Yevgeni Luchenkov

The result is the same. While FAN is now completly out of the spotlight, for a while, they had "friends" in various alliances. One could most definitely argue that keeping their real intentions as vague as possible was done for realpolitik reasons.

To be fair, his comment is right. People *did* approve of FAN's way of doing politics by acknowledging their entrance as legit, despite the lack of visible treaties. That said, I do think it's an incredibly retarded way of doing business and hope it doesn't become the norm.

I like that you guys have seemingly chosen a war theme. Can't say I wish you luck.

STA reaches 4m NS. STA declares war. Yep, everything is as it should be. Just waiting for Tyga's new announcement that they have reached the 3m milestone.

I really dig the "Indonesians" part of it.

No. It's a reflection of a (now) very common strategy. It consists of preventively peace modding the tier(s) where you feel you are the weaker. It has the double effect of bringing the fight where you want it to go. Which is why our alliance's mid to low tiers are in peace mode and others just peace out their top tiers, even if we're in the same coalition. Why? Because we entered while they were still alliances left to join on the other side. Which means that, yes, an alliance who has a strong upper tier (say, 50% of its nations) will comparatively have a high percentage of peace modded nations if it wants to follow through with said planning. Once all major players are involved, we know where to deploy our meager low-mid tiers and can do it effectively. Every war, we get alliances who whine about our strategies. 98.5% of the time, they're our enemies. We must definitely be doing it right.

If Steve and berbers were not there to repeat it in every thread, I think we might have been able to fool our coalition and thus enact our grand plan of backstabbing everybody the next war, as usual. Damn them. Also, welcome to the battlefield, MHA.

Hey look, a declaration a war too late. Stalinists.

Except, that's not what they're implying with "TOP kept half their alliance in PM". They're implying we hid and didn't take the damage we should have taken. Which, on its face, is false. Also, half is false as well. We had more than 80 members.

If we wanted so much to avoid taking damage in "this" war, you know what we could have done? Accepted NSO-NPO-NG's plan and rolled Polar and the South pole for, what, a third or fourth consecutive time? Given our position in the treaty web, we would have been engaged in a minor fashion and would have seen our side score a decisive - albeit boring - victory over outnumbered forces. The lack of a powerful upper tier in that pole would have meant that very few of our nations would have been engaged. Edit: For the love of God, the PM point was already being addressed in the TOP DoW thread. If you remove ghosts from the count, we had I believe 40 or 41 nations who stayed in peace mode that entire war. The war was waged on fronts. Our front's strategy was to do a full engagement in the upper and super tiers where we could realistically have a chance to bring a stalemate. We got very close to that point but our initial heavy engagement on Anarchy Inc. meant that we had few reserves in that area. The nations who stayed in peace mode the entire war were all in tiers where they'd have been outnumbered more than 5 to 1. A dozen of those nations were tech farms. A few were decent but unprepared/unreliable nations. We didn't save perfectly good nations from getting hammered. The fact that we bled over 70% of our NS shows that we did a full engagement. You can't have it both ways.

We bleed 70% of our NS for our allies and it's somehow "not enough". We somehow "saved more". We fought on a front where we were massively outnumbered, yet "we could have brought more out". Bcortell's stats of our "upper nations" being in PM don't reflect this fact: it wasn't an upper tier anymore but a larger higher mid tier. As our warring nations fell down the ranks, they passed by those nations that we had ordered to peace mode. Aside from 4 or 5 nations at 100k+ NS, the rest of those "upper tier peace mode" nations he's refering to are nations who were: 1)Less than 80k NS. 2)Had activity problems and would prove unreliable in combat. Our front was fought down to the last nation. From a 2.3 to 1 advantage in nations in the upper tier for our enemies, we fought it down to parity or very close. Releasing more nations (who were either less prepared or unreliable at the moment) at 80k NS wouldn't have helped our front or war. DT, among others, was able to cycle nations in and out of peace mode. Heavy tech nations that had the potential to declare in the 80-92k NS range. Given what we faced on our front, with the help we received, we did a very good job. If people want to criticize peace mode as a tactic, they should do it as part of a global strategy, looking at global (or at the very least, front-based) results.

We have more ex-Pacificans than ex-Mushrooms in our ranks, I think. We "absorbed" nine or ten MKers. Not half. As for the DoW in itself, I really didn't expect you to try to go the moralist road, Steve. Ballsy. I like it. It's as good a time as any to rebrand Non Grata. I don't think maths work that way.

A very classy declaration.

Not acting on a CB doesn't negate the existence of said CB or the legitimacy of other similar CBs.

I'm not arguing with his stats. By memory, I believe they match ours. The initial point that I addressed was that we were, in TOP, trying to limit our engagement during our wars. Given that we're a top heavy alliance (less the case than before, maybe there's a hint there), being heavily concentrated on in two tiers means you can't simply look at peace mode numbers to see how much we actually commit. His numbers are correct but they also prove what I asserted: when faced with overwhelming numbers, we didn't shy away from the fight where it mattered. Did we keep 45-50 nations in peace mode in the very low tiers? Yes. They represent roughly 10 to 15% of our total NS. More importantly, coalition wide strategy was to keep such tiers in peace mode because we simply couldn't win it. To look at it from another point of view: When faced with odds of 7 to 1 (lower tiers), we stayed in peace mode. When faced with odds of 2.2/2.5 to 1, we engaged. Even in the 4 to 1 (60-80k NS), we did engage several nations. Our front was limited to us and our immediate allies. Nobody else was to be heavily engaged in the lower tiers. Another point of view would be to look at the NS we engaged. Which would make more sense than the number of nations, given our composition. During BiPolar, the other example, virtually all of TOP fought. I'm amused that some people are trying to harp it as if we shy away from fights, even though we go beyond what's asked of us in every war coalition (save perhaps for Karma, for different reasons).

