Meager Beginnings: Senate Seeker Coalition and COIN

Entry posted by Taget October 25, 2009

832 views

I was going to write something about the last war. And I was going to start with the war before that. Even wrote some long wall of text last May I never felt the urge to publish. Instead I'll just start with my pathetic beginning and utterly pedestrian musings on such.

This saga starts somewhere around November of 2007.

Senate Seeker Coalition

I started in another game. Not sure if I am allowed to mention it's name but given the alliance that came from that game was called the Senate Seeker Alliance not really sure that is necessary. This nameless game was a political simulation where parties would seek different posts against each other such as Senate seats, House seats, Governors seats or even the presidency. It had the Republican, Libertarian, Democratic, Green, and Conservative Party. Most people stuck to their real life ideological preference though a few would crossover because they liked the people on another side better or because they wanted a challenge or to be on the winning side. Had an interesting game engine though one that became rather robotic and rote once you figured it out.

That meant that other stuff that was more role playing centric such as Supreme Court, the Presidential runs, and legislation took on more importance. And when they started breaking and the admin proved unwilling to do much to fix them things broke down and the game entered a death spiral (though it is still around) and people started fleeing. Someone came up with the idea of starting an alliance on Senate Seeker to keep people together and in touch. Why cybernations? I have no idea.

The alliance was basically just a bunch of newbs and brought over some stuff from that other game that really had no place in CN. We had a President and a cabinet. But also a Senate with a Senate leader. It never was clear what the Senate leader did and whether he actually had more power than the President. So there was some third position created to mediate if there ever was a dispute between the Senate and the President. Note I said mediate rather than solve. I guess this might've made sense if we wanted to role play a model congress. But actually none of us had a desire to (or else we'd be playing one of those board based political role play games).

We were all a bunch of newbs but we did have two people who did have some CN experience though objectively they were probably still newbs as well. First we had Husky. He burned a lot of bridges with people in the old game and unfortunately got run off. Then we had Jipps. Who actually was probably a lot less experienced than he claimed. But he did actually have a clue which put him miles ahead of the rest of us. He also looked really really huge. I think he had nearly a 1,000 infrastructure which made him much bigger than the rest of us starting at one.

He along with anyone else with a clue of course lost in our elections. Instead we elected Eledin who was our President in the other game. And Elliot who was Democratic Senate President. They had never played before. If I had half a desire to I probably could've run and won something if not this time than after since I had been the long time Democrat Senate Whip.

I will however concede one thing. Those who were too clueless to get anywhere in THAT game tended to be just as clueless at this game. Whereas those who rocked at the other game tended to do well (by our relatively low standards) in this one.

I found the game at least a first a bit complicated (isn't everything new you don't understand yet complicated?) and quickly a tad boring. I did figure out via all the spam I got that trade circles were the way to go. Which is partly why Elliot (who was in the circle I organized) and myself would quickly become larger than everyone else. Stable trades. What a concept!

What did also help a little bit is someone sent me a slightly outdated guide that had such recommendations as not buying more than 200 tech because anything more than that was useless.

But mostly it was just collect, pay taxes, and buy infra. We had very intense and utterly stupid discussions and votes on our boards over stuff that had absolutely no impact on game play whatsoever. I being mischievous and bored tended to vote for whatever caused the most needless bureaucracy or whatever caused a tie vote. That is why I always tried to vote last. Best chance of causing a tie vote.

I did occasionally visit the OWF. I found the long flame filled posts rather boring and annoying. Came away with the impression most people there were rather rather unpleasant nasty people who you were better off staying far away from. This differs markedly from my current opinion in that..... nevermind.

Someone from TOOL who played this other game was active and on our boards and even grabbed away one of our members (Liz Girard). Partly why I have a soft spot for TOOL. First alliance to actually show any concern or kindness for the little alliance I started in. Course if their ambassador "Huckabee" was a bit more on the ball he would've seen an active group of clueless newbies who had no contact with virtually everyone else and thought "I can score some good tech deals for my alliance!" But alas at this point we remained too clueless to know much about that.

The Osiran Compact was another group we had a lot of contact with and a lot of fondness for.

I think the story was Jipps knew some people (since he had played in a few other alliances before ours) and he scored us this “magnificent treaty.” It incorrectly listed him as our President. As he had somewhat of a clue that never was going to happen.

http://forums.cybernations.net/index.php?showtopic=12174

Before this treaty we had no treaties whatsoever or protection. Not that this offered us much. One thing that helped is we did ban tech raiding after a few botched ones that nearly got us into wars that would get us crushed.

CoIN

We also changed our name to COIN (or Coalition of Independent Nations) this should not be confused with CoIN (or Coalition of Independent Nations). They are two completely different alliances. Though Mark Thomas would later join THAT alliance also. The reason for the change was so we'd have a more CN'ish name and perhaps get people who never played that other certain game to join. Personally I wanted a different name. Don't remember what it was. But probably something far sillier.

COIN was pretty much more of the same. We stayed at around 25 members as we had before. We lost a few people who were too disinterested in the game ot notice. And gained a few people. And by gain I mean we picked up some ghosts and we figured... cool. New folks.

We also expanded our contacts with a few alliances who opened embassies with us. Perhaps from that OWF posting.

But since I barely paid attention to stuff like the OWF I didn't know COIN (not CoIN) wouldn't be long for this world. If so I might've noticed this thread.

http://forums.cybernations.net/index.php?showtopic=14148

If I had visited other alliance boards I might've also noticed these "proposals" posted in their embassy signup threads.

Now I don't want to be too mocking since at the time I more less trusted our leaders to know what they were doing and even if they didn't I sure didn't want to bother leading anything. And even if I did want to lead something it's not like I had a clue either. I probably would've just merged us into TOOL which looking back wouldn't have been a bad thing. Or maybe I would've merged with Illuminati because they had a "cool" name. That might've been a bad thing.

The net result of these efforts was that we merged with, United Allied Nations, an itty bitty micro-alliance even by our own dim standards to form the United Coalition of Alliances. The name reflecting unrealized ambitions for a larger grander merger that never materialized. And thus UCA was born. It still really was the same alliance with a handful of people added (and minus a handful of inactive people who never even noticing we had left).

http://forums.cybernations.net/index.php?showtopic=16052

We carried over the COIN (not CoIN) / Senate Seeker constitution which had been streamlined a little but not enough. Senate Leader still remained as a powerful and/or useless position. Don't think we even knew ourselves and our charter wasn't any help.

And I'll stop here and leave the oh so exciting UCA years months for next.