Haflinger

Oh yeah, can you tell that story? I never had any contact with the CSN folks at all. We probably would have lost at least a third of the AA if we hadn't declared on MK. So many people had come to Invicta because they wanted to fight MK for one reason or another, we had essentially become a staging ground for MK haters.

I really had to be dragged into supporting Poseidon. At the time, we had the senate agreement with Valhalla, and I didn't have to deal with Legion at all. I didn't want to have to deal with either Valhalla or Legion any more than I had to. All of my pre-Purplegate friends in Legion had either gone to STA or ODN except for SoL (Seasons of Love) and Hymenbreach, and by the time Poseidon started I think SoL was already in NPO and Hymen had pretty much vanished. Legion-STA relations were close to nil because of the Valhalla-Legion treaty and the Valhalla-STA situation. Purqua would have been better off siding with STA and ODN and forgetting the Poseidon project honestly. At least, our stats would have been. Those wars were pretty fun though weren't they? 😎

You were completely wrong about Hoo, after WotC he was fine with Polaris, as witnessed by his actions later on when he forced Ragnarok to flipflop and defend Polaris against Pandora's Box. It was me that you had to worry about to be totally honest. I'd been suspicious of the Polars ever since MyWorld protected zzzptm and smuggled him to Nueva Vida, and then after Bipolar that whole relationship was doomed. It wasn't until I left Invicta active government that they started to have Polar ties again. Chefjoe wasn't worse than noWedge. Everything CJ did was IC. There were tensions with STA - and STA was right to criticize him - but it wasn't the relationship drama that noWedge had lived for. BAPS were loyal to mhawk because of his role in ousting noWedge and getting them peace. mhawk liked Valhalla, so they did too. I wonder if NE will see this. Hey @Nobody Expects - any commentary? 😎

Triyun liked UPN, he wanted to bring you guys on board. I don't know about the diplomats, I spent more time talking to the IOs directly myself during that timeframe, I don't remember who the Legate for Purple was back then. Valhalla really didn't like UPN though, and if they had sway with the Purple Legate that would explain some of that confusion. Valhalla went around telling anyone who would listen that UPN were untrustworthy. Of course, so did Ragnarok and a good portion of NPO's pre-Karma mission plan in FA was to bring Ragnarok on board, so that might well have been a factor too.

Z'ha was largely inactive by the time of Karma. He definitely was part of the old mold of power-tripping goons around NPO at the time, but he's only indirectly a cause of Karma. There are plenty of people still playing this game, I'm even one of them in my way. There obviously aren't as many as there used to be but there's still a core of players. There always were a lot of inactives, and we lost people all the time. I mean, I nearly quit when Skyrim came out, and I'm pretty sure a lot of other people actually quit when that happened. But it's a pretty low-cost game to keep running so I suspect it will be around for a while to come yet.

Triyun and Vektor knew that there was a storm coming inside Continuum. They wanted NPO to side with Citadel against, well, the Valhalla/TPF branch. That's why they signed the big treaty with MHA. This is especially true for Triyun, note that he went to TOP after the war, which was decidedly not the safe spot to go to after Karma. I'm still not entirely convinced that Vektor wasn't a spy actually. He had formerly been a poster on the LUE boards at GameFAQs. Moo didn't really know what to do, but when bigwoody started running with Blackstone Collusion's bait he was forced to choose between what Dilber and Triyun wanted and the TORN MADP. He went with the treaty. Now if you want to complain of people being dumb, oh man, bigwoody really took the cake. mhawk knew we were going to get razed, but bigwoody was convinced it was going to be an even war. mhawk just thought that if we had waited longer things would have gotten worse. This was probably true... for TPF. I don't know for sure if he realized Triyun wasn't exactly working with the best interests of his alliance at heart, but he'd have to have been pretty dumb to miss hints like the MHA treaty.

