Prodigal Moon

That's the thing: they can never not be a threat. They operate on pure self-interest, and they're way stronger than the rest of us. So if you're in range, your only hope is to either make sure you align yourself with their intersts, or scramble to make yourselves strong enough so that it's not in their interest to raid you or knock you down a peg. I don't think any AA has accomplished either of those things, so after the neutrals fall out of range, we'll just have to see what happens. Even if you want to give them the benefit of the doubt, keep in mind that the treaty web shifts alllll the time. What are you going to do when things inevitably shift down the road, after Cuba's at 120 thousand tech? @Gh0s7: What could be better realpolitik than treatying every AA with a large super tier?? I don't think they just coincidentally happened to get along really well with all of those AA's. I can't speak definitively about them honoring their word, but it sure seems like there have been some pretty huge...misunderstandings...about the Do Not Raid list. The neutrals are the most logical target right now, but I'm totally confident in my prediction for what comes next. Feel free to throw this in my face if I end up wrong.

I'd say there's a top 4 and then a bunch that could fit in in the fifth spot: -NPO -NpO -DBDC -MK plus GATO, LUE, GOONS, Vox, Umb, or Rok

I still think the neutrals are the safest place to be. I'm sure all of them will eventually lose any nations they have in the top 250, but below 270 or so you're good to go based on the ability to avoid the DBDC heavy hitters, and the numbers they have down there. Sure, there's always the risk of another true Woodstock Massacre - meaning a full NS range beatdown like you'd see in a global war. But that's just not in anyone's interests, and hasn't been since Karma broke up the hegemony held by the Continuum. In a multipolar world, no one wants to waste their resources in a war of attrition with someone who's not even in the political game.

I find it interesting to see people from IRON and Argent acting as if proof of DBDC plotting against you would be some kind of game changer. Marx broke it down pretty well in the other thread how that just doesn't seem likely at all. I'm willing to bet that you're grateful for every day of peace you can have with them, hoping to either build the sheer numbers to make an attack unfavorable for them, or somehow get true loyalty (haha). That's the problem with aligning yourselve with vastly superior and vastly more aggressive forces: you need them, but they don't need you.

It sounds like you want to take this personally, but I've been calling new AA's out on their incoherent BS principles for years. If you do or don't want to make plans based on your butthurt over being called meanies on OWF then I guess that's your perrogative.

You may have forgotten that we're at war - and a war of your choosing, at that. The fact that you expect us to already be worrying about what you appreciate is priceless. The arrogance of it all.

If this really all just comes down to tech deals, we should talk in private, because I would be more than happy to assist you in finding some fair deals that do not support DBDC's violent ambitions. I won't begrudge you receiving help from them in a desperate time, but clearly they did not just do this out of the goodness of their hearts, and your quid pro quo support of them now puts you on the side of the real bullies. Respect or lack thereof for the neutrals really has nothing to do with whether they are peaceful and vulnerable. I resist defending them because they are quite content to let the rest of us destroy each other. But there is no denying that DBDC's assault on Pax, WTF, and countless others is unprovoked and unjust. That's what your tech goes toward.

There are truly thousands of other nations who would be happy to purchase tech from you. The New Polar Order gives our sellers $9 mil. per 100 tech, which I'm sure would be far more generous than what DBDC pays. But no, you insist on engaging in tech deals with an alliance that is universally recognized as the bully of all bullies. Why is that? Do you realize that when you sell tech to grow your nations, you also help the buyer grow? DBDC's bullying is directly supported by alliances like yours sending them cheap (or free) tech. At least have the courage to admit that this is the consequence of your actions, even if it is not your intent. No, you are a part of this war whether you like it or not. Your lack of ill will means little when you knowingly support those who want to destroy the most peaceful and vulnerable nations of this world just to further their domination. Perhaps if you need to grow by any means necessary, I should just make it so that it is necessary for you to stop aiding DBDC in order to grow?

You should rethink that agreement, lest you invoke the wrath of the POLARBEAR POLARCAVE.

