Lord Tyrion

Probably against my better judgement, I'll just say a couple notes here to keep the record straight since multiple people have contacted me about this thread. I still stand 100% behind everything stated in public on this situation and that there was no offensive coalition being formed that we were aware of or a part of. I went back and looked at the date we talked to Lefty since this was when these screenshots are from. That was the day TCW came to us asking to join Swamp and we reached out to Lefty that day to get his opinion around how that would be perceived around the game and the pros and cons of such a move. We did have fears of TCW going to Quack if we didn't take them in, and that day was the first time we talked to Lefty/HM about size concerns with Quack and that a defensive pact may be a good idea. That was as far as it got, there was no discussions of taking the fight to them, just concerns that they'd pick off one of the major spheres one by one potentially and we should have each other's backs if that happened. This has effectively all already been said publicly before. The screenshot from Lefty says "they are talking with TCW about joining together to counter Quack's growth". Again, counter the growth (which wasn't an actual statement we used when talking to lefty), not curb or stop or defeat - a size counterbalance. TCW going to Quack would have made concerns there larger and that was where the discomfort came from. But back to the screenshot, TCW joining Swamp as a counterbalance to Quack's growth is what Lefty wrote. But in reading these HM screenshots, it seems SRD got the impression Lefty was presenting some coalition being built to go wipe Quack and it looks like their chat went down that rabbit hole. Beyond that, they had speculative strategic discussion as probably every bloc has from that point on, which obviously nobody else but them were privy to (until now I suppose). I'm not sure what Shifty means by "Yes, TI did know". We had no insight into these HM conversations.

So your original raid wasn't a NAP violation but one late counter is? Nice logic. And if we'd tried to cycle the guy you'd count each of them as a new war and counter each of them and he'd keep coming back for more - he did come back for more, so here we are. We even offered to just peace all those previous wars and walk away but you wanted "a training exercise" for your members. You purposely refused to try to peace the raids today and tried to justify that you can attack any of our members if you deem them appropriate to do so. You wanted this war.

I'll keep this short and sweet. Knights Templar had a member continue to attack Oasis members, their government was asked to peace the wars or boot the member. Last time this member hit us they countered our counters. This was not an isolated incident. The KT gov instead stands by the actions of this member to raid us continually and is in violation of the NAP. Oasis has sent a military response towards KT and recognizes their hostilities towards us.

Cancer is terrible. I hope everything turns out okay for you irl and hopefully we'll see you here again before long, but you're doing the right thing. Take care Tarroc.

All love Atlan, congrats on your retirement and great job on making this game a better place!

Here we go again....

Congrats to all the winners/nominees and thank you to the organizers! Good transparency with everything too.

I think the work put into the awards is overall really good - the process makes sense and would generally be deemed fair. It's really hard to get around the bias and popularity side of things. The alliances with more members will obviously vote for themselves where they can, and also purposely snub those they might be at odds with. I think that's also somewhat the challenge of one vote per top 50/60 AA - I think the representative will generally vote for those they are allied to, to support an ally versus who may actually be most deserving. Thus, a bloc with more alliances would more likely have the favorable outcome in the votes. Additionally, we do have vested interests in the outcome. If my rival is up for best alliance or best for new players, etc - that's propaganda to be used by them down the line if they win, so you might vote against them, even if they are most deserving. It's human nature and you can't really remove that aspect in how people vote, but I do think you'll continue to find the results of the representative vote lean more towards AAs/members in blocs with more ties, and the general public vote towards alliances with larger membership just due to voting for yourself/friends. I think many categories the popularity contest works just fine - like Best Member, Funniest player, best nation page, a lot of the forum stuff, etc - where people are perhaps less likely to vote in "party lines". But when it comes to the main alliance or player awards, knowing which AA is AA of the year or most powerful or who the best raiders are, etc - it seems that could potentially be more objective instead of subjective. In a perhaps ideal situation there would be a neutral panel that would review actual resumes or metrics (this person raided x amount of loot, this AA had this war performance, this AA's score raised/fell this much, etc) and come up with a less democratic selection process, taking out the biases of people voting party lines. That's a bit idealistic though, as true neutral observers in a game like this would be difficult. Perhaps a bit of rambling above, but I think the process of gathering nominations and voting to bring it to a manageable final vote works fairly well, but there are certainly a number of head-scratchers in the final options for a few of the categories as a result of bloc biases it would seem. Viewing it like the Oscars, as an example, many of these awards would be what you'd see announced and not aired on the broadcast, but the few major awards perhaps in the future there could be a little write-up as to some resumes as to why they were nominated and what might be considered (stats, opinions, etc) and have them be more prestigious to win (badge to add in-game from Alex, etc) - that's a ton more work though, so definitely would understand passing on that - but it is a brainstorm/thoughts for future thread

