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Just now, Roquentin said:

And Sphinx knew right and he wanted it to happen?

I mean, obviously they took issue with some aspects of your scheming and I know Camelot was upset over Seeker but there was at least an opportunity presented to make things right. At least one alliance offered a way we could do something for them. It's not meant to be a one way street. We're willing to back people up when they've backed us up.

and if they don't, you roll them?

"Most successful new AA" - Samuel Bates

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Just now, Roquentin said:

If they get hostile yeah. 

You threaten to roll people who aren't hostile. They just want the war to end on your side. You verbatim tell them if they accept any kind of peace, you will roll them. Numerous alliances.

If people don't do as you say, you say they are hostile and roll them when it's completely false.

Edited by James II
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Just now, James II said:

You threaten to roll people who aren't hostile. They just want the war to end on your side. You verbatim tell them if they accept any kind of peace, you will roll them. Numerous alliances.

We don't have that many alliances lol. I've already explained our position re:peace. There's just nothing in it for us in it of itself. It's just been you guys want to codify that peace is always good because that suits you along with the short war stuff when it's harmful to us. I mean any group would try to make stuff that benefits them into the common morality, so you guys have done a good job at that but we know that the morals here with regards to in-game stuff are just a representation of the individual interests of each group/alliance.

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Just now, Roquentin said:

We don't have that many alliances lol. I've already explained our position re:peace. There's just nothing in it for us in it of itself. It's just been you guys want to codify that peace is always good because that suits you along with the short war stuff when it's harmful to us. I mean any group would try to make stuff that benefits them into the common morality, so you guys have done a good job at that but we know that the morals here with regards to in-game stuff are just a representation of the individual interests of each group/alliance.

I have been consistent with where I stand, and I've stood by it. You're the one whose morality is on shifting sands. For you it is of mere convenience. You're welcome to peace us out on reasonable terms. We've offered it day one (Rememebr when I sent you an offer and you'd said you'd forward it to everyone and never did.) You lied. You never had any intention then or in recent history to peace out as supported by the logs (verbatim words from Coal B leadership).

As for Leo being 'hacked' it looks like his claim is unravelling. Illegal use of bots for automated banking. Shame. I remember he pretended to be hacked before to gain sympathy.

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Just now, James II said:

I have been consistent with where I stand, and I've stood by it. You're the one whose morality is on shifting sands. For you it is of mere convenience. You're welcome to peace us out on reasonable terms. We've offered it day one (Rememebr when I sent you an offer and you'd said you'd forward it to everyone and never did.) You lied. You never had any intention then or in recent history to peace out as supported by the logs (verbatim words from Coal B leadership).

As for Leo being 'hacked' it looks like his claim is unravelling. Illegal use of bots for automated banking. Shame. I remember he pretended to be hacked before to gain sympathy.

I did forward it. I'm tired of your bullshit claims.It was forwarded to the NG and Leo and they declined. Simple. It's not on shifting sands. You gain everything by peacing with no conditions and so on. We get nothing and a ton of ill will anyway. That's dumb as hell.

Again, bullshit. There was unauthorized access and the ayybank/BKnet is legal and was always cleared by alex.  This type of bullshit you spew is really bad. When did he pretend to be hacked before? You keep saying it  but you've never backed it up. You told people it was about terms when Leo has never had that happen.

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2 minutes ago, Roquentin said:

I did forward it. I'm tired of your bullshit claims.It was forwarded to the NG and Leo and they declined. Simple. It's not on shifting sands. You gain everything by peacing with no conditions and so on. We get nothing and a ton of ill will anyway. That's dumb as hell.

Again, bullshit. There was unauthorized access and the ayybank/BKnet is legal and was always cleared by alex.  This type of bullshit you spew is really bad. When did he pretend to be hacked before? You keep saying it  but you've never backed it up. You told people it was about terms when Leo has never had that happen.

When I asked around no one on your side knew what I was talking about.

"Bullshit" is not an argument. I don't need to submit 'evidence' for common knowledge.

Edit: "I showed Leo and theNG" I didn't realize only you three spoke for your entire coalition. Perhaps now you see why so many have left you, because you don't speak for them and you wouldn't let them have a voice. You threatened them to do your will, or get rolled.

Edited by James II

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1 minute ago, Roquentin said:

I did forward it. I'm tired of your bullshit claims.It was forwarded to the NG and Leo and they declined. Simple. It's not on shifting sands. You gain everything by peacing with no conditions and so on. We get nothing and a ton of ill will anyway. That's dumb as hell.

Again, bullshit. There was unauthorized access and the ayybank/BKnet is legal and was always cleared by alex.  This type of bullshit you spew is really bad. When did he pretend to be hacked before? You keep saying it  but you've never backed it up. You told people it was about terms when Leo has never had that happen.

Pray, tell, how are you so disadvantaged by peace? I'm curious, in detail, if you will.

