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Schad

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Blog Comments posted by Schad

  1. So when we buy tech from the black market and pay with donations? We should be entitled to a refund since you're taking what we paid for.I personally have lost several donation collect 100 tech and that person gets deleted. Good rule as long as you practice what you preach.

    Caveat emptor, I suppose. A random I started a tech deal with a couple months back was several days into the process of reneging on the second tech payment when his nation disappeared. Dunno whether it was self-deletion or rules infringement, but if the latter, losing the first 100 tech in addition would've at least been a good reminder that I should stop throwing money at complete randoms and expecting anything good to come out of it.

  2. This gets into KZ's point about realpolitik and personal relationships. I'm not going to deny that personal relationships probably play a big part in RL international relations, but I can't think of an example where my (American) President has announced that he and the Secretary of State have been chatting a lot with the leaders of a nation and having a lot of fun, so we're going to sign a military treaty. That's the level that we're operating on a lot of the time in CN.

    But in your conception of such, those two things are almost diametrically opposed...signing a treaty (and then defending that person) is much closer to an IC value, namely the willingness to go to the wall for friends, than it is realpolitik. I also hate it when someone makes a mess of perfectly good politics because of a deep and meaningful 1am conversation about how drunk they are, but that's a whole different kettle of tipsy fish.

    In terms of alliances having overarching values, the biggest problem is that there are so many points of reference there. It's similar to voting; you never find a candidate whose views wholly match your own (unless you've tailored your views to fit those of your chosen candidate...good evening RON PAUL fans), necessarily leading one to compromise on some aspects. Now, multiply that by a factor of "enough to get !@#$ done", particularly once the need to work with the allies of allies comes into play, and you have a melange of often-contradictory beliefs and goals that simply cannot be contained by a coherent statement of values. Thus do even those with strong value systems settle in to realpolitik, unless suitably committed to embark on a quixotic journey through the wondrous hinterlands of micropolitics.

  3. It's not wholly a new idea. A few of the alliances that came out of the old independent circuit -- BN, Sandwich Confederacy, Avalon -- did much the same thing, aiming to have the bulk of their nations in a fairly tight NS band, while building a metric arseload of military wonders to outclass other nations in range.

    That had a couple of problems, though. One, if your allies' strength lies in different bands, you cannot effectively assist one another; combined, you can duplicate the coverage that a generic AA could (potentially with a bit more bite) but if countering in your allies' defense you can't peel off attackers and thus make staggering difficult and whatnot. Second, the advantage of being a bulky mid-tier AA generally only lasts for a couple rounds; after that, you're either getting top tier nations who have all the toys that you do, but warchests that've had the luxury of 10k+ infra collections for the last millennium, while you've been slumming it at half that in order to tech up without inflating your range, and/or you're getting your front teeth handed to you in a mason jar by ZIed tech piles because you've intentionally forwent buying maximum tech...which is what the aforementioned alliances did, to greater and lesser extents, until concluding that it caused more problems than it provided answers.

    If you could do it on a (large) bloc level, where you had a good chunk of a future date coalition working off the same gameplan, it might be doable. Working with less than a few hundred nations, though, and you're at the mercy of forces beyond you.

  4. That owes to the diffusion of political power in this world. Because chained, global wars have become the norm, winning any conflict means having a large and diverse pile of alliances who are not yet sick of your !@#$, and the inherent difficulty of keeping that together has only been heightened by the move away from all-powerful blocs. If you have the Continuum at your back (messy thing though it was) you're able to operate a little more freely and set your own norms; if the largest political entities are maybe a quarter of the NS needed to win a war, you best tread somewhat more carefully or you'll be on the receiving end of the next kinda sorta beating. Similarly, getting beaten down is only a short-term trauma because, hey, it's only pixels, and you're just one political reorganization away from being in the winning coalition again.

  5. I think sometimes that if I were put in charge of a militarily dominant AA like NPO back in the day, I would try disband any alliance that I knew really had it out for us. Yeah, it would suck to end up on the receiving end of that, but it would give the game so much more of an edge if we all faced the risk of consequences like that. We're already immortal as players - we should take a bit more risk. Maybe people adhere to certain limits just because they want to maintain some future competition. In other words, they play to make things remain OOC fun. But in doing so I think they've doomed us to a pretty stale world, we go through the motions of a war of attrition, only to shuffle the players around a bit and then play it out again six months later, with no real long-term changes.

