Schad

Hitting OP when they're already completely at war, running the NS ratio above 2 to 1: perfectly legitimate. Hitting Warriors when they're already completely at war, lowering the NS ratio to 1.6 to 1: dirty and unfathomably evil. Again, it'd take a massive effort on the part of Warriors/Misfits to exit this with anything less than a convincing victory. Stiffen thine upper lip and welcome WD to the war, because this is one of the weirdest things I've ever seen judged as an outrage.

If WD has the capacity to boost 20k, and all of TPC's not-yet-built nations could get to 10k (they can't, but for the sake of argument), Warriors would still be larger than TPC + WD. Steady on, lads; I'm confident that you turn a 65% NS advantage into victory, even if you aren't.

Yourselves and Warriors have a combined 460k NS. OP, TPC and WD have a combined 279k NS. How that means that the odds are massively against Warriors/Misfits, I'll never know.

It's common in every war that necessitates their use. It'll become even more common now that fewer major alliances are in blocs. Using oAs to effectively cover fronts isn't just by-the-book, it's probably an entire chapter of the book. I even stated I am not complaining, but rather disagreeing that this is "as by the book as any war has ever been." A much better example of that would be PB-NpO (I like to think of DH-NPO as separate but obviously related). That war featured the invocation of a number of optional aggression clauses, as well, and the use of optional clauses in NOIR. The biggest difference is that all but a handful of the biggest alliances on the winning side were in blocs, and consequently many of the declarations happened via the aggression clauses in the bloc treaties themselves. Edit: one of these days I will actually use the multiquote function, rather than fucking up the tags doing it manually. One day.

This is partially because, at its peak, the sides for this war were closer to parity than in most if not all world wars. That necessitates moving alliances around to ensure coverage, which means that you often cannot rely upon invoking MD-level treaties alone. And you're still off the mark. Check out the oA chains that were used in Grudge, as an example...a tonne of alliances oA'd in on Fark. Sparta then declared on a couple of those, which resulted in a large oA chain to bring in the alliances that had been earmarked for coverage. GOD hit Valhalla; because the alliances earmarked were a couple chains away, four oAs were invoked in covering them. There are a dozen more examples from that war alone. That's coalition warfare. I mean, shit. There's plenty to complain about in this and every war. But "you're using your treaties to maximize the strategic advantage of your coalition" really shouldn't be one of them.

You could name literally any war since aggression clauses became the norm (rather than just reading them in to MDPs) and find a pile of oA entries. There's nothing the least bit remarkable about their use here, and ignoring treaties, while hardly a positive, has also been a feature for as long as there have been treaties to ignore.

Let's see...didn't wait two rounds and organize a curbstomp. Entered on what is, even with the addition of WD, the statistically smaller side. Declared up on most of their opponents. That's some quality doing something about it, people.

Buttercup, I don't think that you quite comprehend why I responded. My problem isn't with your war...we're years removed from TE being anything but a series of ill-conceived curbstomps undertaken to avenge previous ill-conceived curbstomps. That is to be expected, sadly enough. My problem is that your conceit appears to be the massive post-war disparity in numbers, which I assume you intended as a contrast with the numbers for this war...but you chose a couple metrics which happen to be quite similar to this conflict (I also have a secondary issue with your inability to do basic addition with nation counts, but that's neither here nor there). When the central point you're rambling around is that this beatdown doesn't hold a torch to the last beatdown, you should probably go with numbers that support rather than undermine that conclusion. As for crying, well, only one of us started this thread.

Wouldn't have gone with nations over 10k NS as the guidepost, myself, given that it's currently 20 to 1 at that level. You did that it lying down. Taking it lying down is how the numbers ended up as they were.

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.

2014? Why wait.

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.

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.

They fought a couple wars ago, as well: http://forums.cybernations.net/index.php?showtopic=98242 Doubt that the treaty is active/anyone cares. Edit: goddamn you, Auctor.

Manipulating world events, one musical at a time.

It remains a thing in TE, where generally sub 30% odds give you a high degree of likelihood of doing half-damage, but I do believe that you're correct in SE...certainly haven't encountered it myself, and I've launched plenty of low-odds attacks.

How many times must you declare your existence? Musical interlude! DoE, oh dear, please disappear Rey, will raid you in an hour Me, a humble heckler FA, yours appears to have gone sour So, how long 'til you disband? La, I'm all out of ideas Tea, with popcorn is quite bland That will bring us do DoE oh no no

Been waiting a long, long time to fight Argent...I'm going to enjoy this. Wait, you declared in [i]defense[/i] of us? What the fuck?

Now it's really a party.

Glad to share the fun with you, VE. Welcome to the front.

For that we too shall strive, for we are an uncomplicated people by nature, the common clay of the new West, happy to raise our crops of tech peacefully in the vast expanses of the Sengokan plains. But at the moment of asking we take up arms, deploy our satellites, and nobly wonder what happened to this metaphor I mean really.

Sincerest thanks to TLR; our thumbs were twiddled to the bone.

At long last, the mall will be killed.

Over time CoJ has been for many a maddening opponent and an equally maddening confederate, but you've been a contributor throughout. Good luck wherever you find yourselves.

Quasi-neutral is the category that was often applied to GOP in recognition that they were not purely neutral. Here's [url=http://forums.cybernations.net/index.php?/topic/85436-dont-tread-on-me/]the announcement thread of the policy[/url], which rather clearly spells out their approach to situations such as this: As for the VE protectorate, it matters simply because you'd have thought that, in all the time people have been mulling over the rolling of neutrals in periods of intense boredom (so, always) that someone would have remembered this particular twist.