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  1. 1. Micro Alliances: Do they help or harm the game progression?



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22 minutes ago, Sketchy said:

They harm it.

Micros suck potentially good people into their vortex of incompetence and then spit them back out dead from getting rolled by pirates or with completely inaccurate views of how the game is played, which they then transfer around with them until someone corrects them, which often never happens, and they teach a whole bunch of other people dumb shit too. As a result they lower retention rates for players in the game and spread stupidity around making the entire player base more incompetent, which has a snowball effect.

Add to that the fact they have a 0% chance of success from the very beginning. You only have to look at the history of the game to see that basically no micro alliance has ever achieved success past the first wave of alliances that got their start when the game began and everyone was on an even playing field of ignorance.

The path to success for new alliances is people joining an established alliance, growing their nations, making friends and connections, learning how to play, moving into a low or high gov position, learning how to govern, then breaking out on their own, splintering from their original alliance, taking a decent sized group of friends with them. If you can't get at least 20 people in your new splinter alliance, you should just be more patient and work harder to get more people rather than going ahead and making it.

Way too many leaders of these small/medium sized alliances are just decision makers who rely on the expertise of others to prop up their existence since they were too impatient to learn the mechanics or methods to run even a single department in an alliance. Every leader worth their salt should have at the very least a solid grasp on FA, as well as recent FA history, and know the basics of running each department so they can advise the people in charge of them and ensure they haven't appointed an idiot. Its a bit hard to know if your econ or milcom guy is a moron who has no idea what hes doing, if you yourself have no idea what your doing.

I think the only way most startups are getting 20 people is if its someone who brought 20 friends to the game, ran the IA department of a massive recruiting alliance like TKR and therefore has a sizable following that could certainly be convinced to join them, or if you're a beloved radio show host or some other sort of celebrity in the game. Or if you happen to preach a certain political ideology within the game that resonates powerfully with people.

Otherwise i think the largest i've ever seen was 12-15 or so. Any example above that, has one of the above going for it. I actually had far more of the last one than i expected, but i also ended up competing in those minds with someone who had one of the prior 3 as well, so rip me. 

Guess the lesson is, go get your own wildly popular radio show or newspaper! Or make friends in real life, but i daresay most of us wouldn't be here if we could do that.

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2 hours ago, Akuryo said:

Guess the lesson is, go get your own wildly popular radio show or newspaper! Or make friends in real life, but i daresay most of us wouldn't be here if we could do that.

What do you mean? I make all my friends by telling them I play nation sims. The most friends, just trust me. ?

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2 hours ago, Akuryo said:

I think the only way most startups are getting 20 people is if its someone who brought 20 friends to the game, ran the IA department of a massive recruiting alliance like TKR and therefore has a sizable following that could certainly be convinced to join them, or if you're a beloved radio show host or some other sort of celebrity in the game. Or if you happen to preach a certain political ideology within the game that resonates powerfully with people.

Otherwise i think the largest i've ever seen was 12-15 or so. Any example above that, has one of the above going for it. I actually had far more of the last one than i expected, but i also ended up competing in those minds with someone who had one of the prior 3 as well, so rip me. 

Guess the lesson is, go get your own wildly popular radio show or newspaper! Or make friends in real life, but i daresay most of us wouldn't be here if we could do that.

I've seen it happen quite a few times. The reason it doesn't happen as often as it should is people either lack the ability to attract people or lack the patience. To clarify, I mean 20 people (existing players not recruits) in the first few weeks, not upon founding, usually people will wait to see how many other people join a new AA and who they are before they take the leap themselves.

The issue a lot of the time is these leaders of smaller aas coming up have either hopped around from alliance to alliance, not planting any long term connections, or not escaped their clique bubble of people. If all your friends are only friends with each other then its going to be difficult for you to recruit people who can recruit people themselves. Relying on a single individual such as the leader to bring in all the starting membership is a great way to fail. 

I suppose the other path to success would be for all these people who are looking to get people together to found an alliance, to merge their individual efforts into a single effort for an alliance. If 3-4 would be leaders combined together to make a single aa that would increase their chances. Unfortunately people rarely agree on fundamental directions for alliances and everyone wants to be king so that almost never happens.

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2 hours ago, Akuryo said:

I think the only way most startups are getting 20 people is if its someone who brought 20 friends to the game, ran the IA department of a massive recruiting alliance like TKR and therefore has a sizable following that could certainly be convinced to join them, or if you're a beloved radio show host or some other sort of celebrity in the game. Or if you happen to preach a certain political ideology within the game that resonates powerfully with people.

Otherwise i think the largest i've ever seen was 12-15 or so. Any example above that, has one of the above going for it. I actually had far more of the last one than i expected, but i also ended up competing in those minds with someone who had one of the prior 3 as well, so rip me. 

Guess the lesson is, go get your own wildly popular radio show or newspaper! Or make friends in real life, but i daresay most of us wouldn't be here if we could do that.