    This is the double-edged sword. Those actions in years past raised the stakes significantly; they also likely drove plenty of players away. But so too does the profound political malaise that has settled in. Reverting to the way things were might kill the game...doing things in the fashion that have prevailed since Bipolar will just kill it more gradually.

  6. I'd like to further add that the "legitimacy" of a casus belli is irrelevant; the cause can be absolutely anything. Justification is a separate train of thought under the Just War Theory.

    Exactly; there's a big difference between a reason for war and the right to wage war. In theory, the justness of the war determines whether others support it, and to some extent that does happen around here...however, often as not the treaty framework that we've created ends up superseding that.

    It's a tradeoff that may be necessary; if the primary determinant in who goes where is whether a declared war is definitively just, the rational course for any actor is to avoid taking any risks that could cause one to end up with the short straw...both ensuring that you don't leave another party fully justified in rolling you (read: doing absolutely nothing), and avoiding making a declaration yourself on anything less than ironclad grounds. That's great in a real world international system, where the goal is to have as little war as possible; it's not nearly as great in this game, where eternal world peace would be a death blow.

  7. I thought about making each round ten days, but decided against it for two reasons:

    1. It would make this entire thing way too long. Three months just isn't cool.
    2. I'm guessing that after a fairly short time period, it will become evident which alliances are going to move on. I feel that extending each round to ten days will only cause people to get bored, as they'll just be waiting to see how much certain alliances can run up their score, rather than seeing who will advance.

    * - That being said, if it turns out that five days isn't enough time, I reserve the right to extend the length of the following rounds. If I do so, I'll give at least five days notice.

    Yeah, there's really no fair system that wraps it up in a reasonable period of time. Not complaining; I'm kinda looking forward to it, because if we manage to survive the rounds where we're not importing (if a couple alliances in the group lose members, as an example, assuming I'm reading the format correctly), the stop-start nature of our tech system might get us further than we otherwise would.

  8. AFAIK newb multis have their nations deleted but they immediately get a second chance. It's only second-time newb multies that are actually banned. I might be wrong on this account.

    Doesn't seem to always be the case; one of our nations screwed up last year by creating a second TE nation to get better resources (back when that mattered) before he could delete the first, and got perma-banned from both TE and SE. He had no previous warnings or violations.

  9. It's funny to read about VX in hindsight. Not that I disagree with you about his failure, of course, but at the time he was a very popular leader, at least until he $%&@ed up.I think the mark of a successful alliance is that it can transfer the leadership well. Like you said, alliances like MHA that cycle through personality-less leaders are just as poor at this as alliances with a single leader at the helm into perpetuity. On the other hand, change for the sake of change is dangerous as well. There always needs to be a balance.

    Agreed, and I think one of the things that facilitates the successful transfer of power is having some sort of common purpose or ethic which extends beyond "we're all friends and these are our friends!". An alliance that has nothing but the leader of the day guiding it will likely either be chaotic or sclerotic, either lurching about without direction according to the whims of whoever happens to have the reins, or paralyzed because absent something guiding them, the new leadership just sits around and hopes not to screw anything up too badly.

  10. When hearing stories like this, some Canadians will pipe in with their own tales about how quickly they were seen/treated by specialists.

    There's a trick to being seen quickly: suffer head injuries or heart problems. I've had an appalling number of the former, and without fail you get bumped to the head (I'm so sorry for the pun) of the queue in triage, you get a CAT scan/MRI within hours as needed, and the medical system generally puts you on a pedestal. I also have a slight heart murmur, and that's always been quick to get attention when need be, even too quick...a 6am appointment with a specialist the next day, when I was a couple hours' drive away, was a pain in the ass.

    It doesn't help for the big but not life-threatening stuff, like your shoulder surgery (and the surgery is definitely the better option over the rehab, even without the costs; rehab will probably still leave you with range-of-motion issues, as it did for the people I've known with rotator cuff injuries), but if you just want a quick consult with your GP or at the ER, tell them that you might have a concussion.

  11. "It is getting stale" is probably the most compelling argument, simply because this place runs on novelty (or at least the threat of novelty).

    Other than that, I don't buy any of it, really...that wars last for several months doesn't owe to the whims of the current leading powers, but the fact that most alliances worthy of being central to a conflict are now capable of fighting for far longer than they would have been a couple years ago. And while the wars themselves get pretty dull after three months straight, they do serve a purpose; winning a war has never been so costly, and it's no longer possible to shred a major alliance in two weeks and be done with them.

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