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14 minutes ago, James II said:

When I asked around no one on your side knew what I was talking about.

"Bullshit" is not an argument. I don't need to submit 'evidence' for common knowledge.

Well I can show you the logs,  but they were told. It was a misunderstanding about what you were asking about.

TheNG and Leo can confirm.

I just want to know the specific incident where Leo claimed to be hacked before. What is even the context here? You've never brought it up before. Nice troll.

 

  

13 minutes ago, Don Juan said:

Pray, tell, how are you so disadvantaged by peace? I'm curious, in detail, if you will.

Okay, so one side has a majority of the stuff going into a war, they get put on an infra diet. They don't want to be on an infra diet so they can get back to building on the advantage. They typically don't like fighting intensively with the highest infra nations for a long duration. They  collaborate more often than not. The previous war was possible due to Rose, CoS, TEst, and some arrgh upper tier and most ended up being aligned with KETOG or swappable between KETOG and Rose. KETOG also included the two big upper tier juggernauts. With CoS on its last legs and TEst a thing of the past, there was no one left who had fought the whales in Knightfall outside of KERTCHOGG, so it would essentially be an upper tier hegemony. In this war we had TCW to substitute a bit but that's only because we fought KERTCHOGG first and then tS.  Since I knew tS had no intention of fighting KERTCHOGG and wanted to hit our side instead at a later date, it was essentially a stacked deck and it would continue to be a stacked deck as a unified whole that just always gets to have vast amounts of infra and only fights people not in the upper tier or vastly outnumbered.

You get to go back to your beloved infra pumping and we get to wait for you to make your move. Zero benefit. Get it now? The only way there's any benefit for us if we get something in the peace deal because we know there's ill will and we're the primary recipients. We don't really mind fighting indefinitely, so peace has to be incentivized for us not to be signing a a carte blanche to further entrench your structural advantages when it will screw us to do so. This becomes an even bigger issue with TCW on your side. We derive zero benefit and you institute your own megabloc. You are the only actual people who have consolidated so much in the past to completely outgun the rest of the game, so we know what you're like. The negativity throughout the war has provided us with no incentive to just hand you the keys to the city. We're fine with everyone within the non-expansion burning together since we all have issues with each other so it works for us. 

Edited by Roquentin
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I find it amusing how @Roquentin keeps talking about the next war for some time now (in what ever shape or form it has been over the past 7 months), yet he is so blindsighted he's failing to see the current one. You sir, started with KERCHTOG vs rest of the world basically, which you managed to turn into The World vs BK and NPO. How you managed that is beyond me. 

Edited by alyster
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Everything Roq says goes back to looking at what Frawley (NPO gov!) said so succinctly earlier:

On 1/13/2020 at 5:36 AM, Frawley said:

Wow, you realise we play a game right.

The game is more interesting when the game it is allowed to evolve.  Peace allows for the political cycle to begin again, new coalitions to form.  Fighting different kinds of wars with different allies and different enemies every few months, as opposed to less than one war cycle per year, makes the game more interesting for most players.  This is the "moral" basis for having shorter wars.

You fight it out and you shake hands and you move on.

All this talk of "structural advantages" misses the POLITICS part of this world.  Hell many of the alliances Roq believe some kind of insurmountable lead were busy spending lots of resources fighting each other when BK and then NPO entered the picture.  Roq was worried about EMC having structural advantages?  Politics had divided EMC and NPO had major elements of EMC on their side in both Knightfall and then this war.  NPO was on the winning side in Knightfall and was/is in this war.  The idea that NPO would have been in an insurmountable disadvantage going into future wars is disproven by the fact that they weren't at an insurmountable disadvantage in either the last war or this war.

The politics of these kinds of worlds is that even if people strongly dislike each other, after a while new rivalries and grudges form and people that would have never worked with each other before end up coming together to take on some common foe.  Newer grudges end up taking precedence.

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5 hours ago, Roquentin said:

Good thing no one ever listens to you. Not even TGH in this war. 

Our starting coalition were mostly micros and other weak alliances that would have been happy if we won on day one and that's it. We were never going to be able to appease most of those alliances. They wanted it too fast.

No one cares  about that.  A bad peace is worse than war - Tacitus. People that are tough enough to handle fighting the reconsolidated EMC should be funded. 

Again this would have been a million times worse if we let these people pull this crap months from now. That's why it's the lesser evil to have it happen now. There has been no potential for anything else to happen because they've solidified and with Sphinx's powerplay where apparently he was going to have the whales beiged anyway acccording to new intel just shows the level of duplicity these guys are up to which makes us look relatively angelic. So we have no real incentives here. The whole playing possum aspect was a good trick that pulled the wool over people's eyes and at this point third parties may eventually see that it's just mutual hatred playing out and if they have no investment in it, then why pay attention?

