First, I would like to apologize for my readers as I will be using some OOC references. I'm usually against doing such a thing, as that's how I like to play the game. But, this is a blog, and I think we can bend the rules a little here...

For anyone who has been in New York City, they are probably familiar with how insensitive people can be. Likewise, for those who have traveled to smaller towns, people seem to be much friendlier. This phenomenon is not just heresay, but has been studied by a number of academic professionals in fields like sociology and linguistics. What's more, game theorists have a simple explanation:

In smaller communities (i.e. towns, or in the case of CN, small alliances), it is far more likely that you'll bump into the same person more than once. As such, you are more likely to be careful about how you act, and therefore be much more polite, or even make friends. However, if you bump into the same person twice in a large city, it is unlikely that you'll have remembered their face if such an occurrence actually happened. Therefore, the incentive to be "polite" has been lost, as it takes additional energy for the individual with very little reward. Not surprisingly, there is a fairly well defined correlation of how "polite" people are and the local population size.

So what does this have to do with CN?

Over the past year or so, we've seen the rise of a number of alliances rise to positions of influence even though their nation count is much lower than the superpowers of old. Easily at the top of the list is Gremlins, or even TOP (though it is larger), with other notables being the signatories in Citadel and STA (among others). Advocates of the smaller alliances say that it is easier to keep the active members in order with smaller alliances and weed out those who are inactive or dissenters in war. From a practical standpoint, that much is true. However, it is much easier to form a community that really looks out for each other in a smaller setting (of say 100 members) than in a larger one (400+ members). Not only is organization more difficult to maintain in a larger alliance, but so is a sense of community, which in this author's opinion, is what really binds an alliance together. To some degree, this loss of community in larger alliances is mitigated by the use of technology - IRC, forums, and pm's make communication much easier, and therefore much easier to maintain some sense of community. However, they only go so far, as demonstrated by empirical evidence - to date, very few alliances have ever breached the 1,000 member mark. There are limits to what technology can do, as the overall picture remains the same.

As the CN timeline goes on, people interact more and more with each other, creating their own relationships and connections, more "micro" communities will pop up, either in alliances or between alliances. As such, we can expect even more smaller alliances to announce their presence on Planet Bob, making politics even trickier (especially with the downfall of the NPO coming our way).

However, that does not mean that larger alliances will necessarily be left out. If this desire to form smaller communities is a downward pressure to make alliances smaller, there are still two major upward pressures to make alliances larger - sanctions and senate votes. However, in order to keep their members feeling like they still belong to a community, larger alliances will need to reinvent themselves or think up new strategies to keeping their members participating in their alliance.