[RON Exclusive] What Do You Need To Start A Successful Alliance?

[darkblade]

Intro

Since the wall of text trend has started to die down. It is up to me to keep this dying trend alive. Henceforth I have decided to talk about the subject of startup/micro alliances. I'm just going talk about what I consider important factors in making a successful alliance from my experience as a player. So that the new players can better understand what goes into making an successful alliance. I also want to hear y'alls opinion about my points or what you think is a major factor for making an alliance.

 

Econ

So what I consider the most important part when starting an alliance is econ. econ is gonna be the engine of your alliance. You'll be setting up tax brackets, handling grants, allocating money towards rebuilds and setting up rebuilds as well, the whole shebang. And you have to be careful with how you utilize your money. Because one wrong move, and your down in the gutter with a empty bank and a angry membership. You also have to consider the economic output of your alliance and cover resources that your alliance may not produce much of. Econ usually is more of a behind the scenes kind of position but a very important one. So to all you econ guys out there, you have my respect.

 

Internal Affairs

Internal Affairs is what I consider the 2nd most important aspect when starting an alliance. The quality of your IA is gonna set the quality of your membership. If your IA is bad at their job, then your membership will be low quality. When working as IA, you will be making sure that all members are active and engaged with the community, handling disputes between members, interviewing applicants to your alliance, and punishing members who fail to live up the standards you set for them. IA is a fun position to be in. Stay active and keep the community active while maintaining standards, and you will have a good membership in your alliance.

 

Tech

If you would have asked me a year ago what position I thought was most needed in a alliance, I would say tech. But now with so many bots that handle so many different aspects of an alliance, you can get away with not having a tech person. However, you will still have a disadvantage compared to other alliances and there are just some things you need a tech guy for. The two biggest reasons you would want a Tech guy is security, and reliability. While having public bots is great, there is a security risk of the bot creator having access to info they may otherwise not get. And I'm not saying that the owners of these bots have bad intentions, they are pretty cool. But you would feel safer knowing that all your tech is in house. For reliability, It is great having your own tech guy who can work on custom projects to make life a little bit easier. Like making a script for google sheets or a custom banking bot. So if you can find a trustworthy tech guy or gal. take them.

 

Protectorates

Protectorates are a big factor when starting an alliance. And each alliance you approach is gonna have different standards when considering handing out a prot treaty. Some alliances have high standards, some alliances have lower standards. If you think you have a great gov lineup and a active membership. Then you should consider doing your shark tank pitch to some of the big boy alliances in the game. If your gov lineup is not the best and you need help getting on the right track, then you should try and find an alliance that is willing to work with you on improving as long as you show potential. Even if the alliance is not a major Orbis player, they can still teach you as long as the alliance you pick is a competent one with a good reputation. You also have to consider the protectors culture, style of government, and just overall seeing if your alliance meshes well with them. If your alliances don't mesh well or you don't like their style of government, then it is better look at your options then to sign them and end up being at odds with each other. If you can get a good protector who meshes well with your alliance, then you are good to go.

 

Military Communications

When starting an alliance, you will come across raiders/pirates who want to loot your members. And eventually you may get involved in a global war. This is why milcom is important. You will be coordinating wars against enemies of your alliance, teaching new members how to raid, and setting up MMR. The strength of your alliance will never reach it's full potential unless you have a great milcom lead. Milcom can also be very time consuming depending on how many members you have. And if you don't have a great milcom lead to start out with then don't worry, they can always learn from experience and from your protector.

 

Conclusion

If you have made it this far, then congrats. You have no life. But I would love to hear y'alls thoughts whether or not you agree with my points or if there was something I missed out on. I know I left out FA. But who needs FA am I right? But thank y'all for your time. And have a wonderful day.

TLDR: Learn to read LMAO

[Krampus]

Surprisingly well written

[darkblade]

Just now, Krampus said:

Surprisingly well written

those college classes are paying off.

[JadenStar10]

18 minutes ago, darkblade said:

Military Communications

The age old debate of Military Command or Military Communications.