I would be a god amongst men if I could get the likes of Buo and Sketchy to listen to me :P

And even if that did occur, you would still be a second rate amateur.

 

3 hours ago, Roquentin said:

We don't have that many alliances left.

Fixed it for you. No need to thank me.

Edited by Charles the Tyrant

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1 hour ago, alyster said:

I find it amusing how @Roquentin keeps talking about the next war for some time now (in what ever shape or form it has been over the past 7 months), yet he is so blindsighted he's failing to see the current one. You sir, started with KERCHTOG vs rest of the world basically, which you managed to turn into The World vs BK and NPO. How you managed that is beyond me. 

Two words. Shabby statesmanship.

Actually no, four words. Shabby statesmanship and paranoia.

Edited by Charles the Tyrant
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Two more reasons why the "structural advantages" argument against peace is idiotic:

1) A lot of the extra money EMC members made went into high level cities that have a far lower rate of return in terms of military capability than the cities mid tier nations buy.  Game mechanics do an effective job of preventing runaway exponential growth from giving anyone an insurmountable lead in terms of military power.  For the cost to build one nation from city 20 to city 30, you can build 3 new nations all the way up to city 20.  Those three nations with 20 cities each are worth far more militarily to an alliance than those extra 10 cities for that 30 city nation.

2) A lot of the "peace dividend" from "relatively easy wars" could simply have been balanced by NPO and co sitting out a war while everyone else fought.  And theoretically still could if NPO sits out the next one.

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10 hours ago, Roquentin said:

With CoS on its last legs and TEst a thing of the past, there was no one left who had fought the whales in Knightfall outside of KERTCHOGG, so it would essentially be an upper tier hegemony.

Wait...so you would consider CoS to be a possible asset to help against the upper tier of any possible enemies but no longer consider them able to help due to them being on their last legs? I thought CoS was one of the boogeymen ‘out to get you’ and ‘actively sabotaged your war efforts in Knightfall’. Or are you beginning to realize how ridiculous that narrative was that you stood behind?

You have been worried that everyone was out to get you, when in fact no one was out to get you until you kept giving them a reason for the animosity with all of the gaslighting/desire to drive people from the game.

With that said - It’s never too late to redefine yourself and change people’s perceptions.

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On 1/13/2020 at 10:30 PM, Buorhann said:

A member of an AA who made it their goal to keep the war going till players delete

Not true. Already touched on this in another topic. That you keep bringing it up doesn't make it true.

"Don't argue with members of The Golden Horde. They drag you down to their level and beat you with experience." - Probably someone on OWF.

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8 hours ago, Azaghul said:

Everything Roq says goes back to looking at what Frawley (NPO gov!) said so succinctly earlier:

The game is more interesting when the game it is allowed to evolve.  Peace allows for the political cycle to begin again, new coalitions to form.  Fighting different kinds of wars with different allies and different enemies every few months, as opposed to less than one war cycle per year, makes the game more interesting for most players.  This is the "moral" basis for having shorter wars.

You fight it out and you shake hands and you move on.

Being allowed to evolve and actually evolving are two different things. Peace doesn't necessarily lead to an "evolution" in politics and, more often than not, it hasn't.

There's nothing inherently good or bad about fighting multiple wars with or against similar coalitions. Ironically, change for its own sake here is the opposite of IC politics. If there isn't an animating IC reason - strategic, ideological, or social - to alter your alliance's diplomatic stance, then all that any change has done is to supplant IC politics with OOC notions. (Or, worse, with IC politics cynically disguised as OOC notions.)

I find the game more interesting when it's driven by actual IC politics, not the OOC knockoff that so regularly passes for it and which you endorse here.

8 hours ago, Azaghul said:

All this talk of "structural advantages" misses the POLITICS part of this world.  Hell many of the alliances Roq believe some kind of insurmountable lead were busy spending lots of resources fighting each other when BK and then NPO entered the picture.  Roq was worried about EMC having structural advantages?  Politics had divided EMC and NPO had major elements of EMC on their side in both Knightfall and then this war.  NPO was on the winning side in Knightfall and was/is in this war.  The idea that NPO would have been in an insurmountable disadvantage going into future wars is disproven by the fact that they weren't at an insurmountable disadvantage in either the last war or this war.

Structural advantages are inherently part of the politics of the world. Game mechanics and their long-term ramifications are intimately related to diplomacy. If your politics aren't motivated by material, mechanical realities (including structural disparities), ideology, or a desire for social status and prestige, then they're not IC and they're not really politics. Structural advantages are the politics of the world to a large extent.

8 hours ago, Azaghul said:

The politics of these kinds of worlds is that even if people strongly dislike each other, after a while new rivalries and grudges form and people that would have never worked with each other before end up coming together to take on some common foe.  Newer grudges end up taking precedence.