I don't think its a bad idea to just wait until you have enough people who want you to create the alliance for it to be around the top 50 or so alliances, otherwise just push back when you might make it or not bother. I don't think smaller micros really do any harm, but think its important a new alliance have a good start if they're going to be successful & keep attracting new members. If an alliance forms with vacancies for all the desired gov positions; might be better to wait to launch until those are filled.

20 is kind of an artificial number; since 10 nations with ~20 Cities would probably be preferable to starting with 20 people you've recruited from out of game & need to build up from scratch. Although some planning should go into it, rather than people just creating an AA & hoping people will come.

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4 minutes ago, Noctis Anarch Caelum said:

I don't think its a bad idea to just wait until you have enough people who want you to create the alliance for it to be around the top 50 or so alliances, otherwise just push back when you might make it or not bother. I don't think smaller micros really do any harm, but think its important a new alliance have a good start if they're going to be successful & keep attracting new members. If an alliance forms with vacancies for all the desired gov positions; might be better to wait to launch until those are filled.

20 is kind of an artificial number; since 10 nations with ~20 Cities would probably be preferable to starting with 20 people you've recruited from out of game & need to build up from scratch. Although some planning should go into it, rather than people just creating an AA & hoping people will come.

The reason 20 members upon founding an alliance is more valuable than 10 with more cities is that most alliances will suffer early losses of some of those members. Although I specifically meant 20 members with established nations, not people recruited outside of the game.

If you only have 10 members, losing 1 member is a bigger hit to your initial success than it would be if you were to have 20. Once you consider the fact that a founding government usually is made up of 5-7 people, that means the difference between 3-5 regular members and 13-15 regular members. Alliances rarely thrive when the bulk of their membership IS the government itself.

20 is a minimum, in reality you want as many people as you can when you start.

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5 minutes ago, Sketchy said:

The reason 20 members upon founding an alliance is more valuable than 10 with more cities is that most alliances will suffer early losses of some of those members. Although I specifically meant 20 members with established nations, not people recruited outside of the game.

If you only have 10 members, losing 1 member is a bigger hit to your initial success than it would be if you were to have 20. Once you consider the fact that a founding government usually is made up of 5-7 people, that means the difference between 3-5 regular members and 13-15 regular members. Alliances rarely thrive when the bulk of their membership IS the government itself.

20 is a minimum, in reality you want as many people as you can when you start.

The 10 vs 20 example was just to point out quality makes a difference over raw number; although I agree mostly with your point & 10 would be on the light side. I'm not sure 20 would be the bare minimum for it to be successful if everything else is good; although I agree its better to have as many as you can & ~20 would be a good number to aim for.

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1 hour ago, Sketchy said:

I've seen it happen quite a few times. The reason it doesn't happen as often as it should is people either lack the ability to attract people or lack the patience. To clarify, I mean 20 people (existing players not recruits) in the first few weeks, not upon founding, usually people will wait to see how many other people join a new AA and who they are before they take the leap themselves.

The issue a lot of the time is these leaders of smaller aas coming up have either hopped around from alliance to alliance, not planting any long term connections, or not escaped their clique bubble of people. If all your friends are only friends with each other then its going to be difficult for you to recruit people who can recruit people themselves. Relying on a single individual such as the leader to bring in all the starting membership is a great way to fail. 

I suppose the other path to success would be for all these people who are looking to get people together to found an alliance, to merge their individual efforts into a single effort for an alliance. If 3-4 would be leaders combined together to make a single aa that would increase their chances. Unfortunately people rarely agree on fundamental directions for alliances and everyone wants to be king so that almost never happens.

I'm in the ability camp on that one. Schizophrenic hermits are not renowned for the social skills. 

I've had other people come in from current members, though they were most often players who'd never played PW before. Of everyone in my particular situation, i certainly have the most connections, but even most of those are already indisposed with their own plans. 

Everyone starting up has their own goals, and in some cases like mine they're extremely difficult to reconcile. There's only... maybe 2 or 3 alliances that exist right now where i'd consider those differences close enough to be reconcilable. Even then, i and everyone else in this situation is usually of the mindset that "I wanted to do that, not someone else, i wanted to lead the charge.", one of those 3 alliances doesnt exist yet and we've had conversations about exactly what you've mentioned, and exactly this problem described occurs. Especially the king thing, until 2-3 weeks ago i was running 80% of the government myself because it was just easier to do it myself

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I don't think micros themselves are necessarily bad for the game, but rather the never ending loop of protectorates upon protectorates protecting protectorates, and your average top 20 alliance having lower standards on picking up someone than drunk me at 3am. That is preventing the natural process of elimination to come alight and purge all the crappy pixel hugging micros.

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If you want to start an alliance and the first thought that pops into your head is that you need to get a protectorate, you probably shouldn't. If you're not experimenting with a system no one else is trying, you're probably really boring and unlikely to develop a niche inside the broader context. If you don't have a recruitment strategy other than that maybe you'll have such a *fun* gathering of underachieving social circlejerkers that it will slowly accrete more and more window lickers, then you're probably wasting your time and energy on an alliance that won't last.

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