[Sweeeeet Ronny D]

First thing I recommend is learn how to play the game, if you are a brand new nation, you really shouldn't create an alliance, you are more than likely doomed to fail.  Join an established alliance, and ask a million questions if you are new, find out how they do things, see if they have things you can adopt for your future micro.  Most of these established alliances are established for a reason, which is they know what they are doing, and are pretty good at doing it.

After that, I would recommend going in with a plan of how you want to run things and dont compromise on it, its easier to meet a goal if everyone in your new alliance is aligned, if they aren't get rid of them.  If you have a plan and you know what you want to do, things like Econ, IA, Military should come into focus pretty quick.

I also recommend avoiding high drama people, their shit is going to quickly turn into your shit, and you should be focusing on growing and building not dealing with drama.  It could be attractive to pick up one of these guys you always see posting on the forums and they will probably tell you they can help you, but when you realize that they have been in 20-30 different alliances, there is a reason for that, and you should avoid these people like the plague.  

Have a small group of people atleast 5-8 members before you start.  If its only 2-3 people, you are most likely going to collapse pretty quick.  Recruiting is tough, and the smaller your alliance is, the harder it is to do.

Please remember, building a successful alliance is hard, dont get too discouraged if you fail.  Try to learn from it.  Most of the most successful alliances in this game came in with an established membership base from other places tp build apon.  Or they merged with enough other micro's till they become a force to be reckoned with.  Every success story, like I believe a TI, there are 100 alliances that never get off the ground.

[Sir Scarfalot]

I would argue that IA is more important than econ, but otherwise I think this is a great guide for new alliances. Good job

[Director Nyus]

47 minutes ago, Sir Scarfalot said:

I would argue that IA is more important than econ, but otherwise I think this is a great guide for new alliances. Good job

IA is the best. No bias here, friends!

Good post overall though, DB. Hopefully it'll help some new enterprisers create some new aas.

Edited February 25, 2022 by Emperor Adam

[hidude45454]

This would be good for most micro alliances, if only they actually participated on the forums and with the wider game enough to read this 🙁

TBH, I think most govs are aware of this but just don't have enough competent people or people that actually know how to carry these out around in order to actually follow most of the suggestions. On a side note, anyone still remember this post from 2016?

It's outdated as heck, but still carries some fairly relevant suggestions, and also quite interesting to see how the game has evolved since then.

[Evlar Ball]

This is also an underrated post about FA which some people might find useful.

 

[zigbigadorlou]

8 hours ago, darkblade said:

But now with so many bots that handle so many different aspects of an alliance, you can get away with not having a tech person.

1. How would you get a bot without a tech person?!?

2. Why would a brand new alliance need a bot?

8 hours ago, darkblade said:

So if you can find a trustworthy tech guy or gal. take them.

This is called poaching. You would be breaking the first commandment of orbis by taking them.

6 hours ago, Sweeeeet Ronny D said:

Have a small group of people at least 5-8 members before you start.

Where do you find these members? Poaching?

[darkblade]

1 hour ago, zigbigadorlou said:

1. How would you get a bot without a tech person?!?

2. Why would a brand new alliance need a bot?

1. locutus is the most popular public bot, you also have rift and colosuss and a few others that have the features that every starting alliance needs.

2.the many features they offer to help make life easier. Like for IA when they do audits they have to look for MMR, resources, activity, etc. without a bot, this can take awhile to do depending on how many members you have. but with a command like !audit you can find out which nations failed the audit and get started on addressing those members asap.

 

1 hour ago, zigbigadorlou said:

This is called poaching. You would be breaking the first commandment of orbis by taking them.

Well sometimes it is. depending on the situation. If you know someone who wants to try something new and plan on leaving their alliance. It's not gonna hurt to offer them a invitation into your startup since they plan on leaving theirs anyway. And in rare cases you might get a new member who knows how to code. That was atlas's case when I joined the game. after 2 months of joining, I became their tech lead.

Edited February 25, 2022 by darkblade

[hidude45454]

1 hour ago, zigbigadorlou said:

This is called poaching.

...

Where do you find these members? Poaching?

1 hour ago, zigbigadorlou said:

You would be breaking the first commandment of orbis by taking them.

Ok and

[Buorhann]

Poaching is a stupid term, honestly.  Poach away my friends.  Grab those people you need to run a good alliance.  Hell, I did and they helped me reshape the game for a time.  I specifically targeted certain players for a reason.

