Cooper_

By my calculations, this was 3 TKR Hegemony narratives back. I'm just trying to focus on the current "TKR Hegemony." Thanks for understanding, man.

I don't know you well enough to make any real judgements, but I can understand wanting to speak the truth. I've based my FA style off of the principles of being honest and honourable, and I disagree that you can't do FA and stick to your guts (or even a raging idealist in my case). I've also dealt with Batavia enough as my direct ally and still have never experienced what you suggest. That said, I'm a bit skeptical about your claims with regards to Pantheon's decision-making. I'd contest it based on your actions that war with regards to our protectorate, Nova Riata. Am I happy that you didn't decide to take advantage of TFP? Sure, but I don't think you deserve brownie points for the doing the right thing, especially with the context of you clearly doing the wrong thing with Nova in that same war. Consistency in principle is the only way any set of morals can be exercised in this game. And bringing this back into the context at the moment, it's been clear that multiple parties have acted duplicitously. We were lied to, and it we're seems still being lied to. The point here is to determine the truth by giving people basic logical standards to uphold their words. There should be consistency in the things you say and it should accord with what others say for it to be true. Clearly, someone has to not be telling the truth based on the evidence in this thread.

Seems like everyone is so concerned about my feelings. I should feel honored. We did have a short conversation. It was nice to speak to you again. Yes, I didn't think it was the best time to deal with the personal issues between Rose and TKR. Though I've already spoken to Mhearl a few times. Understandably, the good faith and trust we recently had is mostly lost. That said, my response to your DoW is of a nature that I feel is best addressed publicly. I have specifically chosen to avoid bringing up any dirty laundry that I felt was best left for backchannels, but the comments I made here concern a world vision and are separate. Your DoW has fundamentally changed the meta, and I think we deserve a more elaborative public response on why you've decided to do that and the ability to have Orbis scrutinize its impacts. To me, it looks like Rose's value system as we knew it had collapsed. My bloc-mates have agreed to clear this thread for a bit, so we can have a constructive discussion about it. Right now, none of us are convinced in the reasoning for this choice nor how it will affect the meta. We're looking for some answers.

I think this is a bit of a projection. My understanding of why Swamp would want Quack out is because they're the only other sphere that can compete on an even level with y'all given the unparalleled concentration of tiering at the lower levels. Our FA strategy has always been to keep up good relations with everyone, specifically y'all and Rose, and to react as best as we can to events as they came up. Quack aggression has never been considered not the least because we were aware of concerns, illegitimate or not, about our size. We were open about that with you. We don't just use friendliness as a front. Hi, this is extremely problematic for the entire cause of this war. More than anything else, the reason why smaller spheres fail is because people want more security. We felt the same way about a Hedge/Swamp war. We weren't confident, but that's why we were content with such a dynamic. Nonetheless, this isn't a war we wanted. It was a war we were given, and we responded to appropriately. At best, we had 50/50 odds if we had a semi-blitz advantage (we didn't have the numbers to even consider attacking Swamp) and whatever this ethereal competence is that you assign to us. That's the point of a multipolar world, engaging in risky FA and military maneuvers. It keeps you on your toes, and that's what people are supposed to mean when they point to dynamism. Being unsure about winning a war is a horrible reason to organize a dogpile, and it's more evidence of overestimation than anything else. If we're going to run such narratives, then you can't run the pretense of also considering the meta or use rhetoric about spheres and balancing. This was about personal interests. None of us here have been toxic. We might use strong language in our arguments, but none of it is directed at you or anyone else. Unfortunately, we can't just move on. Actions were taken that are clearly out of the norm, and they need to be addressed. People just can't get off the hook. These exchanges are happening to get to that point of some sense of closure and revealing publicly those machinations that led to this point.

If anybody seems to be complaining about this happening, then I think you're getting the wrong idea. We initiated the preempt with the goal of limiting the damage these revelations caused to us and doing it on our own terms instead of being sitting ducks (hah pun). The question here is the invalidation of our actions that many on your side has been trying to spin. It doesn't make a lot of sense, especially given your previous statements and those of those of others that confirmed the cooperation we cited in our initial CB. That's the point we're making here. We had a justification that now seems even more prescient. I can say that TKR doesn't conduct it's FA as such, but my take is if you make plans and get caught, then there are consequences. The beans got spilled here. The cause of this war is squarely on the parties that began these plans, confirming our CB as a preempt.

