Emperor Adam

ok but based OP since op is inactive you can just send me your money instead my cv:

Not to drag up old news, but they were given numerous chances from myself and Partisan to stay on green so long as they helped Syndi do purges, as per an existing agreement, and they failed to follow through on their end. All it would've taken is them hitting green nations on none/small micros that dragged the score down to be able to stay, and they refused. I even gave them another chance during the war to agree to it before I added that to the terms.

Any decent alliance is going to deny/ignore you immediate for this alone.

Good riddance.

Alternatively: git gud. But yeah, I genuinely don't see this as a problem. Trading isn't necessarily a difficult thing to get into, it's just time consuming and you have to have a decent amount of money to begin with. 150m is honestly plenty to start manipulating most of your own markets.

The three edicts of Eden: gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss.

Happy to be working with you again. Let's make a mess.

We exist. You're welcome. https://politicsandwar.com/alliance/id=9656 Eden's Discord: https://discord.gg/U8zWYBAkjX Quality Unassured: https://discord.gg/nMEGmKYnQf

As the FA for t$ when the split happened, you are woefully incorrect. Benfro and I agreed that Quack's time was done, and were planning to disband before the leaks that lead to TLR happened. Get your information right. As for the rest of the thread, gl, hf, my condolences, etc.

But being a rude smartass is literally 90% of FA. I'm confused, friend!

Full agree. Antiquated feature.

See title. TLDR of changes that could improve it significantly: - Make it easier to find. It's hidden away and heavily mentioned as an afternote. Working it into the tutorial (after these other changes, also rework tutorial entirely but thats another thread that im sure will come later) will make it more prominent. - Let aas have more characters to describe themselves. -Set up certain community-decided on tags (ie, Raiding Alliance, New Player Friendly, City x Requirement, etc) and a search system alongside that to allow alliances to tag themselves and show them what kind of things players can expect from that alliance, as well as search for specific types of alliances. -Make it look better. This just looks... rough. Again, search system would go a long way and I believe there's a few webdesign people in the community that have already worked on an idea for this specifically. Th I'm sure there's more ideas I missed, but I'm mainly posting this to open the conversation and also bother @Prefontaine about it. Feel free to add below.

I'm so glad this doesn't foreshadow anything! Congrats on the move, interested to see what's next.

I wouldn't say every game, but every 20 or so game?

Good luck! Congrats on existing.

I don't think this is nearly the problem you make it out to be. 6m extra a day for that much effort is genuinely nothing when you can do simple buy low/sell highs on the market for significantly less effort and more money. I'd rather time be devoted to things that are important rather than trying to fix a nonexistent problem.

IA is the best. No bias here, friends! Good post overall though, DB. Hopefully it'll help some new enterprisers create some new aas.

I'll admit said rose-tinted glasses may stem from me having been almost exclusively in micros and KETOGG at the time, where things were very all over the place, at least from my perspective. That said, the takeaway y'all are getting isn't even near the main points I was making. It's a merry-go-round of which major sphere is gonna get hit the next. Right now it's t$'s turn. My bets on Rose being next, though Clock's probably up to bat too providing they don't swing first. It's "varied" in the absolute loosest definition. It's like going to a cookout where the cook doesn't season his meat, but has steaks, chicken, lamb, etc laid out. Sure, there's a ton of different options - but none of them taste any good. I think that's an issue both with the CBs being based on a numbers meta and a "well you hit me so I'm hitting you" meta which just feels incredibly uninspired. The main reason for hitting someone right now isn't interesting. It boils down to either a cheap revenge uppercut or a numbers argument/to slow growth down, which are fine as secondary reasons, but not as main ones. I do think the ever-growing younger playerbase is part of it, as well as burnout from a lot of older players. It's not something that can be fixed overnight, but it's something that can be worked on, whether it be by encouraging the forums, leaders leaning back into the roleplay, or holding people accountable for good CBs one way or another. I mentioned this in RON but I'm excited to see where UPN and her allies go and what y'all end up doing. It'll be a nice change of pace seeing y'all back and active in the public eye.

I mentioned this in RON, but to restate it here t$ had actually reached out to ASM with a treaty idea. That said - I'm not expecting overnight changes and it wouldn't be fair to do so. I am, with as much capacity as I can as a well-known player that's nothing more than a raider currently, reaching out a hand and encouraging everyone else to do the same. I've openly done the same for both UPN and Camelot as well. The game needs more active alliances in the political scheme. The game needs it's older alliances to get involved again. Take the time you need, but I anxiously await ASM's return.