[Lossi]

If you wouldn't mind a few add-on notes from someone who had to found a micro from the ground and build it into an alliance that people still can't let the name of die.

 

Culture -

A lot of micros can set up, choose a random theme, and set up the base standard econ / IA models that everyone uses.  But it makes you completely useless in the grand scheme and gives no one a real reason to join or stick around.  People will join, yes, but more by governmental blood and tears than natural growth.  But what actually is culture?  Isn't it just your theme?  No, absolutely not.  Your culture is the trajectory of your alliance, and you should have an econ plan/recruitment plan/foreign policy plan that all feed into the same singular goal.  Give yourself that and you'll attract people who share those values, leading to natural growth.

 

Here are some examples, and I would encourage any alliance I'm reviewing here to correct mistakes in my perception, I will correct this post as notified;

Grumpy Old Bastards is a high-tier tax free alliance that aligns itself to protect and recruit in the high tier range.  (Last I checked) They charge you an intro fee to ensure you're large enough to take care of yourself, then you never pay another dime to the alliance, and they align themselves to Guardian who has always been an alliance able to guard their lower flank in wars.
The Knights Radiant is a moderately taxed/high growth, new nation alliance that focuses on giving small new nations a large voice in their community.
Rose is a slightly high tax generalist recruitment alliance that focuses on community engagement through events and games, while maintaining a fairly intricate web of foreign relations aimed at keeping themselves secure.
Arrgh is a no tax generalist alliance aimed at people who like to raid, because of that they entirely forgo the idea of formal relations and just maintain subtle 'no-raid' lists of people that will certainly counter if attacked.
Chocolate Castle was a high tax, rapid growth alliance that focused more on having a community free of toxicity (often at the expense of relations within orbis), which as a result remained fairly excluded from orbis politics.

 

Amendment to Tech -

Having flashy bots will not trump having experience.  Having run chocolate castle, we were(and our members remain) notorious for reinventing the wheel, as we had a solid tech core that could develop any tools we really wanted access to within a day.  But we did not lean on this, and chose instead to maintain a core of extremely skilled players in various fields.  In some aspects we definitely paid the price for this, often literally (see: CC bank robberies).  But when it came to military or econ, we had allies, even larger than us, coming to us for advice on how to repair the mistakes their bots and scripts made.  But; diving a bit into subjective opinion; it also created a culture of responsibility, where we didn't try to hide or deny the fact that we screwed up, and instead of just saying "Well improve the bots", we asked what we could do to improve so it didn't happen again.

 

10 hours ago, Sweeeeet Ronny D said:

First thing I recommend is learn how to play the game, if you are a brand new nation, you really shouldn't create an alliance, you are more than likely doomed to fail.  Join an established alliance, and ask a million questions if you are new, find out how they do things, see if they have things you can adopt for your future micro.  Most of these established alliances are established for a reason, which is they know what they are doing, and are pretty good at doing it.

After that, I would recommend going in with a plan of how you want to run things and dont compromise on it, its easier to meet a goal if everyone in your new alliance is aligned, if they aren't get rid of them.  If you have a plan and you know what you want to do, things like Econ, IA, Military should come into focus pretty quick.

I also recommend avoiding high drama people, their shit is going to quickly turn into your shit, and you should be focusing on growing and building not dealing with drama.  It could be attractive to pick up one of these guys you always see posting on the forums and they will probably tell you they can help you, but when you realize that they have been in 20-30 different alliances, there is a reason for that, and you should avoid these people like the plague.  

Have a small group of people atleast 5-8 members before you start.  If its only 2-3 people, you are most likely going to collapse pretty quick.  Recruiting is tough, and the smaller your alliance is, the harder it is to do.

Please remember, building a successful alliance is hard, dont get too discouraged if you fail.  Try to learn from it.  Most of the most successful alliances in this game came in with an established membership base from other places tp build apon.  Or they merged with enough other micro's till they become a force to be reckoned with.  Every success story, like I believe a TI, there are 100 alliances that never get off the ground.