This declaration is probably the defining point of this war, perhaps of the entire post-IQ era. Unfortunately, I think this is true for the wrong reasons. The war was expected to be a HM/Swamp v Quack. I'm not sure who would've won, but it would've been close. But my qualms aren't limited to what could’ve been the makeup of an excitingly competitive war, they mostly lie with the lasting repercussions on the meta. A lot of the ideas that Rose suggested y'all stood for have been abandoned here. At one point, you seemed to believe in the ideas of a balanced, multipolar world and fighting in wars for the sake of the meta. Now, that's no longer the case. Things have changed. There's an interesting juxtaposition you can create between the declaration here and the declaration at the beginning of Dial-Up. In one, you were outnumbered, outgunned, and fighting against a plot to gang up on a smaller sphere. Today, you are outnumbering, outgunning and fighting with a plot to dogpile another sphere. In the first case, the claims about fairness and the meta made a lot of sense, and earned you a lot of fans like many of us in Quack. Yet here we are where we're faced with the same set of justifications that ring hollow in a set of circumstances that belies your cause to enter. It's hard to make better wars from the former as you stipulate in the OP when this scenario is reminiscent of the same former chicanery in past wars, entering without a CB and without regard for the consequences on the meta. The situation is further complicated by the stances y'all have taken for months if not years preceding this war on what the meta should look like. Outwardly, there seemed to be Rose buy-in to the concept of a world with many powers that isn't constrained by consolidation. Inwardly, those principles weren't applied. Rose's entry has solidified the resolve of Quack. Many of us were expecting significant changes in the composition of spheres and a serious shift in power as a consequence of the war with HM/Swamp. This might've (perhaps was even likely to have) resulted in the breakup and restructuring of Quack and/or Swamp, the two largest spheres in the game. Personally, that's where I saw value. There were a lot of moving parts and numerous opportunities to see the dynamic in Orbis radically change, a true expression of elusive dynamism in Orbis. It’s going to take a lot for that to be considered again. I don't know what the political result of this will be. The entry has mortared any cracks in Quack internals and effectively isolated us from the rest of the game. The expectation that we'll see a significant restructuring after this is now in flux. This is the most disappointing part. It's also where I see the most hypocrisy for any real motivations about the meta, sphere size, or any sort of principles. Bipolarity and stagnation is something I fear, and the necessary ingredients were assembled here. Heck, it even defeats the purported CBs and reasons behind the other sphere's war too. The corruption of these values is full-thickness. And maybe that doesn't mean much to most people. To the born-and-bred TKR guy, this is everything. I’m struggling with understanding how you see us moving forward from here, Quack and Orbis. I don’t want this to happen. No one in Quack wants this to happen. A move to bipolarity and stagnation like we saw in the past is demonstrably harmful, yet it’s seeming more and more inevitable. The conditions are already unfavorable, and we’re going to need to see change (and a lot of it) if we hope to stop this. Yet despite all of this, we still don't have a reason behind the entry–if there really even is one. The series of shifting rationales we've been given haven't added up. The few lines we've been given here aren't effective either. For such a large-scoping decision and for all of the good faith we have–I have–afforded you, this merits more. The future of Orbis that you've catalyzed deserves at least some better explanation for the decision made here. I hope you consider this. I hope the damage is reparable.

Hi, I can confirm that TKR had direct and very open lines of communication with Rose during all preceding events since NPOLT. We made it quite clear that Quack never had any intention of hitting them on several occasions. For even very little things that Rose had concerns about, we always gave them our assurances and offered transparency. This was a non-issue.

Updated to include Schrute/WTF. I also limited the search result to nations who've been active in the past 3 days.

You know things are desperate when Vexz makes a post with a Taylor Swift song and not Selena Gomez. A Rare sight indeed.

I find this to be the fairest point brought up thus far. Reactionary consolidation is definitely a phenomenon that exists and contributes to the development of bipolarity. To the extent that it happened with Swamp is up for debate. From my understanding, it precipitated the TcW and Swamp merge. That said, there were also other factors like the previous war and the months of decline TcW sphere had beforehand. When the NAP started, TcW and Quack were at parity. Later Swamp took that role from TcW. Quack then outgrew the rest without really adding any ties. TcW joined with Swamp and brought things back to an equilibrium with Rose and HM as the other major players. I can tell you the this was actually the first thought I had when I saw that tie. That was part of the reason I was looking forward to the preempt against TcW/HM with a Swamp counter. I thought it'd've been a really fun and balanced war with a strong possibility of both larger blocs breaking up after the war.