That's been more untrue than not because there haven't been the type of comprehensive victories/defeats or mutually amenable settlements to past conflicts to engender that sort of change. The reason why IQ and Syndisphere/EMC were in a state of alternating cold and hot war for years is that neither side could comprehensively defeat the other and both sides believed that continuing the long-term rivalry was their best strategic option. If either had been able to crush the other, it's possible something different would have emerged, although that probably could only have happened if the victory had led to infighting among the victors.

The ostensible settlement that ended the IQ-EMC rivalry wasn't a settlement so much as a half-baked papering over of the differences and disagreements between those two groups, and one which didn't have the universal trust or buy-in that its boosters claimed it did. That the zeitgeist of early 2019 looked almost exactly like the zeitgeist of EMC in 2017-18 - broad comity between most alliance leaderships, especially those of former EMC, and an explicit hope that NPO and BK would fight a pitched war against one another - should tell you pretty much all you need to know.

8 hours ago, Azaghul said:

Two more reasons why the "structural advantages" argument against peace is idiotic:

1) A lot of the extra money EMC members made went into high level cities that have a far lower rate of return in terms of military capability than the cities mid tier nations buy.  Game mechanics do an effective job of preventing runaway exponential growth from giving anyone an insurmountable lead in terms of military power.  For the cost to build one nation from city 20 to city 30, you can build 3 new nations all the way up to city 20.  Those three nations with 20 cities each are worth far more militarily to an alliance than those extra 10 cities for that 30 city nation.

A lot, but not all of it. A substantial portion of EMC's years of profit have gone into building larger warchests, probably in part because upper tier cities are more expensive. Furthermore, the parts that have gone into building more cities have still created a military advantage, regardless of the lower return rates. A nation with a significant advantage in cities is harder to fight no matter how expensive those cities were. Finally, it's not like NPO or other, relatively newer, relatively lower-tiered alliances had years of identical revenues to EMC that they spent more efficiently. Instead, they had years of lower revenues compared to EMC and had shorter periods in which to generate positive ROI for their infrastructure thanks to fighting more wars than EMC's upper tier.

Very little of this would be a problem if PW's upper tier powerhouses made a habit of actually fighting one another. If warfare had, over the long run, imposed a cost on upper tier nations proportionally equivalent to the cost it imposed on mid tier nations, then your comment on game mechanics would be a lot more relevant to the discussion. It's obviously not irrelevant - former IQ alliances have (slowly and incompletely) closed the gap with former EMC alliances - but it hasn't outweighed the impact of alliance politics over the years.

8 hours ago, Azaghul said:

2) A lot of the "peace dividend" from "relatively easy wars" could simply have been balanced by NPO and co sitting out a war while everyone else fought.  And theoretically still could if NPO sits out the next one.

Sitting out one war would not have balanced out the de facto, years long policy numerous upper tier nations had of doing the same.

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36 minutes ago, Edward I said:

Being allowed to evolve and actually evolving are two different things. Peace doesn't necessarily lead to an "evolution" in politics and, more often than not, it hasn't.

There's nothing inherently good or bad about fighting multiple wars with or against similar coalitions. Ironically, change for its own sake here is the opposite of IC politics. If there isn't an animating IC reason - strategic, ideological, or social - to alter your alliance's diplomatic stance, then all that any change has done is to supplant IC politics with OOC notions. (Or, worse, with IC politics cynically disguised as OOC notions.)

I find the game more interesting when it's driven by actual IC politics, not the OOC knockoff that so regularly passes for it and which you endorse here.

Structural advantages are inherently part of the politics of the world. Game mechanics and their long-term ramifications are intimately related to diplomacy. If your politics aren't motivated by material, mechanical realities (including structural disparities), ideology, or a desire for social status and prestige, then they're not IC and they're not really politics. Structural advantages are the politics of the world to a large extent.

That's been more untrue than not because there haven't been the type of comprehensive victories/defeats or mutually amenable settlements to past conflicts to engender that sort of change. The reason why IQ and Syndisphere/EMC were in a state of alternating cold and hot war for years is that neither side could comprehensively defeat the other and both sides believed that continuing the long-term rivalry was their best strategic option. If either had been able to crush the other, it's possible something different would have emerged, although that probably could only have happened if the victory had led to infighting among the victors.

The ostensible settlement that ended the IQ-EMC rivalry wasn't a settlement so much as a half-baked papering over of the differences and disagreements between those two groups, and one which didn't have the universal trust or buy-in that its boosters claimed it did. That the zeitgeist of early 2019 looked almost exactly like the zeitgeist of EMC in 2017-18 - broad comity between most alliance leaderships, especially those of former EMC, and an explicit hope that NPO and BK would fight a pitched war against one another - should tell you pretty much all you need to know.