The other day I was surfing and found another link to a Rebbilon thread, this one from 2013. Remember

I liked Triyun and I wanted him to be successful in his internal projects inside NPO. He totally wasn't; however I agreed to Watling essentially to help Triyun out. If Triyun had gotten his way though, Karma would have looked hugely different. I did use Watling as leverage to get Hunter out of DE. Of course I didn't need to do any convincing; during the GLOP incident I got word to Moo what Hunter had done and Moo did all the work. But I was the one who triggered the meeting. I hated BDC too lol. I never really knew Coolgreen. I nearly pried BAPS away from Valhalla during the Dave War. When we attacked MK (in defense of our freshly-signed treaty with CSN) I invited BAPS along, and they really wanted to come. It was a close call then, but it was also too late, BAPS were mostly retiring by that point. But BAPS really hated MK and it bothered them a lot when they weren't allowed to fight their hated enemy because of Duckroll. Still, they pushed Duckroll to take the "Anyone who hits Invicta gets countered by BAPS and Duckroll backs BAPS up" policy that really took the pressure off of Invicta in that war, because MK's midrange wasn't competitive with ours, and it meant that we were only fighting MK for the duration of the war.

Yeah I wanted to do the Stickmen thing mostly because it would have led to an implosion by CJ. I didn't think it was a plan that had a very high chance of success, but if they'd gone "Sure!" when I first approached them I would have seriously swung for it. Even though it would probably have cost me the BAPS treaty, which I did value and which did pay off in the long term. In the early days, actually even before I was Invicta (I started out in a Purple micro called NRGW), I talked to Hans quite a bit, and then there was the Ataraxia drama and that mostly put an end to that heh. By the time Karma rolled around I was talking to you at UPN the most I think, Alt. Which is largely why there was all that drama between the two alliances over the stuff I was doing during Karma, because I was personally responsible for most of Invicta's major FA decisions at the time. Hmm, I also remember the Dark Evolution drama. UPN supported DE's entry into CDT, for reasons I have still never been able to figure out, and I hated them. I considered Hunter to be both an idiot and a proxy for zzzptm, and the rest of them were only slightly better. (Incidentally, when I finally left Invicta I joined Javahouse, which is where zzzptm's reroll was. I didn't know that before joining, but my arrival did make him nervous I think. He was reassured when I told him that I'd only ever wanted to do one ZI against him and I never believed in chasing rerolls.) BAPS hated DE too, and this was one of the things that brought us together.

