Marooner's Musings

I disagree with the "quality" alliances having a smaller pool of talent for government. A "quantity" alliance typically has a relatively low ratio of active members to total members, while a "quality" one will have a higher ratio. Active members are the only ones who can be depended on to do anything outside of the game itself (and are much, much more reliable in that area as well). It's quite possible that in absolute terms, a "quality" alliance will have more active members than a larger "quantity" one, and thus a larger pool of talent to draw from.

Though, I do agree with you on the need for balance - occasionally recruitment spam will net you a valuable, if inexperienced, new member, help supply new internal tech deals, and to a limited extent fight stagnation.

Both types are needed, and in fact inevitable. 'Quality' alliances take a disproportionate number of the larger nations and the more active, politically interested players, and that leaves a large number of smaller, less active or new players who will naturally group together into alliances as well.

If you look at most 'quantity' alliances, there is a core of politically active members who typically have large nations and who actually run the alliance and its foreign affairs. In some ways, a 'quality' alliance is simply restricting itself to this core, and sacrificing the extra strength and potential the recruiting gives you for the sake of not having to deal with the extra work and problems that it also brings.

The depth of talent in almost every alliance is surprisingly shallow – maybe ten to fifteen competent and motivated people in each alliance at most. Even sanctioned alliances can have trouble filling all their spots with good, active people. But I think that in general, 'quality' alliances don't have any more issues with that than 'quantity' ones.

Every alliance needs to attract recruits in order to survive, as eventually older players retire from CN and at the least you must replace them. But it is possible to attract recruits without actively recuiting new people, as long as there are other alliances out there to 'cultivate' the new recruits for you. Even we, in Citadel, recognise the value of recruiting though (CTC). And even the archetype of full-on recruiting, TOOL, realised the benefit of high average NS. You are correct, as with all things a balance is the right answer.

I like the argument that Bob put out with the "quality" alliances being essentially the core of a "quantity" alliance. You can see some of that difference by comparing the composition of NATO and Zenith. We have a similar top 20 and fairly similar nuke, infra, tech stats, but vastly different member counts. NATO is very open with their recruiting and Zenith tends to be restrictive.