A lot, but not all of it. A substantial portion of EMC's years of profit have gone into building larger warchests, probably in part because upper tier cities are more expensive. Furthermore, the parts that have gone into building more cities have still created a military advantage, regardless of the lower return rates. A nation with a significant advantage in cities is harder to fight no matter how expensive those cities were. Finally, it's not like NPO or other, relatively newer, relatively lower-tiered alliances had years of identical revenues to EMC that they spent more efficiently. Instead, they had years of lower revenues compared to EMC and had shorter periods in which to generate positive ROI for their infrastructure thanks to fighting more wars than EMC's upper tier.

Very little of this would be a problem if PW's upper tier powerhouses made a habit of actually fighting one another. If warfare had, over the long run, imposed a cost on upper tier nations proportionally equivalent to the cost it imposed on mid tier nations, then your comment on game mechanics would be a lot more relevant to the discussion. It's obviously not irrelevant - former IQ alliances have (slowly and incompletely) closed the gap with former EMC alliances - but it hasn't outweighed the impact of alliance politics over the years.

Sitting out one war would not have balanced out the de facto, years long policy numerous upper tier nations had of doing the same.

 

Overall, the general problem in this game is that while the game fundamentally favors lower tier nations in terms of theoretical economic and military ability, in practice, security issues emerge.

 

Let us say, for instance, the upper tier actually fights the upper tier. Pretty soon, the defeated elements drop to the mid-tier and are then blockade held (see CoS last war). Then the victorious side blockade holds the defeated upper tier while the victorious upper tier boosts up and goes back to stockpiling resources.

 

In practice, this just means that the upper tier takes very little economic damage from actual war and the only way to actually disadvantage an upper tier is to blockade hold them for a prolonged period of time. And then the food STILL continues to get rolled out and sold. So I guess that's why they call it spam.

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15 hours ago, Roquentin said:

We didn't. They think it's easier that way and most of them talk to each other. It's pretty ridiculous what an old boy's club it is.

They hated Sphinx less than they did us and he saw an opening to get back in their good graces and partner up with as many as possible flip flopping on EM, protecting George, Rose, getting Don Juan to join and the list goes on. 

You don't know how cliquey they are.

All trolling and jokes to one side, I did read all the logs that Gorge had and yes I saw many times where Sphinx was saying one thing to you and Col B and something totally different to me, when I questioned him about this, He replied with he was just towing the Col B line.

There are tons of things people have said to me then said something totally different to others.

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1 hour ago, Edward I said:

Being allowed to evolve and actually evolving are two different things. Peace doesn't necessarily lead to an "evolution" in politics and, more often than not, it hasn't.

There's nothing inherently good or bad about fighting multiple wars with or against similar coalitions. Ironically, change for its own sake here is the opposite of IC politics. If there isn't an animating IC reason - strategic, ideological, or social - to alter your alliance's diplomatic stance, then all that any change has done is to supplant IC politics with OOC notions. (Or, worse, with IC politics cynically disguised as OOC notions.)

I find the game more interesting when it's driven by actual IC politics, not the OOC knockoff that so regularly passes for it and which you endorse here.

While there have been similar coalitions, similar is not the same.  Different alliances drop in and out.  And there also is more variety in terms of strategies going in in how alliances come in, initial deployments, etc.  The first couple of weeks of a war are the most exciting as things shake out even if it's a similar coalition to the previous war.

And while it doesn't always change, it at least has the CHANCE to change.  A much greater chance than if there are fewer war-peace cycles.

I'm not arguing against IC politics driving that change.  I'm saying that shorter war-peace cycles generally speeds up how fast IC politics play out.

Quote

Structural advantages are inherently part of the politics of the world. Game mechanics and their long-term ramifications are intimately related to diplomacy. If your politics aren't motivated by material, mechanical realities (including structural disparities), ideology, or a desire for social status and prestige, then they're not IC and they're not really politics. Structural advantages are the politics of the world to a large extent.

How does this address what I said?

Quote

That's been more untrue than not because there haven't been the type of comprehensive victories/defeats or mutually amenable settlements to past conflicts to engender that sort of change. The reason why IQ and Syndisphere/EMC were in a state of alternating cold and hot war for years is that neither side could comprehensively defeat the other and both sides believed that continuing the long-term rivalry was their best strategic option. If either had been able to crush the other, it's possible something different would have emerged, although that probably could only have happened if the victory had led to infighting among the victors.

The ostensible settlement that ended the IQ-EMC rivalry wasn't a settlement so much as a half-baked papering over of the differences and disagreements between those two groups, and one which didn't have the universal trust or buy-in that its boosters claimed it did. That the zeitgeist of early 2019 looked almost exactly like the zeitgeist of EMC in 2017-18 - broad comity between most alliance leaderships, especially those of former EMC, and an explicit hope that NPO and BK would fight a pitched war against one another - should tell you pretty much all you need to know.

Elements of IQ and Syndisphere/EMC still have a rivalry of sorts.  Others switched sides and switched around.  Which is why alliances that formally fought NPO/BK like Syndisphere fought with you last war and this war.