Kae joined UPN to get away from me. We had to replace our Vice President, I forget now who it had been, and I was Minister of Foreign Affairs and she was Minister of Finance. Kae was an incredibly industrious Finance minister. She really built the Invicta tech machine. But it was all a one-woman show, and she didn't really have a team. So I got the job essentially because she was irreplaceable in Finance, whereas I actually had managed to recruit some people into Foreign Affairs. She had already had runins with me over the opsec paranoia. I wouldn't tell people things. I kept Jor in the loop, but most of Invicta government just didn't get updated on what I was up to in FA. And frankly, Jor didn't really care very much about FA and let me do my thing, I think most of the time even when I did fill him in on things he didn't really listen. It's funny you say that now about C&G. I had signed Athens to a PIAT, I didn't really talk much to the rest of C&G but I was pretty close to a number of Karma alliances, including ODN and MHA. We had only recently stopped the tech shipments to Grämlins, and that was only because we had too many tech buyers inside Invicta. During the Karma war I acted as a kind of conduit between Triyun (NPO FA IO) and Londo (leader of Athens), both of which would complain to me about the other. 😎 I wanted to leave Poseidon all along. I signed BAPS to TODDY in order to guarantee our continued protection of Pegasus, which I liked, after we left the bloc. But I couldn't stand chefjoe (leader of Valhalla, usually called CJ). I did have other people I liked in Valhalla but wow did we ever hate each other. In fact, after the War of the Coalition I wanted Invicta to leave Purple entirely. I had been pretty disgusted by the whole STA-Valhalla affair as well as Legion-Vanguard; I wanted to keep us in Purqua but shift to Aqua with NATO, and leave you guys as the single Purple alliance. Not very many people knew about this plan, it got stopped by Dawny (co-founder of Invicta) and Atlashill (then leader of Invicta; normally referred to as AH during this time period). IIRC Denzin (MHA triumvir) knew about it though and was in favour. If that had happened, we probably would still have been a Hegemony alliance but right on the very edge, NATO would have rolled with Continuum and we would have gone that way. But maybe not, maybe under those circumstances Trident might have kept NATO and led to NATO being a Karma alliance. When the plan got shot down, I nearly left Invicta and joined the then very new Argent alliance, which was absolutely chockfull of my favourite people from MHA at the time. Dawny persuaded me to stay in Invicta. I did manage to make some changes in Poseidon. I got the gigantic senate rotation plan through. Nowadays, Purple is a normal colour, all the senators are from the same alliances every month. However, by about 2011 I think I had the senate rotation through, which meant that every single Poseidon or P.E.A.C.E. member got a turn having a senator, including some pretty small alliances. Purple was a good place to go if you wanted to be a micro with a senator back then. If I had succeeded in getting Stickmen into P.E.A.C.E., which might have led to my fantasy scenario of Valhalla leaving Poseidon and losing its senator - or disbanding Poseidon entirely and just keeping P.E.A.CE. and Pegasus, we might have had a truly huge rotation. Oh yeah, another tidbit. When Invicta upgraded ODN in the summer of '08 to an MDP, Dawny told me that CJ threw a fit and wanted to have me ejected from Invicta so Valhalla could ZI me. Apparently I hadn't updated their government on the plans. Well, of course I had updated them... sort of. I talked about it to Toga, who was then a Norn. I considered him government, CJ didn't. The reason I told Toga was because I knew that Toga would just say "Oh, OK" about it whereas CJ would probably have figured out what I was up to. Also Toga apparently failed to tell anyone about it lol. (Which I wasn't expecting. But it made the situation funnier so I was good with that.) The reason I did that was because, at the time, it looked like ODN was going to defend Polar in the War of the Coalition. I wanted to make sure they got out with an easy peace. So Diomede (then ODN government, possibly a Senator, I can't remember exactly what now) and I wrote this really strange defence clause that only becomes mandatory when the other alliance really needs help. A few people noticed that when it was posted. I remember in particular Ephie (Ephriam Grey, former Invicta government, then leader of Andromeda, a small protectorate of VE) picked up on it and posted repeatedly asking us whether it was an MDP or not. Anyway the idea had been that if ODN was getting totally curbstomped, we'd have this clause that we could use to pressure Valhalla & co. into letting them out, or else we'd have to declare on someone not a treaty partner at war with ODN. This curious clause led to later drama during Karma. In the runup to Karma, it was obvious that ODN was going to be a Karma alliance. But we still had this treaty, so they contacted us. However, Diomede had left ODN (I think he was in Argent then), and nobody left in ODN had actually bothered to read the treaty. Of course I had written the treaty and knew what it was for, so I told them that them joining Karma was allowed because I knew it wasn't a treaty violation. Then ODN goes and suspends the treaty. Because of course they haven't read it. There was a huge negative reaction. After Karma we downgraded them back to a PIAT, as they had actually honoured the terms of our original PIAT, which ended up eventually getting cancelled by them.