 

This is a good extension of what I'm saying about tech.  Experience will always be better than having a bot that can do it for you, because if you rely on a bot, and don't have the experience to do it yourself without said bot.  When suddenly borg doesn't like you anymore and deletes your entire discord 'on accident', or limits your access to his bot because it 'uses up api requests', you stop having any viability as a leader, and start losing members quick.

[Ramona]

11 hours ago, darkblade said:

Intro

Since the wall of text trend has started to die down. It is up to me to keep this dying trend alive. Henceforth I have decided to talk about the subject of startup/micro alliances. I'm just going talk about what I consider important factors in making a successful alliance from my experience as a player. So that the new players can better understand what goes into making an successful alliance. I also want to hear y'alls opinion about my points or what you think is a major factor for making an alliance.

 

Econ

So what I consider the most important part when starting an alliance is econ. econ is gonna be the engine of your alliance. You'll be setting up tax brackets, handling grants, allocating money towards rebuilds and setting up rebuilds as well, the whole shebang. And you have to be careful with how you utilize your money. Because one wrong move, and your down in the gutter with a empty bank and a angry membership. You also have to consider the economic output of your alliance and cover resources that your alliance may not produce much of. Econ usually is more of a behind the scenes kind of position but a very important one. So to all you econ guys out there, you have my respect.

 

Internal Affairs

Internal Affairs is what I consider the 2nd most important aspect when starting an alliance. The quality of your IA is gonna set the quality of your membership. If your IA is bad at their job, then your membership will be low quality. When working as IA, you will be making sure that all members are active and engaged with the community, handling disputes between members, interviewing applicants to your alliance, and punishing members who fail to live up the standards you set for them. IA is a fun position to be in. Stay active and keep the community active while maintaining standards, and you will have a good membership in your alliance.

 

Tech

If you would have asked me a year ago what position I thought was most needed in a alliance, I would say tech. But now with so many bots that handle so many different aspects of an alliance, you can get away with not having a tech person. However, you will still have a disadvantage compared to other alliances and there are just some things you need a tech guy for. The two biggest reasons you would want a Tech guy is security, and reliability. While having public bots is great, there is a security risk of the bot creator having access to info they may otherwise not get. And I'm not saying that the owners of these bots have bad intentions, they are pretty cool. But you would feel safer knowing that all your tech is in house. For reliability, It is great having your own tech guy who can work on custom projects to make life a little bit easier. Like making a script for google sheets or a custom banking bot. So if you can find a trustworthy tech guy or gal. take them.

 

Protectorates

Protectorates are a big factor when starting an alliance. And each alliance you approach is gonna have different standards when considering handing out a prot treaty. Some alliances have high standards, some alliances have lower standards. If you think you have a great gov lineup and a active membership. Then you should consider doing your shark tank pitch to some of the big boy alliances in the game. If your gov lineup is not the best and you need help getting on the right track, then you should try and find an alliance that is willing to work with you on improving as long as you show potential. Even if the alliance is not a major Orbis player, they can still teach you as long as the alliance you pick is a competent one with a good reputation. You also have to consider the protectors culture, style of government, and just overall seeing if your alliance meshes well with them. If your alliances don't mesh well or you don't like their style of government, then it is better look at your options then to sign them and end up being at odds with each other. If you can get a good protector who meshes well with your alliance, then you are good to go.

 

Military Communications

When starting an alliance, you will come across raiders/pirates who want to loot your members. And eventually you may get involved in a global war. This is why milcom is important. You will be coordinating wars against enemies of your alliance, teaching new members how to raid, and setting up MMR. The strength of your alliance will never reach it's full potential unless you have a great milcom lead. Milcom can also be very time consuming depending on how many members you have. And if you don't have a great milcom lead to start out with then don't worry, they can always learn from experience and from your protector.

 

Conclusion

If you have made it this far, then congrats. You have no life. But I would love to hear y'alls thoughts whether or not you agree with my points or if there was something I missed out on. I know I left out FA. But who needs FA am I right? But thank y'all for your time. And have a wonderful day.

TLDR: Learn to read LMAO

Tldr fr though?
 

6 hours ago, Evlar Ball said:

This is also an underrated post about FA which some people might find useful.

 

@Epi Take notes. 
 