Many of the alliances you say had a broad comity against you were literally fighting each other before the leaks of BK planning to attack them during rebuilding.

Quote

A lot, but not all of it. A substantial portion of EMC's years of profit have gone into building larger warchests, probably in part because upper tier cities are more expensive. Furthermore, the parts that have gone into building more cities have still created a military advantage, regardless of the lower return rates. A nation with a significant advantage in cities is harder to fight no matter how expensive those cities were. Finally, it's not like NPO or other, relatively newer, relatively lower-tiered alliances had years of identical revenues to EMC that they spent more efficiently. Instead, they had years of lower revenues compared to EMC and had shorter periods in which to generate positive ROI for their infrastructure thanks to fighting more wars than EMC's upper tier.

Very little of this would be a problem if PW's upper tier powerhouses made a habit of actually fighting one another. If warfare had, over the long run, imposed a cost on upper tier nations proportionally equivalent to the cost it imposed on mid tier nations, then your comment on game mechanics would be a lot more relevant to the discussion. It's obviously not irrelevant - former IQ alliances have (slowly and incompletely) closed the gap with former EMC alliances - but it hasn't outweighed the impact of alliance politics over the years.

Sitting out one war would not have balanced out the de facto, years long policy numerous upper tier nations had of doing the same.

1) Yes, upper tier nations are harder to fight.  And EMC had greater revenues to work with.  But my point is that game mechanics mean that greater revenues haven't translated into a proportional amount of greater military power because of disproportionate city costs.  More cities per player can be and often has been balanced out by having more players.

2) Sitting out one war wouldn't have made up the gap in terms of high tier cities, but it would have gone a very long way towards catching up or even getting ahead on warchests.  To the tune of hundreds of billions.

3) You didn't address the most important point: NPO has been on the winning side the last two wars.  Politics, alliances switching sides, and up-declaring have more than cancelled out the "structural advantages" your opponents have had.

The idea that those "structural advantages" pose some kind of existential threat that make peace untenable for you if they aren't eliminated is pure paranoia.  If they were so insurmountable, you wouldn't have been able to overcome them.  The fact that you have been able to overcome them two wars in a row proves that they aren't the giant boogeymen that you are making them out to be.

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51 minutes ago, Sphinx said:

Roq this might be a surprise to you, but you realise people have different methods of playing this game and all games? Not everyone wants war 24/7, large parts of Grumpy went inactive once they got dragged down because they aren't interested in fighting. In TCW's case yes we'll fight but we don't like fighting for months after just recently another major war ended. Also, you don't need to twist peoples words, Alexio and I were pissed off at Chaos for legitimate reasons, in Frontier's case it was because SOUP poached 20 members from his alliance.  In TCW's we were dropped by TKR, after fighting and bleeding for them at the urging of SK/CoS and other parties who wanted us out of the picture. You claim its our agenda to be anti-IQ yet we only made the Bloc because we knew if we left then IQ would attack us. You forced our hand so we spoke to equally dissatisfied people and created a group. We didn't want this war originally or this escalation, but here we are and you continue to dig your heels in and ignore the writing on the wall that your own actions are drawing people who don't want to work together, into partners of necessity.  

NPO members aren't programmed to understand Irony. 

You realise Don Juan was a founder of Pantheon right and was part of the Triumvirate of GPA? Many of us in TCW have known Don for over 5 years in this game and many more in other games. The sole reason so many of the ex-EMC people are in contact with each other and still friends to this day is because they were in the same alliances together, GPA/Pantheon together have their old guard spread through TCW/TKR/Grumpy, its not because all whales want to hang out together like you seem to be obsessed about. We knew these people for years so of course we'll be friendly and willing to work together, I talk to people like Benfro, almost daily despite us being at war for months because we first met almost 4 years ago when we were newbies in Pantheon. 

Yet you either misconstrue this was "being allies in waiting" or hegemonising the whale tier when its just people doing one of the pillars of an MMO game, 'interacting with the community' outside their own alliance, something I know apart from NPO gov, your rank and file barely do. So again you continue to make assumptions about us wanting to revive EMC, or to have the whale tier on lock when its just claims that are derived purely from your own paranoia. In TCW case we've had no plans to rejoin 'EMC' in fact the government isn't keen on doing much, apart from trying to build our Bloc outside of the IQ, EMC, FARK Bloc power blocs, if this doesn't work there's dozen of TCW members who would support us going paperless and bringing back GPA, and going neutral because quite frankly we're sick of the BS, and tired of the drama from both sides. Your views of us consolidating couldn't be further from the truth, we only reached out to others as we knew we'd need support since we'd get killed if we didn't ave outside treaties to people in other Blocs but considering how things are going in this game, myself and many of our members are at a stage were we really don't care whatever TF you try to do to us.