Yeah I always figured Umbrella was pretty securely in the DBDC inner circle, but I guess once you get to a certain level of domination and ambition, no one is safe. IRON on the other hand...haha, yeah, good luck.

Hahahaha Doom Squad ARE ~ThE rAidErs~. Hell, so are NG. So we're meanies for letting TE know who they're getting into bed with, but you're cool with the raiding in the first place? This is like those stupid DT and WFF threads all over again. I do appreciate being called a first class alliance though, that feels good.

I support this whole post 100%, and it's awesome to see you stand up to them, but it's hard to be too sympathetic considering you had a significant role in enabling them to get this dominant. DBDC has always been about attacking innocent nations, so why join up in the first place? It seems like it was all good until they started hitting your former home. Anyway, I would absolutely love join you in seizing this opportunity to strike, but my 22k tech nation (which would be up to about 26k tech by now) has been destroyed, thanks to...wait for it...DBDC. I'm tempted to continue going after their tech sellers but what's the point if they're, let's say, "unshakably loyal" to DBDC?

wow lol ok man u got me I can see how it might seem ridiculous they're here to play a game and make Skype buddies, but it is what it is. If I decided to play the bad guy, I wouldn't get bent out of shape if someone had some dramatic language to describe me. I would eat it up. They should be grateful someone out here still even cares to notice the difference between DBDC and GATO.

Maybe subsidiary of a terrorist organization would've been more objective? I'll try to work on that.

Did you take a minute to think that aligning yourself with a terrorist organization right off the bat might not be the best way to express those values?

True, realpolitik and OOC friendship do seem to be on opposite ends of the spectrum, but in RL politics there is that third element of values or culture of a nation that influences alliances. Since both of those factors are sorely underdeveloped in most AA's, and even team color has been rendered almost irrelevant by the change to trades, it makes sense that those who don't take the strategic side of things too seriously fall back on OOC friendship factors. Having strong values and abiding by them really can limit who you align yourself with (or what AA you join in the first place...). Lord knows we encountered that in CoJ and I dealt with a lot of that looking for potential partners in my alliance before that. But considering how much most of us hate the treaty web, wouldn't that be a good thing? WC: I agree completely with jerdge. There's lots of ways to go about it. In DNA, our DoE created a narrative of a benign but complacent group (completely true in RL) that got overrun by darkness, forcing us into an internal power struggle. If we had decided to do something really aggressive, we'd have been able to say "The werewolves made us do it!" Cuba: Your description of ODN really gets at the heart of why I posted this. Their approach is so explicitly OOC that it's no surprise that align themselves with just about anyone.

Yeah, I was just throwing out an easy way an AA might get try to get a sense of where it stands on the Peaceful vs. Aggressive spectrum. Considering how most AA's don't really "do" much on their own besides chain into treaty web wars, raiding is one of the few ways AA's distinguish themselves, so it's a shame that we've all but dropped any meaning attached to it.

