Why we can't have nice things

[Grave]

4 hours ago, The Acolyte said:

Wait is Tyrion admitting he actually had secret treaties?

So what I've learned:

1. We were correct in assuming Oasis literally refuses to fight any war that isn't a dogpile, or at least heavily in their favor.

2. Oasis can't be trusted, just assume they always have secret treaties, therefore they're always the enemy.

 

Ily for this isjaki. Keep up the great work. 😂

 

 

Oasis literally blitzed you by ourselves at the same time you blitzed Oasis and mystery with BW

[Isjaki]

3 minutes ago, Grave said:

Oasis literally blitzed you by ourselves at the same time you blitzed Oasis and mystery with BW

We do have leaks from certain Oasis alliances claiming that they were about to get blitzed on the night of the blitz. Blitzing at the same time is the least that could be done to save face. Doesn't really contradict the points Vader made.

[The Titan]

27 minutes ago, Grave said:

Oasis literally blitzed you by ourselves at the same time you blitzed Oasis and mystery with BW

What are you talking about?
I'm enjoying peace atm.

[Eumirbago]

3 hours ago, Big Brother said:

If you want a picture of the future, imagine cheeks getting clapped - forever.

Yamborghini High

[Broke]

Some of you are taking the game way too seriously. Touch some grass please. 

[Isjaki]

1 minute ago, Broke said:

Some of you are taking the game way too seriously. Touch some grass please. 

We are not the ones deleting infra to make stats look better, mate. Practice what you preach.

[Sweeeeet Ronny D]

4 hours ago, Isjaki said:

This is bad because, in the past, most wars have been tossups and milcom actually had to work hard to ensure victory, coming up with tactics like tier-locking, planes only etc. Over the last few wars since NPOLT, it has become easy to predict the eventual victor from the first few days.

This is incorrect, just about every war since the inception of the game you know who is going to win before the first shot is ever fired.  I can only think of one war where the side I expected to win, actually lost. (GnR)

One of the advantages of mini-spheres is it promotes frequent shorter wars.  When 4 of 6 spheres are fighting, that means two spheres are just hanging out profiting off the war, so it's to the fighting spheres' advantage to not drag it out since their other competition grows stronger while they are fighting.   Also if wars are shorter, they are more likely to happen more often.  War is alot more fun for both the winning and losing side if it only lasts for a few weeks vs 3-4 months and its better for player retention since you dont have people quitting due to being sat on for months on end.

In the last year, Grumpy has fought every sphere in the game with the exception of Clock who is brand new, which makes politics more interesting.  I dont have go too bloc outside of Hollywood if we want to attack somebody, if we want help we gotta go outside and find it, just like others if they want to hit us have to do the same. 

The only downside of more shorter wars is military burnout, running wars well is alot of work, and I for one am ecstatic that Grumpy has the chance to sit out it's first major global in about 4 years I can use the break. I say that, and we still we had the opportunity to join this war, but chose not to.

[Cincinnatus]

5 hours ago, Sval said:

Minispheres were never going to work the way some people wanted them to, because they don't address any of the underlying causes of political stagnation on Orbis.

Precisely.

When you have upper tiers costing multiple tens of billions to rebuild on top of the time spent waiting for that rebuilding investment to pay itself off, alliances will naturally gravitate towards measures which can grant some measure of security. Add onto it the game's FA and leadership meta and a few other factors, you basically have a state of affairs which naturally leads to bipolar webs and hegemony. It's pretty much inevitable

Can it be changed? Of course, but it's going to take structural change at at a foundational level and not just the well intentioned wishes of a few leaders from across the web.

Personally, I can't blame oasis and mystery for forming whatever treaty it was they created as a form of security. What I do disagree with, however, is imbuing this newly FA created entity with a defensive and reactionary mindset from its inception. I think it would have been a better move to instead adopt a more proactive approach solely to keep some semblance of initiative and control over the subsequent events.

The end result would have probably been the same, simply due to membership compositions, but reactionary politics is never a good base position to start from imo simply because it implies a loss of control.

But yeah, can minispheres work? Yes. Should it be the meta? Yes. Can it work within the current FA political landscape though? I'm sceptical 🤷‍♂️

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Sweeeeet Ronny D]

I would love for someone to define political stagnation for me.  Everyone !@#$es about it, but I feel like we may have different definitions of it.  If the definition is that we have the same wars over and over again, then I feel like that issue has been solved, we have had more variation in major wars than we have seen in the history of the game.  If its that the same 10-15 people decide who fights when, then yeah I would agree that is still an issue.

[JadenStar10]

46 minutes ago, Sweeeeet Ronny D said:

This is incorrect, just about every war since the inception of the game you know who is going to win before the first shot is ever fired.  I can only think of one war where the side I expected to win, actually lost. (GnR)

Wdym, you won that war??