This 100%, 

Epi was going to turncoat on IQ anyway so he needed a way to get back into IQ's good books so he threw people who wanted to work with him under the bus. Reaper or Solar can tell you how pissed I was when I found out Aky escalated things without informing us. I told Aku he needs to real himself in and stop being too aggressive and actually think of a plan before diving in otherwise if something like this happens again he's getting dropped. But Akuryo's aggression isn't anywhere near as bad as NPO's blatant paranoia and desire for all allies to fit themselves into a counter cutter mold and if you don't do this then you're branded as a 'rival' or 'threat'. NPO can cut the crap about 'defending' Camelot/BoC, as Reaper said you wanted to hit NP again, you wanted to TCM, Weeby, Ironfront you wanted to hit the whole damn Bloc because IMO you saw it as a way for TCW to leave on a solid footing, and having a new power Bloc develop isn't something IQ likes since we all know everyone not allied to them is a enemy.

Funniest thing is Camelot/Epi picked a side which will extract punishment on them for attempting to leave and for leaking information, in a similar vein to what BK said when once the war is over they'll attack BoC yet they too are now fighting on behalf of IQ. Epi's probably trying to play themselves up as best as possible to be seen as a valued partner because if he doesn't then Camelot's screwed as NOBODY will help someone who doesn't have the courage of their conviction to make a stand especially considering BK said they were going to drop Camelot post war anyway.

I didn't want this to spiral out of control, I just wanted out of this damn war. I didn't even know before it was too late that their was an offer of resolution on the table, and I thought about the offer BoC/Camelot made and whilst paying $350m reps to leave NP/TMC alone seems tempted you probably would've rolled us anyway so I'm glad nobody took that.

TCW isn't part of Colo A, we aren't signing TKR, or t$ or Rose. I don't know how many times I need to tell you this, we want to do our own thing and make a Bloc cut off the from treaty web, if that fails then we're going paperless, neutral and reforming GPA. That should tell you if we're going to help TKR/t$ in the next war against IQ, we're tired of this continual political cycle of the same rubbish over and over, we just want to do our own thing. But you can't leave well enough alone so you're forcing us to fight in a war against people who cost us $160 BILLION in damages after we just took $110 BILLION damages 3 months before that, any member in our position would be sick of the BS at that stage, let alone ex-Pantheon/GPA'ers.

Especially considering of out said c30+'s several alliances couldn't even get them to engage in the war, whilst if a c20 NPO'er is told to jump they ask how high, but NPO just looks at raw numbers and makes a judgement. TCW was 9/10 largest nations in Colo B, we shouldn't have been able to take down 100+ whales yet over a long grind we somehow managed it. NPO just doesn't understand this, to them all whales are hyper active mid tiers and not a mixture of semi-retired old-guard, and active fighters. 

Good points though Azza, food for thought for NPO if they actually take some constructive criticism for once.

If anything, it's NPO's continued actions THIS WAR that threatens to create the conditions they proclaim to be so worried about.

With any other rivalry or grudge, alliances like TKR or TCW can generally expect to have a reasonable war and then peace out and move on.  It's not going to turn into some ridiculous long term war.  Maybe more than war, but with breaks for politicking and coalition building and getting over war weariness in between them.

This threat of unending war is new.  NPO has become its own worst enemy by establishing the type of war we are seeing now as a potential precedent that everyone is going to have to worry about and plan against.  The longer they keep this going, the deeper they dig that hole and give people reason to unite against them to prevent it from happening again.

Roquentin refuses to see it and honestly, I'm not sure if he's capable of seeing it. I'm inclined to hope there are people in NPO and in their coalition who do see it and will eventually force some sensible resolution.

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Just now, Azaghul said:

If anything, it's NPO's continued actions THIS WAR that threatens to create the conditions they proclaim to be so worried about.

With any other rivalry or grudge, alliances like TKR or TCW can generally expect to have a reasonable war and then peace out and move on.  It's not going to turn into some ridiculous long term war.  Maybe more than war, but with breaks for politicking and coalition building and getting over war weariness in between them.

This threat of unending war is new.  NPO has become its own worst enemy by establishing the type of war we are seeing now as a potential precedent that everyone is going to have to worry about and plan against.  The longer they keep this going, the deeper they dig that hole and give people reason to unite against them to prevent it from happening again.

Roquentin refuses to see it and honestly, I'm not sure if he's capable of seeing it. I'm inclined to hope there are people in NPO and in their coalition who do see it and will eventually force some sensible resolution.

Yeah, we now know based off of logs that BK is mostly broke, and a lot of alliances have depleted their funds. NPO can supplement them, but for how long? Another 1-2 maybe 3 months, but now they have a lot more wars and their "top" that was "growing and making resources" now have to engage, and being against so many people, they'll have to overextend and get picked off.

 

I don't think NPO will "lose" but I think they'll be forced to peace, whether that be a surrender or white peace depends on how long Coalition A drags this war out, tbh.