I'm not really one for spin. It makes me dizzy. On the other hand, I'm a big fan of speaking the truth, and I think all of the statements I made oblige with that. If you have evidence to the contrary of what I said, I welcome the discussion. Looking at your response, I feel like you're just playing semantics or maybe it's just nonsense. We're not hella-huge, but we're huge? Swamp is large, but we're a different large? What does that even mean? I can't respond to vague definitions that don't have any logic or data backing them up. I mean this whole narrative has been vague. My thinking is it's vague because going into specifics would make it easy to scrutinize the narrative. I've already given you statistics that show Swamp being larger than Quack by a significant margin as well as outiering above and below us. You've told me what kind of huge you think Quack is. That isn't really a fair equivalency. Unless someones starts giving me a valid definition of what a hegemony actually is and then proves how Quack qualifies under those conditions, all of these arguments hold no water. We can dance around on rhetoric, but in reality there's zero substance to these claims. Thus, I will continue to suggest that this hegemony narrative is nothing but a political mask for opportunism because that's what the hard evidence suggestions. Finally, I have a real problem with quality critique. This double standard is always leveled against TKR. I don't understand why we have to be handicapped by some notion that we're competent. Yeah, we put a lot of effort into training our members and gov, and it pays off. That should be expected, and we take pride in it and our community. Your metaphor is a bit off as the competency advantage tops off pretty rapidly. The wars against IQ numbers and our quality demonstrated that nicely. And I think that's pretty insulting to Swamp who has a lot of promising gov (and many old guard) in T&, TI and TFP, especially. As an aside, it's nice to see you around, Kev. I hope @Pika and you are doing well. I didn't get to say good bye when y'all left last time. Stay well, friends.

Hi Kev, I'm having a bit of trouble following some of the logic here. You say we didn't go hella-huge, and yet you also imply we deserve a check and balance. Can you go into why Quack specifically needed a check? I keep hearing this hegemony narrative without any backup. People keep saying "oh Quack is a hegemony," but they are having trouble saying why that is. Unfortunately, there are no wars or really statistics to point to. And if that's true why doesn't Swamp, the bigger sphere, need that same check? Why is the the anti-hegemony Hedge Money working with the biggest sphere twice in a row to dogpile other spheres?

I think it's hard to make an apples to apples comparison. I also haven't been around long enough to know enough about Orbis intimately to make such a claim. What I will say though is that I think there's a substantive difference between being called a hegemony and acting like a hegemony. It's hard to make that point because a lot of decisions, especially negative decisions are thrown out when you make tiering comparisons in a vacuum. I mean I'll say Quack has had multiple opportunities to hit other spheres, which it has turned down due to a combination of factors including fairness of the war and impact on the meta. On top of this, Quack has actively cut down on it's treaties (TI, T&, Soup, and others) as well as rejecting many other potential ties. When the NAP began, we were at the size of TcWsphere, and the only thing that changed was that we grew faster than the rest. Should we get penalized for recruiting better and growing faster? I'm not sure. I also mean to contend the fact that Quack even qualifies as a hegemony. There are currently 4 principal spheres, and Quack makes up about ~30% of cities with another sphere, Swamp,, making up 35-40%. From what I understand, the hegemony narrative's strongest point is the TKR-T$ tie. Something about our competence makes us the end-all-be-all of Orbis. I get the idea that competence makes a large difference, but as we saw with IQ even the best fighters can't really do better than 1.3:1, 1.5:1, maybe? 2:1, and most of Quack isn't TKR-T$. I suppose the final point people make is control over a single tier, but that just isn't there on any level. I think all of these conditions of hegemony failing are why the claims are so vague here. It's just an accusation of hegemony with no backup. Part of the problem is that actors see hegemony narratives as a means to an end because it has worked in the past. If you want to roll someone opportunistically, then you call them a hegemon and can fudge the rest. It's a crime of existence not a crime that exists. This isn't the first time that it's been used successfully against TKR. And they can be effective politically, but that doesn't make them true. It's usually a bit more complicated with that in backrooms, but you probably understand better than I, buor, how powerful hegemony narratives are. Admittedly, this is one of the poorer narratives I've seen, which is why we were a bit surprised by the other spheres also entering. It's a bit funny that the "hegemons" are usually the ones that get hit 2-3:1 instead of the other way around. If you want to know my take, I was expecting to go to war with Swamp and HM. We couldn't realistically take on both, so we blitzed what we could and hoped for a slow counter to merge our blitz front before Swamp could fully mobilize. We weren't sure whether we could win (50/50 at best), and I thought we were going to have among the most balanced wars in recent times. Result either way was likely going to be the breakup of Quack. Now, I have no idea what will happen with the ensuing political isolation we'll experience. I imagine the meta commentary will be more refined as we see things evolve, but I think that fairly responds your question. Hi, we didn't do any plotting. We responded to the dice Orbis gave us. This war was never our intention nor our idea. It was either now or in mid-November. There's no if. Only when. We chose to do it on our terms with clearly established Orbis precedent.