I don't know how to multiquote on blog comments so I'm just going to try to address as many points as I can directly to the posters: BMTH: I think you're on the right track, but missing the other crucial peace that Schatt always points out - that you can be friends without being military allies. Especially since most of the interactions you have with people outside of OWF are probably going to OOC, or them just being themselves. In that sense, the OOC/IC cuts both ways, and it's completely okay to roll your buddy's alliance for IC reasons since this is just a game after all. Edit: This was written before your last post, which clears things up a bit. I agree that's it's hard for people to keep their IC actions and OOC buddies seperate. 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. Sigrun: Thank you for that post and for illuminating the absurd back and forth that's been going on; I think you're totally right. It's like A: (IC) You're slaughtering innocent people and looting their homes - you're monsters! B: (OOC) Uh, who cares, we're just having fun. C: (IC) That's exactly what makes you a monster!! I'm guilty of getting sucked into this too, so this blog entry was an attempt to clear the air a bit and at least let us be clearer with each other about our personal uses of the IC/OOC divide. WC: I think Sigrun put it better than I could about RL CB's and evil. Even though there is a rationale behind the use of nuclear weapons in WWII, people *still* have very strong opinions about it in both directions. President Bush (W.) was called a murderer, war criminal, etc. for the invasion of Iraq, even though the he presented a national security justification for it, and there are potential strategic reasons why it could have been in America's interest. If he had just said "We want their oil and we can take it, nothing personal" I can't even imagine what the backlash would've been like. When I think about politicians who strongly advocate for their national interest alone, what kinds to mind are people who want to do away with all foreign aid, or isolationists. That's a far cry from the untempered use of instrumental violence. Even still, there has been plenty of discussion in recent years about a link between sociopathy and leadership, so I don't use that label in a hysterical way but in an objective, clinical way about a certain perspective on the world. So I don't mean to say that cloaking one's actions in a fake CB makes them better necessarily, but there is at least a RL need to do so, because the global community doesn't tolerate instrumental violence nearly as much as we do here. I don't expect everyone to take this browser game as seriously as RL, but you'd think after 8+ years and all scheming and arguing and nation building that we invest in it, we could at least try to invest a bit more meaning in our actions. MV: I think you make a great counter-point about survivalism and tribalism, and maybe our community just hasn't progressed to the point at which value conflicts are a focal point since most of us are just trying to avoid getting stomped. I think most new nations and new AA's couldn't care less about what I'm talking about, and just want protection. So there might be an intersting sort of IC-OOC hierarchy of needs. I'll admit that when I thought Polaris was at risk of getting rolled before Disorder, I didn't care nearly as much about who we had to get on our side to make that happen. It was only after our survival was clealry taken care of that I started to ask myself more about whether the breakdown of the "sides" made any sense at all, and wonder what was the point of the war if there were so many AA's I disliked on our side and relatively peaceful AA's on the other side. I didn't want to go down the path of arbitrary wars that I mentiond in the original post, and stepped away from Polaris for a bit. jerdge: I chose a blog post because no one reads the OOC OWF for anything other than polls and stats! I agree with the rest of your post though, including the idea that eventually the current pattern we're in will get pushed so far that it collapses and something new emerges. And that if you want to be good you should probably join GPA...or CoJ. But CoJ has dissolved into Polaris, so join Polaris It is true though that neutrals are immune to my criticism, since they're some of the only AA's ever to base their entire approach to the game around a guiding principle. enderland: I agree with most of your post, though I would point out that at some point Hitler becamse pretty much synonymous with evil, at least in America. There will always be the temptation to appease, bury your head in the sand, or even compromise your beliefs to join up with the "evil" side and avoid destruction. That's just as true in CN as it is in RL, so I don't expect micro AA's to make suicide runs at DBDC (yet). But it would be entertaining if more AA's at least found a way to line up their IC behavior with their position with regard to DBDC. As it is, I think most people on here don't even quite get what the big deal is, since they're looking at it OOC.

I'm not even pushing for anything nearly approaching the RP section, or even talking as formally as Hime Themis. Just having our nation leaders act based partly on some set of principles or values. Even if people are basically just "roleplaying" themselves as the leader of a nation, I think that would naturally lead to what I'm advocating for. For example, most of us probably have a sense of right and wrong and wouldn't defend someone who completely violates that. We also have cultural, political, and philosphical views that lead us to feel an affinity to some countries over others (e.g., that country (AA) doesn't believe in free speech (limits member speech on OWF), so I don't like them). If these sorts of things were inluded to any degree in the game, it would make things a lot richer. Unfortunately the Fascism vs. Communism feud is the only example of this sort of culture clash that comes to mind. Aligning with tech raiders even if you don't believe in it is a real conundrum, as Enderland brought up well in that thread just as I was working on this. I think it's a great question and of course even in the real world there's a realism vs. idealism debate. I'd say the problem in CN is that we're so "meh" about RP that a hard realism approach is pretty much the only thing that people even understand, and idealism ("moralism") gets you borderline-OOC attacks for being a nerd, neckbeard, taking things too seriously etc.

