Hob Dobson

Considering the sheer volume of commentary, I suspect that that could have been directed to "@Everyone" and still contained a completely accurate summary of the original posting. Unfortunately, I've now added to the growing morass myself.

Agreed. While I did not get to interact much with ARES, my impression was that Nueva Vida and AZTEC brought a great team to the game. The Echelon and MCXA folks who blew nearly half of Uustonia's infrastructure away weren't so bad either

In which case, one should be able to call on experienced friends and allies to help out with organizing the effort. Since so many people seem to be bothered by the level of difficulty these terms present, there really should be no shortage of volunteers.

Gracious, in many respects, as befits an Empress. TSI should have a bright future ahead of it. Perhaps all four of you should be hailed more, and second-guessed less?

Much earlier in the discussion it was pointed out that Terra Prime was going through more difficulties than just the prospect of reparations. While I do not like the ultimate outcome, I do understand that holding an alliance together - even without external pressures - is not at all easy. As long as the members have a place to hang their hats without being raided into oblivion, that would be enough for me as an outsider to ask.

The Green Civil War was not a wonderful time for VE either, from what I've heard since. Be that as it may, I'm more surprised that VE is absent from the longer list of alliances that had once been allied to Q/1V.

Ah. I hadn't checked on Terra Prime's military status, but simply considered that tech raiding has not gone on hiatus while the various inter-alliance wars proceed. Still, those that wish to continue fighting for their allied cause may need some sort of backup, sooner or later. And those that do surrender might need someone to plead their cause afterwards.

Should we assume that TPF will be protecting the AA long enough for members to go their separate ways, or have other arrangements been made?

Actually, no, we really did not need to know that. Please save such details for the tabloids and my personal inbox. Still, congratulations to two of my favorite Aqua alliances that are not, and have not yet merged into, Ragnarok.

Usually "congratulations on achieving peace" works. NATO is no GGA. I don't think that either alliance is bothered by that.

The could just use "friends" as a reason. The Dark Evolution is listed on the wiki as having an MDoAP with Greenland Republic.

Remember when Ragnarok used to stand alone against the world? I don't either B) o/ CSN

No disrespect to our own opponents intended, but from what I've heard I couldn't agree more with your assessment. Also, when it comes to war propaganda, the best of us come in a distant second to MK.

I thought The Pansy was still in Valhalla?

While you are entitled to have your own personal views of another's actions, I assure you that the actual determination of treason is very much for that person's alliance to decide.

As Tyga has said, there are time limits before it is even possible to withdraw military equipment. What you are saying does make tactical sense, in that a surrendering nation can initiate surrender procedures, stop attacking, and draw down before peace is accepted. This has the benefit of not releasing defensive openings to potential tech raiders in the middle of proceedings ( In each war there are always jackals looking for easy prey. I am certain neither side in this conflict wishes to encourage such behavior even by accident or oversight. )

I would wager that there are some in nearly every alliance who have past grievances they would like to see redressed, with compound interest and penalties. I guarantee this is true even within the halls of the Viridian Entente. It would be unfair to silence them lest they be heard by outside parties, even if the council they give cannot reasonably nor honorably be followed. And if an alliance choses to exercise vengeance in place of justice, whether "Hegemony" or "Karma", one can be sure that many others will be taking that into consideration when dealing with that alliance in the future. For whatever it's worth, I do recall that members of several of New Polar Order's allies were denied the possibility of individual surrender during the first week or two of the conflict In comparison to that, this is a step in the right direction.

Just to clarify - that precludes aid to Karma nations as well? On the one hand, it would be good not to be taking advantage of the defeated. On the other, some of those surrendering may want to start rebuilding as soon as it becomes practical.

Assuming that the primary system bottleneck is the database, and that the relevant queries have been optimized to the maximum extent possible already, some of these statistical summaries can be redirected either to denormalized tables carrying the relevant information, or even to textfile equivalents that are parsed outside the database. The drawback is that there would be a limit to how up-to-date these summaries would be, depending on how frequently they can be updated within system resources. Even though there's somewhat more potential for mischief with server-processed files, the game database would still be the central authoritative data source and corrupted files would be overwritten periodically (or on demand if necessary.) The nice graphic displays of nation stats aren't inherently server-intensive, as there are browser plugins and javascript libraries available for making simple bar- and pie- graphs a client-side rendering task. The primary downside to that, is that some browsers cannot render SVG and/or may have limited javascript support (my cell phone, for example) A more difficult solution to implement would be to queue the users' updates. It's easy enough to set up for input (as long as you never have to change the format of the queued data files or messages), but as far as I can tell, outputting the updated data to a client over HTTP would be anything BUT easy. It might be easier to do as several have suggested and limit the 23:30 - 00:30 timeframe to nation upkeep tasks: nation status editting, bills, collections, purchases, deployments, etc. Force the server-intensive summaries and the war-screen tasks that change the summaries to be done earlier or latter. Well, that's my inflated US$0.02

The comment about GDA's warchest was a little bit cruel

If I recall correctly, SOLID was pounded for a good four rounds of war declarations as a result of sticking by their allies. With that history to consider, if IDC is willing to accept a risk like that on principle, more power to you. Small in numbers, great in heart. That said, should our paths cross I will still work for my allies victory and your honorable defeat.

From the OP: Apparently, some folks never got the memo.

It would seem that sarcasm is difficult to convey when your audience is too busy drooling overstaring at your avatar. o/ Syndicate

Not every alliance was first striking at first, but at this point a "no first strikes" policy may be more honorable than wise. Particularly around update it may be difficult to tell who has fired nuclear weapons or not.

I'm told they could, but then RIA would have to translate the explanation for you, and then your ears would bleed. That it was.