weeks after that this working relationship went from tense to truly toxic. Post War With many members from Gov messaging me about how displeased they were after these series of bruising conflicts, and moral overall being rather low, I came to the conscious choice to go easy on people. Alan did the exact opposite. He started to accuse everyone of being incompetent, of being unable to do their jobs, and wanted to fire them. I put my foot down. No way, not after everything our members have just gone through. If he wanted to fire someone he would need to ask the rest of gov, not just himself making a unilateral decision. Alan found a nice way around that. Why fire someone when you could just make them quit? And thus began the most disrespectful period I have seen from any leader at any point of playing this game. Multiple people being told that they were having they safekeeps taken from them for not meeting the standards he wanted, but again, never clearly explained. Berating gov officials in front of others being told how furious he was in their performance. I know of three people who will be or already have deleted their nations because of being complete sick of the way Alan was running things. I know of another 4 who left the alliance being sick of Alan and getting dragged into war after war in his name. And of course gov member after gov member quit. At this very low point, I finally decided that I would try to rebuild what he had so determinedly torn down. The Final Days, The Handbooks Tale Its actually amusing how little the final war with the Singularity factored into things. When you're already used to getting zeroed time after time you just stop thinking about it. Sorry Singularity, I wish you had a bigger part to play in this chapter. With that said, I went on a mass recruitment drive for gov. But here the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. So what was the main problem for gov? Not understanding to a tee what their individual responsibilities were. So I pressured Alan. Tell them exactly what you want them to do. Tell them exactly what tasks they are to be doing, so there is zero misunderstandings between leadership and gov. I expected it to go like this. Alan: Low gov IA number one, your job is to handle (_____). Do you understand? Low Gov IA: Yes, for I am a reasonable human being and can understand tasks when they are clearly given. Glory to Black Skies! Instead, we got...THE HANDBOOK. This is the one thing I feel extremely confident in leaking, one because of how much I hate it, two because it was to be released to the general Black Skies population anyways. This was the guides on steroids. This was the Black Skies bible, Alan its Prophet. This document, and this is the best version of it I must say as in the hours after it was released was so confusing to members that it had undergone at least 3 revisions, was the end all of gov responsibilities. New gov member wants to know what to do specifically? Consult the Handbook. Didn't understand exactly? Well, you're stupid. I wish that was hyperbole but, no. That was his actual response. So I decided to do something about it. This was my recruitment of new gov members and I would not set them up for failure. I was sitting people down and telling them what their exact tasks would be, referencing the sacred Handbook. Now a little bit about me. I have served 13 years in the military, 3 of which in the capital which involved working with politicians. In the Army, while some might be an infantryman, there are specializations. Mortar crew, Radio operator, Recon, all might fall under the title of infantryman. So this was the philosophy that I brought to the this task. Everyone in IA would do IA, but certain people would have certain tasks within IA. Alan...Alan did not like this. This was an affront to the Sacred Handbook. I was called a fricking idiot, I was told anyone who didn't understand it was stupid, I was called beyond useless, and I was flat out threatened with demotion for trying to implement this. I told him to do it, because I would demerge immediately. And then I realized, why was I doing this? Not the implement of a tasks system, but trying to run things with Alan? He was never going to change. Nothing about this was making me happy. Him threatening to demote me was the wake up call I needed. I was stuck in a toxic relationship and I needed to get the hell out. So I told him as much, and told him I would consult with PRIU members about reforming. According to the Handbook, this was poaching. I kid you not, this was an actual thing that was said. Apparently keeping the bank of PRIU separate was for reasons other than having PRIU members remake PRIU. I was beyond giving a damn. The Handbook could burn for all I care. Alans response was predictable. Removed from all roles and then him badmouthing me to all former PRIU members in members channels I could no longer access. Unfortunately for him, the old PRIU servers were never deleted and as always, most of my members would leave, dropping Black skies to what it was before, a sad lonely alliance with no friends near 50th in rank. The damage done to what was PRIU is still almost beyond measure, with near half of its members having left or deleted during our time with Black Skies. Our future is still up in the air, but I do know one thing. No matter how hard it is to leave, and whatever abuse your ex will hurl at you, it is always, always better to leave a toxic situation and strive for something better than hang around someone who clearly has no regard for anyone but themselves and is willing to hurl verbal abuse without a second thought as the the person on the receiving end. I do not know what the future holds for Black Skies and Alan. He has survived many crisis in this game and gets points for resiliency if nothing else. What I will say is, after 4 months of working with him, he is most deserving of the reputation he has held for many years in Orbis. He is who we thought he was.