You just made me laugh out loud, literally. I appreciate the trolling. You keep me on my toes ❤️

I do earnestly believe that making IQ comparisons is wrong. I had no intention of a personal insult as that is never my style. Do forgive me good sir, but I do think that qualifies as toxicity to be gaslighted in such a way. And you can be serious without it getting personal. That's what I meant by it's a game.

I just reran the numbers by sphere. I also updated some of the alliances involved, so the numbers changed marginally. Swamp is the largest sphere by a non-minor margin (roughly 40% of HM ahead as a comparison). They alone out-tier us in everything below C21 and above C35. Anyways, I'm around for more data-driven discussion. My inner Nate Silver is just waiting to come out! Hello, Akuryo! Pleasure to make your acquaintance. The narrative you're throwing out here isn't correct. We have logs as Partisan previously posted for everyone to see. We were going to get hit by y'all, and it wasn't really a secret y'all had been gunning for us for months (probably since the beginning of the NAP). Maybe it's my memory playing tricks on me, but I sure remember starting the NAP with a bang with folks from your sphere starting hegemony narratives right off the bat. And then we had months of rumors coming out of nowhere talking about Quack's plans to hit enemy spheres, which somehow never materialized. We were privy to a lot of information, much of it was probably suitable for a declaration of war. The months of spinning y'all had going didn't fall on deaf ears, and I find this to be important context which you don't reference. But if only one point gets through, this was was going to happen either way. We've confirmed that all parties were planning on entering in November as the logs say. To say anything else is a lie, and you know that. Only thing we did here was choose how the war went down. We were expecting Swamp to counter, and I was looking forward to it. I thought a Swamp/HM war with Quack would've been loads of fun and relatively even with asymmetric tiering advantages. Alas, one can hope. I suppose one can also appreciate the irony of an anti-hegemony "hedgemoney" starting two dogpile wars in a row. Anyways I think you'd get better responses if you were nicer to people. Spreading the toxicity of the OWF isn't a good thing. I feel like every time I log on to this god-forsaken place I see you yelling at someone and having no patience for anyone who might disagree with you. It's a game y'know, and being rude to people doesn't make it anymore fun.

This just isn't cool or funny. We spent 9 months under NPO and IQ's boot, fighting harder, longer and louder than virtually any other alliance. And I'm damn proud of our community for doing what it did. Now, you're going to call us IQ/NPO? Take a step back man, and get some perspective. We're freaking TKR. On a more general note, I really think we need to practice better hygiene with how we post. Calling people you don't like IQ is just wrong and clearly lacks any understanding of context. A lot of us suffered a lot during that war, and it minimizes it when you just flippantly throw it around. And in reality, it doesn't take a lot of brainpower to come up with a better byline for your narrative. Do better. Be better.

Reposting

Hi there, I heard you've got complaints about the quack hegemony. For your viewing pleasure:

Off to war we go! Good luck everyone.

I have no sympathy for Pantheon, but isn't this a standard thing–to counter for an attack on anyone on an AA? That's always been our policy too. Since Nova, there's no doubt they deserve this from my view, but I'm iffy on setting the precedent of escalating from what could be considered a valid counter. Anyways, blood for the blood god! Have fun burning the pixels. I'm jelly :3

I overall like the changes, but I'd suggest rebalancing the costs of the Spy Satellite and perhaps recouping costs to anyone who invested in it. It's pretty expensive, and its ability to control a spy war just got significantly nerfed. I can still see the value in having them, but it's lower than what it was. I imagine there's also some derived demand for space program because of spy satellite, so that also got weaker. Suggestion: 25% cut in money and resource costs, and a refund of that amount of to players who have space program. A corresponding 10% cut in costs for space program.

Congratulations guys on picking out a new gov. That said, I would like to say that @Redarmy is a treasure, and you will be missed. I've had the opportunity to become friends with you over these past months (almost a year now?), and I'm really happy I did. I know I speak for everyone in TKR when I say this because whether it was in CoS/Val (RIP) or later in ASM, you were a great friend and person throughout all of the tough times. I'm sure that almost everyone who really knows you thinks the same. There's really not many people who are as genuinely kind to as many people as you're. I didn't intend for this to get that sappy, but I really mean it. There's always a spot waiting for you to chill out with us whenever you like. Enjoy your retirement because you deserve it. And please don't be a stranger. Obligatory: RIP Chaos. I miss you ❤️ It's dark and full of terrors. I think Ben sometimes forgets to feed us.

Finally making me proud to say "ayy lmao."