We committed forces, along the lines of the coalition-wide strategy which was to engage in very specific tiers. Others did not. We had no one who didn't want to fight. We did have a few who were not prepared to fight - we encourage our nations to grow quickly because tier dispersion is what loses wars. Given that we lost roughly 65-70% of our total NS, I wouldn't expect you to actually call us out for our war effort but it's tough to please people. Either we don't lose enough NS, or we don't lose it across all tiers or we don't lose enough tech, etc.

We have always done our utmost to respond to coalition strategies and allied requests. You claim we lost only 13% of our NS in Grudge War. I'd ask for you to tell us where you're getting those numbers. Assuming they are right, though, we cannot force people to beat us. We were fighting a winning war. Our alliance was (still is) very much an upper tier alliance, with few nations to spare in the lower tiers. We wiped out the enemy's upper tier. Our big nations had the luxury to rebuild during the war because they were not really engaged. That means only our 0 to 60k NS nations were engaged, so maybe 45 nations. Comparatively, those nations form a minor percentage of our NS. It's true that our allies lost more than we did during that war. I think IRON bled something like 40% of its NS. However, we always responded to their demands to the best of our ability and our members fought in the lower tiers. We were simply winning the war and had comparatively less nations engaged in that tier. What do you want us to do? Play badly on purpose? Mass recruit so we, too, can lose lots of NS in lower tiers? If you want to look at historical precedents, look at wars where we were heavily engaged and losing. Did we stay away from the battlefield or did we commit our forces?

Not to undermine our own war performances but can you point to us which war we didn't take damage in? Or which war you're using as a basis for your wild claim that we're minimizing the damage we suffer? I'm curious.

Okay, we've all had a blast calling each other out over the use of peace mode. Let's stop doing it, please. Please?

And you'll still be there, reminding him about it. And posting about Athens. ;) Falalalan!

I'll be posting Pacifica's DoW under the title of Imperial Advisor Emeritus and Ombudsman to the Body Republic. Sidenote: it's always TOP manipulating everyone. No matter what side and who's fighting.

Yeah, except some of those alliances have also formulated their own set of demands. So who knows. I just know that this is a first, where uninvolved alliances are hitting rogues and then demanding reparations from them. It's like a raid where you also ask the raided nation to pay you. I guess raiders need to take note. This is progress.

"Millions". Yes, that was mostly my work, when I was in MK, as a low government official (Baron of Trade/Tech, whatever). Since it often gets repeated as an heinous crime MK committed, here's the full story: I had been organizing trade circles on the behalf of MK members. One circle in particular lacked a rare trade (before resources swapping) so I started messaging nations with those resources and offering them a few millions dollars if they accepted to join said trade circle. One of them did. He was a member of NSO. He accepted the money, sent me a message saying he also accepted the conditions (one of them was that he would be bound to the TC for at least sixty days, seemed fair on both sides). Fast forward fifteen or so days, he cancels the trade. We send him a few messages, no answer. I contact NSO's leadership, ask them about this fellow and his current status since he was still on the NSO AA. They tell me he has left the alliance and is essentially a ghost and that we are good to attack him (OOC: guy has like 100 NS so meh). Normally, it would have stopped there but we found out a few days later that he was still masked as a member on NSO's boards. So we went to NSO and asked what was up and why they had lied to us about it, since the guy was clearly still masked and active on their boards. They told us that it was an oversight and not their responsibility. At that point, we saw it different. We figured that since the guy had accepted the money as a member of NSO and since he still showed apparent signs of being a NSO member (being masked on their forums, being on their AA), we would hold NSO responsible for that. We got into a discussion with RV, who was into their govt at that time. We had given a few millions to the nation in question and figured they were only abandoning him because he probably didn't care about his own nation (OOC: being 100 NS, easy to rebuild, nothing to lose, except our own money). We thought we would start it by asking them to repay a little bit more than what we had given to their nation. Normally, it would have led to a bit of back and forth and they probably would have accepted to repay the six millions we had paid in the first place. Instead, RV decided to play the "anti-MK" card publicly and went on a campaign of "see, they are trying to extort 15m-250tech from us for a single cancelled trade!". Add incomplete logs and half the story and most people ran home thinking we had asked for reps just because someone cancelled a trade. It was a good move by RV, though, as we simply abandoned the affair entirely, given public backlash. Amusingly, RV was to join MK shortly after.

This went from a bunch of nobodies threatening to PZI Timberland to a discussion on post-hegemonic Karma to a discussion on MQ's rogue band of warriors to revelations about MHA. PZI is a fantastic practice. It fell out of use because too many people actually bought the anti-NPO propaganda and it was part of it. So now viceroys, PZI and so on are frowned upon to the point where they're more damaging than useful for any alliance who use it. Shame.

You were already not joining prior to that, much to my dismay. :(