Entry posted by jerdge
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I am one of the GPA members that most speak with other people, and every once in a while I am asked if the GPA likes/dislikes some other alliance, whom we'd like to hit and such.
The last time I answered to this, on the forums of another alliance, I came up with a bit of a wall of text that I think explains rather well my point of view on the issue, and which is also probably near to some of the best and most honest answers you can get from any long term true GPA member.
It's not an official stance, though (if you want one, please ask our President).
Without further ado, here is an adaptation of what I posted on that forum (I basically just removed an example, to shorten it a bit).
Those of you that (like me) care about it can consider it "mostly" (not entirely) IC.
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Q. Just for !@#$% and giggles - if you (GPA) were ever to decide to go to war or involve yourselves in politics - which "side" do you find yourelves more in support of - what alliances do you guys like / dislike - is there anyone you guys would love to roll ??
A. The only side I've ever seen "supported" in the GPA is the GPA one. Our membership, while often aware of the general aspects of CN politics, usually doesn't know exactly what the "sides" are about and why they were formed in that way in the first place. At each war we always have people asking about the reasons behind it.
As we don't have any FA preference, members usually end up liking/disliking other people for specific reasons. Our Ambassadors, for example, usually have a kind attitude towards the alliances they are assigned/went to, and at times there's some disliking that arises when someone else is perceived as being hostile towards the GPA.
Without having any specific data/evidence at hand I'd say that many of us probably feel sympathy for the other neutrals or semi-neutrals (WTF, TDO, GOP, OBR, Pax Corvus, Créole etc.) but that's just a series of individual attitudes (which I am not even sure about) and not a characteristic of the alliance as a whole. Those of us that deal with foreign tech also like alliances that stay at peace, for obvious reasons of reliability.
The GPA likes peace, for several reasons. Many don't spend that much of the time in CN (and couldn't thus very well cope with war); many others like nation building more than anything else (if you don't dislike math it's way more interesting than war, IMHO); others like the challenge of going alone and peaceful in an often violent environment, protected practically only by the "soft power" of our hard-earned reputation of trustworthiness; others again are RL pacifists, etc.
Our culture is strongly against war and we wouldn't like attacking anyone else unless it was necessary to defend our way of life, thus there's nobody that "we would love to roll". -
Q. If you, as a neutral alliance, were to attack any other alliance in the game one on one, who would it be, and why??.
A. As said above, in principle no one. I can tell whom we'd never attack no matter what: everyone that leaves us alone.
I can also imagine that, in case we had absolutely strong and irrefutable evidence that someone is threatening us, if we could think that we may have a good chance at averting the threat with a first-strike attack and we had the reasonable expectation to not destroy our reputation, or to jeopardize our status among the alliances - well - in that case it would probably make sense to attack the threat military, and to be over with it.
However, that scenario is absolutely improbable. For one we don't routinely go around collecting intelligence, thus we are unlikely to have any strong evidence about anything (people talk with us and you know there's a lot of gossip going around CN at any given time, but that's not the kind of thing that can give anyone any certainty).
An enemy that we could put down with a pre-empt would also have to be weaker and unconnected, thus the very rationale behind an attack would logically fall apart: much better to let them attack and have that blame fall on them.
Going on the aggressive wouldn't be taken well by many parties, a lot of which are absolutely influential. We have no desire to have an "imperialistic" FA - not only because it would be suicidal for a neutral, but mostly and especially because of the culture I was talking of above - and it would be terribly silly and counter-productive to have the look of having an aggressive/imperialistic agenda we're not even interested in.
Finally, the GPA has a strong government but also a long tradition of democratic discussion. Were we attacked the President would have all the powers s/he needs, and the backup of all the alliance, but an attack on our part would need a long discussion that would never end in a great support for the action (most likely the opposite). This obviously leads to all the problems you can imagine about the opsec, the quickness and the internal political impetus that any aggressive action badly needs, to have a chance to succeed. The GPA is basically structurally unable to attack other alliances, and she will never have the will to do so.
You can BTW take this occasion to ask other Questions. Be anyway aware that you'd be asking them to me, not "to the GPA".
Finally, a small ooc "notice of service": this blog entry apart, I am going to mostly desert these forums from now on and probably for a while, just for lack of time. I doubt that many will notice it, anyway.
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