It's genuinely a shame it ever stopped.

I agree completely, which is why I've directly called out alliances I want to see step up as well as mentioned sphere leaderships by name. I think the balancing act and unity is why we're ending up with most of the CBs being boring as hell. I want more personal stakes. I want to see alliance members feel passionate about the wars their in, not because of some numbers, but because somebody wronged their alliance and they want blood. More radically, I want to see alliances seek retribution on their own, without the help of spheres on either side. I want MDPs to be non-chaining as a standard, and to see more 1v1s/1v2s etc. Enough of every war being a global, take a page from our micros. Be interesting! Be fun! Stop making everything forced to be one big group vs another when most of the groups involved have no stakes in the conflict other than helping their ally. I want to see more alliance leaders being straight up with their intentions, not pre-emptively assuming everyones going to be involved, but being so damn sure of their CB that they believe that allies of the one their attacking look at it and go "!@#$ that, you have this one coming. We'll help you with the rebuild, but we're not burning for it." I want an Orbis with shifting sides, shifting goals, and above all, meaningful interactions. Enough of this numbers bullshit. Enough of this tit-for-tat "you hit us last war it's our turn to hit you". It's so unbelievably fricking boring. Orbis can do better, and so can it's leaders.

Is it? All it takes is for FAs from various alliances that are fairly quiet (BK, ASM, etc) to stop being that, and start participating in FA outside of their sphere.

I mentioned this in RON/in DMs a bit, but I'd adore seeing a return to option 1. It has its downsides but it encourages every AA to participate, and makes for more interesting politics.

No, they aren't. Y'all are a bunch of doomers. Now on to the actual point of discussion: What are politics like currently? How do they compare to old politics? I think trying to sum it up all neatly in one little paragraph would be unfair, both to the history of the game and the people who made said history, so WoT incoming. That said, for the sake of brevity, I'll be skipping over the specific causes of wars and moreso focusing on the politics behind them, and the effects of gameplay on them. I'll fully admit to this being ripe with bias, this is more meant to start a genuine discussion. I'll admit I'm not entirely sure when this switch happened, other than knowing it was increasingly obvious post-NPOLT, but there's been a shift in politics. In the past, the "base political unit" (thanks for the wording, zev) was an individual alliance. Today, the base political unit is the various spheres. Lets discuss both in more detail, along with their benefits and downsides. In the alliance unit era, politics were very fluid and at times, unpredictable. In this era, CBs and roleplay were king. Justification for every action had to be there and ready to be defended lest you bring unwanted attention to hostile actions. In this era, we had relatively common shifts in relations, as alliances were expected to have relations with other alliances on a more personal level. This lead to leaders being proactive in politics - making their intentions clear, making themselves known, and above all, being ready to defend any actions they felt like taking. This added a level of intrigue to the game with FA leaders being public faces of their own alliances, being known by the community, and being held responsible for their actions. The main downside to this that I can see is the skill gap. Some people with proper experience, be it PnW, IRL, or other games, could run circles around newer blood. Another potential downside is that alliances were less likely to see off-the-cusp events happen, such as betrayals, as leaders were held individually responsible for their actions and many didn't care to play the villain, which oft lead to a more bipolar political landscape. In the current era, we have a set of major groups (Blackwater, Mile High Club, Hollywood, and Clock), all "led" by a single person/alliance publicly. These small groups of people take the brunt of the responsibility in pushing politics, as in many of the spheres, the other alliances partake almost exclusively intrasphere. The benefits are fairly obvious: We have multi-polarity. It's wonderful and a great breath of air. But there's significant downsides: The roleplay is... almost non-existent. CBs are weak, or not even CBs at all. Many wars recently are fought with the CB being military meta (tiering, consolidation, etc) with there being no lasting negative effects post-war (will expand later). Wars feel empty, and the OWF is a ghost-town outside of the aforementioned leads. Let's get a little more in depth about CBs. In the past, roleplay (and scheming) were a lot more prevalent. This lead to wars based on FA actions, with more political intrigue. CBs currently are just... weak. Indicting myself in this as well, war viability seems to be more based on the numbers rather than the offense. There's a big focus on only going into wars that are numerically favorable, which stalls and hurts the overall politics of the game. Because my ADHD has been acting way up and I've been stuck on that last paragraph for about an hour now, I'll leave more of an open request for opinions on peace terms vs no peace terms. I'm interested to see the various opinions that people have on if we should begin using them again or not.

Take care.