3 hours ago, zigbigadorlou said:

1. How would you get a bot without a tech person?!?

2. Why would a brand new alliance need a bot?

This is called poaching. You would be breaking the first commandment of orbis by taking them.

Where do you find these members? Poaching?

1. If poaching never happened then a lot of good alliances would've never gotten made.
2. Give your members good reasons to stay and not leave your alliance if you want them to not be poached? If people truly want to leave your alliance. If someone tries to poach them and they actually want to be in the alliance, they'll most likely just stay, if they already wanted to leave it just gives them an extra option when they do leave. :shrug:

[darkblade]

10 minutes ago, Ramona said:

Tldr fr though?

What Econ is like
What IA is like
The importance of Tech
The factors when picking a protector
What Milcom is like
I want to hear your opinions
FA sucks

Edited February 25, 2022 by darkblade

[Sphinx]

@darkblade Very extensive and well thought out guide, 

11 hours ago, Sweeeeet Ronny D said:

Snip

Correct me if I'm wrong.. but out of the top 15 alliances, I believe every single one bar Weebunism was created either by established players or through the merger of already established alliances. Even TI's Tyrion cut his teeth in Fist's Pantheon before leaving to create something far greater. 

[darkblade]

28 minutes ago, Sphinx said:

@darkblade Very extensive and well thought out guide, 

Correct me if I'm wrong.. but out of the top 15 alliances, I believe every single one bar Weebunism was created either by established players or through the merger of already established alliances. Even TI's Tyrion cut his teeth in Fist's Pantheon before leaving to create something far greater. 

Don't quote me on this but I think another big alliance that started off noobish and small was order of the white rose. It might be another alliance I'm not sure

Edited February 25, 2022 by darkblade

[MUT]

This post and its replies are so useful. Thanks guys.

 

[zigbigadorlou]

5 hours ago, Lossi said:

But what actually is culture?

Those are all policies, not culture. I would say the culture informs policies. For instance, the culture of Grumpy is a place for seasoned players who want to be free from responsibilities and issues of most alliances. This leads to their 0% tax, decentralized gov, etc. Alliances like TKR and Rose (correct me if I'm wrong), are more focused on being an inviting general gaming community, so they both navigate to policies that benefit the incorporation of new players. So acceptable tax levels, build programs, training, games, etc. Arrgh is a community focused around raiding which informs their culture. 

6 hours ago, Buorhann said:

Poaching is a stupid term, honestly.  Poach away my friends.  Grab those people you need to run a good alliance.  Hell, I did and they helped me reshape the game for a time.  I specifically targeted certain players for a reason.

This honestly deserves its own thread. The culture has shifted away from complete condemnation of poaching, and a lot of people have different opinions on it...however everyone has to agree it has been historically used as a CB quite commonly. 

[Jordan]

@darkbladeI feel attacked with that TLDR 😠 I don't wanna read

[darkblade]

1 hour ago, Jordan said:

@darkbladeI feel attacked with that TLDR 😠 I don't wanna read

you can always hire @KillzBob to read it for you. ik he has a text to speech business.

[Raphael]

20 hours ago, darkblade said:

Econ

So what I consider the most important part when starting an alliance is econ. econ is gonna be the engine of your alliance. You'll be setting up tax brackets, handling grants, allocating money towards rebuilds and setting up rebuilds as well, the whole shebang. And you have to be careful with how you utilize your money. Because one wrong move, and your down in the gutter with a empty bank and a angry membership. You also have to consider the economic output of your alliance and cover resources that your alliance may not produce much of. Econ usually is more of a behind the scenes kind of position but a very important one. So to all you econ guys out there, you have my respect.

I think it's important to extrapolate a little bit here.

A lot of people are terrified of being in anything other than a whale or "upper" tier alliance (c20+ only, c30+ only, etc.). When PnW first started, the economic logic was that it was always cheaper, gave better ROI, and generally was more cost-effective to grow whoever the smallest people were.

The script seems to have flipped where, as we see in recent globals, even a tier mismatch in the upper tiers causes people to throw their hands up and walk away. Everyone wants c40 or 45, and if you're not there then you're irrelevant to the game's macro-politics involving thousands of nations.