This was prompted in large part by a particularly annoying thread here:http://forums.cybernations.net/index.php?/topic/125757-ambition/ but I've wanted to address this topic for a while now. The point of this is not to stir up IC beef, because even if you hate an alliance IC, this game thrives on conflict and it would be even more lame if we were all treatied to each other. Mainly, I'm frustrated that politics is becoming even less-value driven and more reduced to "realpolitik" and OOC friendships. I put realpolitik in quotes because I think in order to look past principles or morals for more pratctical concerns, you have to have some principles or morals in the first place. Without that, there's really no compromise or tension in the choices you make - it's just a completely obvious and natural affiinity for whichever side has the bigger numbers. In other words, if you don't have a moral compass guiding your alliance to help you distinguish who's a good match for you and who's not, then what difference does it make who's on your side beyond your OOC buddies? X mil NS is X mil NS whether it's GOONS or Valhalla or RnR or VE. However, that eventually gets us to a place where in-game friend and foe are completely arbitrary and transient functions of how the ever-shifting treaty web is playing out in that cycle. If all you're interested in is hanging out on IRC with OOC friends and clicking buttons once a year, no problem. Wars will still happen, but there will be no CB or at least no clear reason why those guys over there are the ones you should be fighting, and these guys in your coalition are the ones you're supporting. If you want to treat this game as any kind of political simulator, with an emergent narrative and points of debate to engage in, you're going to be completely SOL. Some of you might think this is just because Polaris is on the wrong side of the power balance right now, but I'd rather lose a "Good vs. Evil" struggle than win an arbitrary war with no CB, where no one even cares why they're fighting or who's on which side. If we're going to do that, then let's at least pick teams OOC beforehand so we can have an even fight, just for the challenge of it. So this brings us to DBDC, which as been the focal point of a lot of moral-type discussion. I honestly don't want to spark the same debate going on in that thread, but I have to point out that by any real world standard, or standard by which 90% of AA's operate in CN, DBDC would be considered "the bad guys." Or at least, an extremely aggressive group that doesn't respect the norms that place a check on untempered violence, and that make no effort at justifying any of this. Any country in the modern RL war would face an enormous, global backlash. There would be UN resolutions, sanctions from larger nations, etc. DBDC's behavior is extreme even by CN standards, where we've been too apathetic to care about tech raiding the unaligned. So my request to you is this: think for one minute about what your nation and alliance stand for, if anything, and wonder about whether your role in the Cyberverse is even remotely coherent or consistent with this position. For instance, if you've outright banned tech raiding, there is probably a reason for that, and it just might mean that the more aggressive, amoral alliances shouldn't be a natural fit. Ask yourselves which alliances IC are a good match for yours. And if they all seem pretty much the same, including yours, then you're starting to see the problem. If you do this moment of soul-searching and decide that your AA isn't concerned at all about principles, and will do whatever serves it best, regardless of what it does to other people, then congratulations: you're RPing a band of sociopaths. That's awesome! I'm being completely genuine here: people RPing alliances that are bloodthirsty and completely indifferent to law/morals/ethics would be great for the game. But don't support others who do that on one hand, and then play yourselves off as a milquetoast, harmless group of good guys that just wants to get along with everyone. That's incoherent and, more importantly, LAME. You can do whatever you want! Tech raid neutrals! Start rolling tiny AA's just because you can! You don't have morals, remember, and you'll probably have fun. You see, I don't hate DBDC for doing what they do. I hate the rest of you for being so apathetic about the political sim aspect of the game that it doesn't even register for what it is. tl,dr: Figure out if your AA has IC values (or no morals at all) and then RP it, and we'll all have a much more interesting game.

If true, that's just a sad indictment of this global community.

Brother, if you're not angry, you're not paying attention!

YEAH BUDDY [flair]WHOOOOO [/flair] AINT NO GETTIN OFFA THIS MOTHER FUCKING TRAIN THAT WE ON

DBDC will probably lose more NS from that one defection than they lose from damage this entire conflict :psyduck:

Something: DONE