  4. Ah yes, the former diplomat threatning to attack people in other discords. How are you? 😝
  5. https://politicsandwar.com/nation/id=188494
  6. I didnt delete, i got kicked by justinian. And i waited until the alliance was dead before posting this.
  7. I have been waiting to write this for a long time. For those of you who know me, I was once the Co Leader of the alliance know as Empire of the Romans. I have the honour of being Justinians first merger, although definately not the last. The Idea of Rome When first approached by Justinian asking about a merger, it started off extremely poorly. Despite my alliance being the larger of the two, Justinian approached it as us simply merging into his for the good all involved. When we balked at this idea, and proposed more equal terms the talks almost died right there. Many times, looking back, I wish it had. But instead, I got my best people together, and decided it was best to negotiate this out for the potential it had. Notably, Justinian brought nobody but himself to these talks. His people would do whatever he decided on was what he said. The talks were a clash of ideals, democracy and standards on one side, quick and flexible authoritarian on the other. In the end we tried our best to merge these conflicting ideals into one cohesive foundation for our new joint alliance, the Empire of the Romans. There were a few things left out, with the idea that we would get back to them later. Things left out, conflict resolution, warchest standards, fiscal policy and government expectations. These would be the seeds for the fall of Rome. The Rise of Rome The initial merger went as well as could be expected. My members joined the new alliance within a day, the alliance bank was transferred, people joined the new discord, things went swimingly. Justinian and I worked hard to set up a community, a government, and a path forward. We had elections, people were joining, our financial situation was stable. Justinian and I were a good team, in the beginning. We worked together, we figured out solutions to problem, we compromised. Justinian worked hard on finding mergers for the new alliance, although this was the first real indication that this alliance was not. what it first seemed. Despite being equals, at least on paper, I was not informed about mergers before they were just about to happen. While I was okay in principle with mergers, not being informed on them was a troubling situation. I chalked this up to growing pains, and let him know that I did want a bit more in terms of notice and updates regarding potential mergers. With this out of the way, we grew. Merger followed by merger. All really disorganized alliances, all broke. So while we grew in terms of numbers, our alliance bank did not. And despite communicating that I and all of gov needed more information about mergers, the information we got was usually last minute, hours if not minutes before the merger was to take place. This pattern would persist until the very end. The Cracks Begin to Form The first real drag it out conflict that Justinian and I had was over which sphere to choose. PRIU, having fought hard in the delta hedge war, had secured a protector in Children of the Light, and we had good working relations with them. Justinian was coming from Hollywood and TKR, and wanted to continue with them. For once, we could not agree. Which was fine, we had planned for this possibility. If we could not decide, Gov would. And gov voted for Cataclysm. This should have been the end of the matter. Instead Justinian engaged in a smear campaign, dragged CotL reputation through the mud, twisted arms, and forced people to change their vote. This went against everything that we had decided on, but instead of making it a bigger issue than it needed to be, I simply remembered that this was how it was going to be going forward. I didn't know it yet, but the good times were already over, it was going to be a battle of wills from this point forward. Meanwhile, the mergers continued. At this point, I started to sound the alarm. Not only was our bank shrinking in comparison to the amount of members we were absorbing, all of these nations had 0 warchests. Myself, knowing the importance warchests played in PRIU doing well in our war, wanted to stop. Consolidate. Train our members before getting new ones. Justinian wanted to seize the momentum, continue to grow. These lumps of coal could be turned into diamonds at a later date. Besides, TKR would keep us out of war. But to address my concerns, he would import a specialist government minister from outside the alliance. If I said our military situation was abysmal, he would grab a guy he said was an expert in military affairs. If I said our builds were junk, he would import a IA guy. Economics 10/10 taxes was hurting us, he would import a finance guy. These people would stay for as little as 3 weeks sometimes before going inactive or leaving for another alliance, all the while the issues they were here to address went unresolved. And the ones that did stay were the loyal yesmen to Justinian, that seemingly being their strongest attribute. More on this later. The absent leader To begin, I understand this is just a game. The pay is horrible, the hours can be long, and the credit if fleeting at best. That said, those who want to be leaders do need to put in the time. I made sure to always be around my discord, available to members and government alike should something arise. Maybe too much time, as my wife would tell me as I sorted government issues while out on date night. So I don't blame people for having a life outside the game, Justinian least of all. But there comes a point where I began to wonder, how could I help run the alliance when the guy Im supposed to be running it with is never there? Gov would spend hours discussing an issue, awaiting Justinians input, we wouldn't get a response for 20 hours. I would send paragraphs of text suggesting policy, wouldn't get a response for days. There were times I needed to join the VC after one of his shows to get a hold of him to let him know all of gov was waiting