I'd like to see a return to more traditional econ approaches where people aren't afraid to grow themselves, take loans if needed, and work for their alliance rather than the same handful of people try to create whale AA's every couple of years.

 

20 hours ago, darkblade said:

Protectorates

Protectorates are a big factor when starting an alliance. And each alliance you approach is gonna have different standards when considering handing out a prot treaty. Some alliances have high standards, some alliances have lower standards. If you think you have a great gov lineup and a active membership. Then you should consider doing your shark tank pitch to some of the big boy alliances in the game. If your gov lineup is not the best and you need help getting on the right track, then you should try and find an alliance that is willing to work with you on improving as long as you show potential. Even if the alliance is not a major Orbis player, they can still teach you as long as the alliance you pick is a competent one with a good reputation. You also have to consider the protectors culture, style of government, and just overall seeing if your alliance meshes well with them. If your alliances don't mesh well or you don't like their style of government, then it is better look at your options then to sign them and end up being at odds with each other. If you can get a good protector who meshes well with your alliance, then you are good to go.

 

Military Communications

When starting an alliance, you will come across raiders/pirates who want to loot your members. And eventually you may get involved in a global war. This is why milcom is important. You will be coordinating wars against enemies of your alliance, teaching new members how to raid, and setting up MMR. The strength of your alliance will never reach it's full potential unless you have a great milcom lead. Milcom can also be very time consuming depending on how many members you have. And if you don't have a great milcom lead to start out with then don't worry, they can always learn from experience and from your protector.

Prots+Milcom go together in my mind. Especially if you're setting up an alliance with newer players or have a lower tier.

Raiders are outside the minds of most "political" players because we've so significantly outgrow the raiding AA's - but Arrgh, 99A, Space Invaders, even the dreaded None still are very very active in the low tiers and you have to be aware of this reality. Most alliances will wave off raids as a learning experience but a lot of new players get discouraged with a lack of support when they are attacked - even if it's 200k to rebuild them, they expect a response team from their alliance to help. Countering is important for both morale, training, and instilling an idea that orders have to be followed. ("Why do I have to counter for them? I don't want to lose infra")

 

A protector can shore this up for you in a significant way. Ideally you have someone who already has their milcom figured out and a team of reliable counters ready to roll.

I'd actually disagree on your vein of thought here: The onus shouldn't be on the protectorate to start out competent in order to secure a good protector. The good alliances in the game should actively seek to grow other alliances into decent members of the meta. I'd really like to see a push to develop new blood, despite the challenges it presents.

18 hours ago, Sweeeeet Ronny D said:

First thing I recommend is learn how to play the game, if you are a brand new nation, you really shouldn't create an alliance, you are more than likely doomed to fail.  Join an established alliance, and ask a million questions if you are new, find out how they do things, see if they have things you can adopt for your future micro.  Most of these established alliances are established for a reason, which is they know what they are doing, and are pretty good at doing it.

I still am a huge proponent of the idea that new players should be railroaded into established AA's in order to increase retention.

[Sweeeeet Ronny D]

6 hours ago, Sphinx said:

@darkblade Very extensive and well thought out guide, 

Correct me if I'm wrong.. but out of the top 15 alliances, I believe every single one bar Weebunism was created either by established players or through the merger of already established alliances. Even TI's Tyrion cut his teeth in Fist's Pantheon before leaving to create something far greater. 

Was he?  I just remember one day looking at the alliance list and being like, where did these guys and there 100+ membership come from?  I assumed it was home grown.

[Kelson]

16 hours ago, darkblade said:

Don't quote me on this but I think another big alliance that started off noobish and small was order of the white rose. It might be another alliance I'm not sure

One thing I've admired about OWR over the years is their consistency. I remember OWR launching, and they have remained persistent throughout the years. Many of the upstarts over that period, mine included, dwindled. They didn't.

A significant contributor to a successful alliance is developing that core, foundational group of members that value the relationships established with one another more than any extraneous event that could potentially derail a micro. Usually, a micro will fail ultimately from within, but the spark to that failure could be something like Arrgh raiding you. Having assembled that core membership, though, will enhance your ability to withstand those and other disruptions.