An Invicta-UPN merger would probably have been absolutely disastrous for both alliances. Invicta was so tightly controlled at the top and such a Wild West among the general membership. I remember when Kae went to UPN, that drama would have been just crazy if we'd all been one alliance. Never mind what would have happened if Mag and Samo had been stuck in the same alliance as me lol. Amazingly, Invicta is still going. Their forums seem to be still active, I thought way back in the Karma era that we would outlast a lot of our detractors but the project's actually been more successful than I thought it would be. If you'd told me that they'd put Swat into government and still be around years later, I would have been very dubious. Anyway I no longer consider my old opsec rules relevant, so if anyone wants to talk to me about pre-2011 Purple politics, fire away. I always wanted to start wars. CN can be pretty dull so I figured that infuriating the occasional person would help keep people interested. Guys like Samo never understood that; he criticized me for playing the game badly. And well, I had played the game "well" in my early period, the way he would have approved of, and I just got to the Illuminati War which was a total letdown and right around then I changed my playstyle. This was one of the reasons I had that obnoxious opsec system in place. It allowed me to surprise people sometimes by pulling off schemes, and well, the rest of the time it just annoyed people who - like Kae - wanted to know more than I was ever going to tell them. IC aggravation led to lots of wars, some of them pretty fun too. 😎 So I kept secrets from absolutely everyone. I might have forgotten some of them by now but I have a pretty long memory.

Wait, how could you not know that? Invicta's leader posted this: I was against that post at the time but eh whatever, it really happened. Timitz, who was at the time a sort of new member in Invicta high government, handled the war assignments for the majority of Hegemony AAs. This was largely because on the night of the Karma counter against NPO, a huge group of Continuum NPO allies wanted to pull out and not defend NPO, arguing that they were not required to because NPO had violated intelligence clauses in treaties. Invicta and She Said She Was 18 were the only two AAs that immediately promised aid. (To be fair to them, there were no Legion government awake at the time. Once they woke up and came online, they all immediately agreed to help as well.) There were two events that changed that. The first one was that Doctor Fresh, who was then MCXA government, made a pretty good speech in favour of defending NPO in the #hegemony IRC channel. (Which got leaked everywhere. #hegemony was probably about one-quarter Karma spies lol.) The second one was that Karma got wind of what was going on and everyone basically knew that IRON was next if NPO stood alone. Since FinsterBaby at IRON was leading the betray-NPO squad, that put an end to that scheme right there. TOP made an agreement with Karma to allow IRON to technically defend while suffering minimal damage, and the game was on. In the post-Karma period, the treaty with Invicta was one of the first ones NPO announced. Nobody paid attention to the fact that I had downgraded on them, and Invicta's two highest treaty partners were now UPN and BAPS. But oh well, if people actually read treaty texts this would have been a completely different game lol.

I used to post quite a lot on these forums. There were a few reasons for this; the main one being that early in my CN career I was on the winning side of a couple lopsided wars and found myself bored to tears by them. I decided it would be more fun to try the other side, and you know I was right. Probably why I'm still here, but CN warfare against the odds is actually pretty fun. I'm also a fast typer and good at coming up with controversial remarks, especially crazy-sounding but technically plausible conspiracy theories in a jiffy too. I was reading the forums today and I realized that the last alliance Invicta fought against back when I was in high government had finally disbanded. Invicta's still here, although I'm not in it anymore. Anyway that was TOP, who we fought against way back in Karma when I was Vice President of Invicta. Still, my favourite posts were the jokes. I didn't make that many of them here on the big boards as I was too busy trying to start wars, preferably ones which would last a ridiculous amount of time, most of the time. But I did make some jokes. Here are links to my two favourite posts of mine: This was during Karma and there was an idiot in Invicta lower gov. I was VP and decided against a detailed rebuttal, instead treated the whole thing as humour. I love this post. The Rebbilon were a bunch of crazy anti-ODN rogues. Invicta and ODN were allies at the time and I had a lot of fun making fun of them. They were pretty dumb. I love this post too. I had some fun here over the years, but I never did find the war I wanted. Now my warchest is totally out of control. Oh well. 😎

At least he spelt rogues correctly. Not like lipstick.

I actually came to it from being a fan of Dragon's Dogma, which I still play sometimes. Anyway from reading about it online I got to Berserk, which has a lot in common with the game. (I'm also a fan of Claymore, which has a lot in common with Berserk as well.) Haven't finished watching the anime yet, I'm in the middle of the Golden Age arc movies. Never read the manga, not really a big manga guy.