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4 minutes ago, Azaghul said:

While there have been similar coalitions, similar is not the same.  Different alliances drop in and out.  And there also is more variety in terms of strategies going in in how alliances come in, initial deployments, etc.  The first couple of weeks of a war are the most exciting as things shake out even if it's a similar coalition to the previous war.

The first weeks of wars are fun, yes. Changing small facets of them for the sake of calling them different isn't a good reason to change the politics that lead to them.

4 minutes ago, Azaghul said:

And while it doesn't always change, it at least has the CHANCE to change.

The odds of change without a decisive end to this war are vanishingly small. The attitude towards Coalition B and NPO in particular has been one of overwhelming IC and OOC hostility from the moment we entered until now. We have no reason to believe the people who told us we'd be torched for "ruining" minispheres, or who think we're "breaking" the game for [insert action from last six months here] will have a change of heart after the war. So, rather than negotiating a hollow peace in the full, reasonable expectation that Coalition A will rebuild and come back to fight the same war stronger and more organized, we're content to continue fighting until we get a satisfactory one.

If you want that dynamic to change, give us a reason to agree to peace that makes that outcome unlikely.

4 minutes ago, Azaghul said:

A much greater chance than if there are fewer war-peace cycles.

I'm not arguing against IC politics driving that change.  I'm saying that shorter war-peace cycles generally speeds up how fast IC politics play out.

You have an issue primarily with game mechanics then, not us. If decisive victories in wars were easier to obtain and longer wars were harder to sustain, there would be shorter wars. If both coalitions wanted to, for instance, collectively lobby Alex to implement meaningfully low soft caps on alliance and individual warchests, I imagine the implementation of such a mechanic would go a long way towards speeding up the war cycle. Unless and until a mechanic that limits the ability of alliances to wage protracted wars is implemented, though, the social side of the game will be constrained to happen at the pace of the mechanical side.

4 minutes ago, Azaghul said:

How does this address what I said?

11 hours ago, Azaghul said:

All this talk of "structural advantages" misses the POLITICS part of this world.

Game mechanics, including the structural advantages they create in conjunction with player actions, are the basis for the politics of the world. You can't possibly "miss" the politics by talking about them; at worst, the discussion will be incomplete.

4 minutes ago, Azaghul said:

Elements of IQ and Syndisphere/EMC still have a rivalry of sorts.  Others switched sides and switched around.  Which is why alliances that formally fought NPO/BK like Syndisphere fought with you last war and this war.

Many of the alliances you say had a broad comity against you were literally fighting each other before the leaks of BK planning to attack them during rebuilding.

And those wars were explicitly framed as fun, friendly, rivalry-free engagements. Soup's first war was billed as "community outreach." Surf's Up happened shortly thereafter; the belligerents were the same people who had spent so much time praising the ethos of wars like the Soup-Fark one; and they made it pretty clear that they thought Surf's Up was an example of that ethos to be emulated by others. If it was a war that had anything to do with rivalry or IC disputes, the combatants had a funny way of showing it.

4 minutes ago, Azaghul said:

1) Yes, upper tier nations are harder to fight.  And EMC had greater revenues to work with.  But my point is that game mechanics mean that greater revenues haven't translated into a proportional amount of greater military power because of disproportionate city costs.  More cities per player can be and often has been balanced out by having more players.

2) Sitting out one war wouldn't have made up the gap in terms of high tier cities, but it would have gone a very long way towards catching up or even getting ahead on warchests.  To the tune of hundreds of billions.

3) You didn't address the most important point: NPO has been on the winning side the last two wars.  Politics, alliances switching sides, and up-declaring have more than cancelled out the "structural advantages" your opponents have had.

The idea that those "structural advantages" pose some kind of existential threat that make peace untenable for you if they aren't eliminated is pure paranoia.  If they were so insurmountable, you wouldn't have been able to overcome them.  The fact that you have been able to overcome them two wars in a row proves that they aren't the giant boogeymen that you are making them out to be.

Obviously we've made some headway against the perennially superior upper tier forces arrayed against us and obviously they, in and of themselves, aren't an existential threat. Coupled with the attitudes of those nations' owners and of their alliances' leaders, though, yes, they are. If the almost sole use to which those nations are put is opposing NPO's spheres of influence, why should we treat them as anything but a perennial threat? If, absent substantial long-term planning and dedication on our part, their advantage spells perennial defeat for us in wars, why shouldn't we treat them as an existential threat?

In fairness to you, some of the advantage that upper tier grouping enjoys are the products of glaring balance problems in the game's mechanics. However, that doesn't negate the social reasons for the problem - upper tier consolidation - and it doesn't change the fact that, without changes to the mechanics or a newfound willingness of upper tiers to fight one another, we have no way of dealing with problem besides going after the whales every war.

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