[Leftbehind]

21 minutes ago, JadenStar10 said:

Wdym, you won that war??

Not sure if you are joking or not. Either way HW had no business winning or drawing that war.

[Hiroshima]

There is always going to be two sides, regardless of how many mini blocs you have.

[Cincinnatus]

24 minutes ago, JadenStar10 said:

Wdym, you won that war??

We really shouldn't have been able to manage a victory.

[MinesomeMC]

11 hours ago, Zei-Sakura Alsainn said:

My god it's happening again.

Somebody ring up the old folks and ask them if this looks like 2015 brewing a storm again.

can confirm

[Vice]

4 hours ago, JadenStar10 said:

Wdym, you won that war??

The white peace given was a pity term. 

 

If it looked like Hollywood won, and it smelled like Hollywood won… doesn’t matter what the peace terms said. 

[Thalmor]

Pardon for any spelling or grammar mistakes. I'm tired and I also don't feel like proofreading this:

I disagree with the OP pretty strongly. I still think politics are the best they've ever been.

Some of you guys really don't understand how good y'all have it. Wars in 2015-2020 were almost entirely just the same two sides going against each other. Maybe one time it was Para-Convenant against Syndisphere, and another time it was Inquisition against 'Easy Mode Coalition' or whatever; but for much of the game's history, that's pretty much all that ever happened, and people planned for that. People wanted it to be different as early as 2017, but you didn't really see any big changes until 2019. Then, we had to - tragically - fight a war of extermination that resulted in the worst elements of the community being driven out of the game entirely. Although it's been a long road, the meta of the game is finally a point where I think we've broken out of that bipolar (in more ways than one) world that we inherited. 

Look, I'm sorry that dawgpiels happen. I'm sorry that Oasis and Mystery had such a bad case of feeling impotent and buck broken that they scrambled to the bunkers because half of Clock built a few tanks. I'm sorry that secret treaties are something we still might have to deal with (or are dealing with, depending on what narrative you want to push). I'm sorry that this isn't a game with 30,000 players and dozens of blocs who all have something different and interesting going on. I'm sorry that P&W is kinda a shit game that doesn't give us anything to really fight over (which leads to the weird cognitive dissonance of people saying that they don't care about CBs until they get hit, then they suddenly care about CBs). I'm sorry that the meta still has a way to go before we're all happy.

But, with where we are now, we are in the wild west of politics. Blocs split and join up with each other. When somebody mils up, nobody knows what they're doing because there's so many directions for a person to swing at. Globals ends with a sudden white peace that nobody really saw coming. Entire swaths of the game are making agreements on how they'll approach peace terms (the NAP end 4 out of 6 blocs signed right before the war started). That in particular in something I haven't seen in years.

A lot of people seem quick to read the eulogy of minispheres, but I'm just not seeing it. Now, we have a global with TKR and Rose staying out. Did anybody see that coming? Would anybody see it coming if Rose and TKR did decide to come in? Who knows! Hell, did anyone see this current war coming? What was supposed to be 2 alliances against an entire bloc turned into two blocs on another two blocs. The current flexibility of politics is only possible thanks to the commitment to minispheres that people have been pushing for.

Mystery-Oasis forming a megabloc because they got scared does not kill minispheres. Lord Tyrion does command a lot of power within Oasis, but he isn't some demigod who is capable of blowing up a massive chunk of the meta based on his political posturing. The reality of P&W is that we went from boring, predictable wars that eventually led to one side trying to win the game, to a very dynamic, open political situation where alliances, blocs, and decision makers have a much wider toolbox of options to use when executing their political agenda- whatever that may be. 

I'll believe minispheres are dead when we're back to, like, how politics were back in 2015-2016. And if you don't even know what I'm talking about, then I'll repeat myself: You don't know how good you have it. 

[Palps]

12 hours ago, Grave said:

Be careful, with all that spin you might get yourself into a corkscrew nosedive and crash. 

@Ducc Zucc corkscrew 😳

[Eumirbago]

6 hours ago, Sweeeeet Ronny D said:

I would love for someone to define political stagnation for me.  Everyone !@#$es about it, but I feel like we may have different definitions of it.  If the definition is that we have the same wars over and over again, then I feel like that issue has been solved, we have had more variation in major wars than we have seen in the history of the game.  If its that the same 10-15 people decide who fights when, then yeah I would agree that is still an issue.