on him to make a decision. Again, everyone needs a life outside this game, but a leader of an alliance should be available more than 20 minutes a day. And its not like he would be at work, or with family. He would be playing EU4 while ignoring all our pings. And when he did grace us with his presence he was more likely to simply want to do something that popped into his head without collaboration instead of addressing what myself and gov had been discussing. So in late november, this finally came to a head. Not by me, but by Justinian saying he was over running the alliance. We should merge into TKR. Little did I know that talks were pretty much complete and the merger was my approval away from being completed. I for the life of me could not understand how someone who put in 20 minutes actually governing could be tired of it all, but I did manage to talk him down from it. But it has to be known, EotR was on borrowed time from mid to late November. It was no longer a matter of if EotR would merge into TKR, but a matter of when. The decline of Rome Arrgh did in Rome. Arrgh killed the dysfunctional alliance called EotR. Arrgh mass raided EotR for 2 days. Arrgh, in 2 days, drained alliance members of 50-60 percent of what was in the alliance bank in resources. It wasn't clear yet, but Arrgh had set EotR into its death spiral. Everything wrong with the alliance came back to bite it. Preparedness, nil. Warchests, for the vast majority, none. Build discipline, none.(20 percent of net losses were suffered by 3 individuals, all under 12c with average 2700 infra). I had never been so embarrassed in my time in this game. Milcom was none existent. People being blockaded for 1 turn talking about surrender. I was ashamed I had let things get to that point. All the mergers just made the alliance bloated. Not stronger, bloated, with soft nations with subpar militaries and no warchests. And all during this raid, Justinian was nowhere to be seen. Too busy getting high and drunk, we could deal with it. In 2 days, Arrgh laid bare every failing of the alliance. Low taxes meant a pitiful alliance bank. No warchest standards meant a lot of wars lost, and high infra builds destroyed. Poor gov standards meant little to no effective milcom. And the final nail in the coffin, conflict resolution would end my time as leader. Before the arrgh raid, I had let it be known that if standards were to be applied alliance wide, they needed to start in gov. So I let every gov member know, have a effective warchest or you cannot serve as gov. I gave 2 months for people to get up to speed. And they all did, to their credit. Until a week after the argh raid, when Klaus Noxix sold his entire warchest for a new city. I fired him. Justinian reinstated him. I fired him again. I sat him down and talked to him about the importance of warchests and made sure he understood before I let him back in gov. A compromise in my mind. Not good enough for Justinian. Klaus Noxix was one of those loyal yesmen Justinian wanted, so the standards didnt apply to him. He removed me that same day. Why? We had never come to an agreement on conflict resolution, so off I was. Everything I put into that alliance, for nothing. The final days of Rome I was kicked. Equal Co leaders my ass. But oddly, I wasn't upset. I thought I should have been. Knocked down to member,discord priveleges taken away. I should have been raging. I was anxious about starting from almost scratch.(Justinian, to his credit, gave PRIU its original bank back). I had go contact my members, get Clock to bring me back into the fold, organize a move from EotR. But I was not angry. Why? Why was I not angry? Because EotR was doomed. I knew it, and I believe Justinian knew it too. Not because I left, or because all but 1 PRIU member returned to the reformed alliance, the few of the alliance with proper standards and proper militaries. No. It was because as Arrgh had shown us internally, EotR was broken. Its fundamental structure was broken. And it would be up to Justinian alone now to fix it. All those rapid fire mergers with a bank that was actually slightly smaller than it was at the original merger but with 3 times the members left the alliance 1 major conflict away from toppling over. And as that conflict began, I watched EotR be the only member of Hollywood to go negative net, and I knew it was over. And so it is, merged into TKR as it would have been in november if not for my intervention. While I can watch with amusement from afar, this does not fill me with any great joy. A lot of people put a lot of work into that alliance, despite its failings. To watch it crumble 5 weeks after I left is nothing but a disservice to those who did put in that hard work, those long hours. As for why now, why share this all now? Well, with the alliance all but dead, nothing I say will effect it further. I had wanted to share this before, and many of the news organizations in game wanted to hear it. But due to the work those still there had put in, I bit my tongue, and went on with my life. So this is for those who wanted to know.
  8. I agree, a lot of nations are simply having max air builds and are able to completely dominate all three areas of warfare simply due to getting air superiority. While its not impossible to win these conflicts, its prohibitively difficult. Blockade them with your navy, nope, they will airstrike your navy until the blockade is broken. Get ground control. Nope, they wreck your tanks and half their power. A simple fix for this is upping the amount of planes someone can take out with a successful ground attack. When someone has a 300-400 plane advantage over you, taking our 50-80 planes isn't going to do enough to turn the tide. 100-150, yeah that's going to cut into that overwhelming air power.
  9. I feel that someone should have soldiers , planes, tanks,something, if they want to fortify. Someone with no military forces whatsoever but can hold off someone with Max military makes no sense.
  10. nation name:Palsada Nation link: https://politicsandwar.com/nation/id=35147
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