I will stick up for Quack some here. I understand why they proceeded how they did given what they were facing, so whether Boyce had anything of actual value or not is somewhat irrelevant to me. They felt they were going to be targeted either way and they acted upon it - plain and simple. I don't fault them for that at all for making the best play from that position that they saw at the time. I think people focus too much on actual CBs that in some way we need some hard evidence to be justified for a war. It should be as simple as "we felt threatened and that's why we acted". As one that would like to avoid a repeat war, we need to accept some of what happened for what it is and be willing to move on. While I still stand by our assessment of the threat before the war started, this war did show that they weren't in as much of a dominant position as much of the game feared perhaps, and so I appreciate their feelings on the defensiveness about being viewed as a hegemony. I think everyone can reset some of their expectations and perceptions perhaps, as we all move forward.

Good luck to all!

Will you take my word for it? Sorry, but it literally had zero impact on the peace talks themselves. Not trying to be mean, just want to level your expectations for the future. At the end of the day, in terms of peace itself, who was right or wrong or any fault, etc doesn't ultimately matter - a war is what it is and people will proceed as needed for peace regardless of any facts or unknowns still out there. There was pretty much no debate in peace talks about why the war happened or CBs or anything else, because at that point it didn't really matter for what was needed to happen.

Thanks to all for a spirited war and best of luck with rebuild everyone!

Dude..... come on. Don't take what I said and try to make it the next thing you hound publicly to try to get people to talk about. Peace talks will remain mostly confidential, don't start beating drums to other leaders to put it all out there in public, it won't happen. Even though I said I'd be fine with it, I'd advise against it and most other leaders would too. In fact that would probably derail peace talks more than anything else, and you're one that's been trying to facilitate getting peace done. Just drop it, please. When peace is done and the terms are made public, I'm sure there'll be plenty that could then be discussed by all.

I wasn't necessarily intending to, just trying to dispel any misinformation about the ordeal. We'll have more to say about our future plans when those are further defined and ready. But I will say this, TI/TFP did inform Swamp leadership of our intentions to leave post-war a couple weeks ago - they were caught off-guard and disappointed we'd made that decision and were frustrated by our lack of transparency/communication around and since that decision, which is understandable. There's no reason to go into it further than that though. I don't have anything bad to say about Swamp and certainly wouldn't do so publicly. There's a lot of good people there and from my end, I'm happy to have worked with them and appreciate what we'd done together.

I love how people with zero knowledge of the situation act like they do. We'd informed Swamp weeks ago we would be leaving, but nice try.

Congrats Roberts and good job to Ripper on a tenure done well!

Yeah alum consumption is almost unchanged in this war, meaning people aren't building/using planes. Ground kills way too many planes that it doesn't make sense to rebuild planes unless you're willing to max your tanks too. I don't mind them destroying some planes, but a ground attack can destroy more planes than a dogfight.

They probably do kill a little more than they should, but that's not overly concerning to me at least. The one thing I've never liked is the protection for missiles and nukes built within the day. I understand people could probably use bots to destroy them right when they are first built, so maybe there's a 5 minute window to launch it or something, but doing spy ops and not knowing whether you're able to destroy that nuke/missile or not is a bit odd. But if that didn't change, the game shouldn't even let you launch a spy attack if there's nothing that you can destroy - it should just say there are no nukes available to be destroyed and not have your op go through then. Same with when they have zero spies, I've heard that sometimes that gets your own spies killed - but maybe that's been addressed.