Political stagnation is when The $yndicate and her allies decide to sit around and do nothing

[Kyubnyan]

16 minutes ago, Thalmor said:

- SNIP -

Couldn't agree more. I'm very happy with the current state of the meta. It certainly helps (IMO) that a lot of the influential alliance leaders and gov in this multisphere environment come from what I like to think of as the minispheres that really started it all by being completely disconnected from other spheres (KETOGG and CHAOS). Orbis certainly has come a long way since the team up of KETOGG and CHAOS (and friends) to take on IQ 2.0 and I'm excited to see what happens next.

[KillzBob]

7 hours ago, Broke said:

Some of you are taking the game way too seriously. Touch some grass please. 

I'd rather let you eat it instead.

[hidude45454]

100% AGREE with Thalmor and SRD, some of y'all never experienced some of the earlier globals in the game. As a continuation to my earlier post, usually either I was crushing or getting crushed day 1 more or less in the same way it often happens now; even though ex-TEsties like me never got to see a fully paperless world the fact that so much paper has been burned because a bipolar Orbis was super cancer is already an improvement. While this is not exactly a great testament to Tyrion's motives, the fact that the idea of minispheres should be abandoned for so little makes little sense to me.

13 hours ago, Isjaki said:

That’s right, going back to a duopolistic Orbis is our best option. Wars will be drab, standard and boring, yes. But at least, both the sides will be more or less ‘equally’ matched, and competence, not numbers, will dictate the outcome.

“That sucks, Isjaki” you say, and I agree, it absolutely sucks. Unfortunately, we can’t have nice things, since Oasis has made it clear that they will seek secret treaties.

This could not be more wrong. There is literally nothing to indicate that wars will be "equally" matched just because there are two sides and from history also has rarely been true. But yes, wars will be significantly more boring than they are now, and I also think it's defeatist to give up so easily and revert back to an old political climate that is even more unfun than it currently is now.

13 hours ago, Isjaki said:

When one bloc makes it publicly clear that they will seek secret ties, other blocs naturally have to seek secret ties of their own (or get rolled out of the way) until we end up with a duopolistic Orbis. Rather than having a glorified 2 sphere world, united by secret treaties, maybe it would be better to have an actual 2 sphere world.

Also not true and I hope this current war illustrates that? IMO just as Oasis signing onto the NAP agreement and then trying to break it immediately was used as a reason to hit them, there should be a multi-sphere agreement to avoid secret treaties that lessens the effect of bad apples.

Additional point: don't see how this is a "glorified 2 sphere world" either, and at the very least even if you could claim it is, at least it isn't always the same two sides that bipolar Orbis was known for.

[Cooper_]

As a perpetually scorned, grumpy, and old-time idealist for minispheres and dynamism, I'd just like to say I was rather impressed with the response (I can't say if it was for the right reasoning or not due to not knowing the full story).  

The stability of a system is judged by the equilibrium that is achieved after it is perturbed.  As I see it, Oasis and Minc made a move that disturbed the balance of minispheres.  The reaction was swift and fierce, and I don't see them or others repeating that mistake as far as precedent goes for a decent bit of time.  To me, that's the sytstem working, minispheres doing what we always wanted it to do.  So before I learn more to make me question motives of each side, I'll be returning to FA slumber.  Hopefully, I can be impressed again the next go around.  

Good luck folks, and let's see those walls!

[Horsecock]

15 hours ago, Isjaki said:

No self-respecting alliance leader in this game will greenlight a war these days unless they have a reasonable degree of assurance about the outcome.

Am I a joke to you?

[Zevari]

Honestly I feel like this entire situation has been rather interesting. 

For once I actually got to witness some real political movements going round, miss-communications and other situations. This actually is quite entertaining to watch from a position of non-significance (and annoying watching all the dumb shit).

My only issue with the whole situation is that it seems like people gave up on doing anything besides war after the temporary MDP was signed. We could of had some interesting results from this situation such as Oasis still being hit by BW, and Mystery being hit by those two alliances from clock that caused this whole mess.

If this had gone the way I said above you wouldn't have people as scared of openly announce their plans or make unique moves like this one and we could of see an even more balanced war between the parties.


I feel like people need to remember in a game that heavily revolves around politics and the general community, open ended diplomacy (with high transparency) is far more entertaining than watching some numbers on my nation page go up and down because people were too lazy to talk to each other.

[Keegoz]

7 hours ago, Thalmor said:

Mystery-Oasis forming a megabloc because they got scared does not kill minispheres. Lord Tyrion does command a lot of power within Oasis, but he isn't some demigod who is capable of blowing up a massive chunk of the meta based on his political posturing. The reality of P&W is that we went from boring, predictable wars that eventually led to one side trying to win the game, to a very dynamic, open political situation where alliances, blocs, and decision makers have a much wider toolbox of options to use when executing their political agenda- whatever that may be. 

Correct, if Tyrion wants to ruin minispheres in some aspects it will take another sphere to take him up on it. Takes 2 to sign a secret treaty.