About Integrity and Perseverance

Day 1,718, 07:41 • Published in Portugal Portugal • by John Bokinski

(This article is a free translation from Portuguese – the original article is this one – http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/sobre-integridade-e-perseveran-a-2093786/1/20)


I started writing this article on last weekend, but I was not able to finish it, so today I decided just to change it a bit in order to adapt him to what happen in the last few days.

As it had been predicted some weeks ago, the alliance between the USA, Brazil and Spain, although not formalized in paper, is already established by the MPP signed and in the next few months this will mean that most of the TEDEN countries will be wiped.

The reason for the weakening of the TEDEN countries reflects not only the impact of the departure of the USA and Brazil has in TEDEN (which was much larger than the impact of Spain leaving ONE) but mainly due to the strategic alignment with ONE that USA, Brazil and Spain are following.

Explaining this idea better. As part of their disassociation with TEDEN, the governments of the USA and Brazil started a media campaign, followed by military actions against two of their neighboring TEDEN countries, Canada in the case USA and Portugal in the case of Brazil, as a way to achieving the objectives of the new alliance.

And the main objective of these 3 countries was to achieve 100% bonus for all of them, and for that it was necessary to take regions from Canada and Portugal (Venezuela was also required, but this country had already agreed to provide a couple of regions in order to assure its survival).

To comply with these objectives, USA attacked Canada after declaring this country NE in the conditions most of you are perfectly aware of, and Spain attacked Venezuela (and apparently took more territories than needed).

Facing this scenario TEDEN could have followed two types of decisions; or avoided entering into conflict with the new alliance leaving Canada to be conquered and not helping Portugal to recover some territories in order to have a congress or support these two countries and enter into direct conflict with the new alliance. Let me make a stop just to comment on the rational of the creators of the alliance known as CTRL.

I believe there were two types of sponsors, ones who understood that the creation of this alliance would inevitably allow the victory of ONE over TEDEN, and as such they did not care that Spain would leave ONE and enter the new alliance, probably they would not have a problem even that Poland would follow Spain, because in the short term they knew that their objectives would be achieved (I will call this the Pro-ONE faction). The second type of sponsors believed that creating a block over the Atlantic axis, ONE and TEDEN would continue to fight in the Balkans and they would be able to dominate and split the Americas and Western Europe between themselves (and possibly enter Asia) (I will call these the Anti-Balkans faction).

What the Anti-Balkans faction did not understood is that EDEN follows the motto “the brotherhood” and would never accept to discard Canada and Portugal while they still have the strength to fight, and, although they knew the cost this would have for their stronger countries, TEDEN channeled part of its forces to support those countries entering in an obvious conflict with the USA and Spain. This was the likely and most favorable scenario that the Pro-ONE faction had envisaged since the beginning, and will allow the core ONE countries to attack with additional force in Central & Eastern Europe.

What the Anti-Balkans faction did not want to understand, is that, their actions could assure them the 100% bonus for their countries, but at the same time they were condemning some of their most ancient allies, like Croatia or Greece, to choose between losing their territories or losing their integrity. The governing classes of the USA and Brazil failed to understand that facing these two options, the TEDEN countries would always chose to lose their territories and consequently a scenario where 3 alliances co-exist could not be achieved when the first move of CTRL is to attack TEDEN countries.

It is here that the integrity issue comes to life, since, although the TEDEN HQ knew pretty well that the decisions they are taking would eventually lead most of its allies to lose their territories, they cannot take another decision without betraying their principles. For that I congratulate TEDEN decisions because although this actions will bring us short term suffering, the togetherness that is being built will be very important later (I will comment this further ahead).

It was not a surprise that some of the more ancient MU’s of the USA have refused to hit against Canada, and some of the Brazilian MU’s have continue to fight against Spain, generating frustration on their governments. The Brazilian government even decided to distribute Q7 weapons to mercenaries for fighting for Spain, apparently due to lack of interest of their own armies.

The position taken by these MU’s is related to the existing strong bond between them and other TEDEN armies (despite some of them being private armies) and, as they are experienced soldiers, they know exactly what is the impact of the actions of their governments in TEDEN countries.

When these governments said that they would not abandon their most loyal and ancient allies I can only assume that they were lying or they did not had a clue about the obvious implications of their actions (which is strange for such experienced players).

The only thing I still do not understand in the behavior of the USA and Brazil’s governments is why these countries chose to alter the “status quo” of ONE vs TEDEN, since they had already achieved the 100% bonus objective. The only country that really needed this change was Spain, which will be the biggest winner in the short term of this line of events. I believe in the next few weeks other important ONE countries will harvest the benefits of this events. When I am saying this, I am not trying to create any conspiracy theories, I am just trying to understand what the benefits for Brazil and the USA are and until now I am clueless.

My article may appear pessimist in a moment that Portugal has recovered several of our original territories, but I think it is important to prepare the Portuguese people for what is to come. Although Portugal has recovered, Canada is still losing ground, the same with Croatia and several other Central Europe TEDEN countries. The damage of CTRL + ONE is twice the damage of TEDEN and even if we where only considering ONE and allies against TEDEN the damage is still considerably higher and will not have to wait a long time to see that.

Consequently we need to keep balance, do not waste damage on battles we cannot win and save our energies for the ones we can inflict damage to our adversaries. No one dies in ERep, you only lose bonus when you are wiped, but a country can die if its playing community loses motivation and enters into disarray.

Losing the war is losing players without being able to replace them for new ones, not losing territories. Losing territories is unavoidable considering the current geopolitical order, but this loss will grant us a common objective and the strength to mobilize our players and help improve our community.

These events give us also another important information, which is understand which are the communities that share our values and with whom it is critical to bond and reinforce our friendship. The communities that put loyalty and integrity above petty material interest, communities like Argentina that despite understanding the difficult geopolitical scenario they were in, did not hesitated to enter EDEN, communities like Croatia , the multicultural China, the Greek, Colombian or the Finish that despite having wars in their regions or on their borders did not hesitated on helping us, and part of the Brazilian community that despite all the pressure from its government, still fought on our side against Spain when we tried to recover our territories.

And that is integrity, fighting for these communities in a battle for real, is more important than to fight for Portugal in a battle that is won or lost. TEDEN will not win a lot of battles, consequently we have to choose well the ones that we fight, and those, fight to win, and obviously we cannot fight only for one country. All the Portuguese MU’s need to stay together and understand that those are the communities that we pledged our loyalty and is on their side we need to fight to show that Portugal is with them. Do not lose damage without an objective or for a personal objective. This is the way.

Although geopolitically CTRL+ONE are dominant, I never saw a long period on this game where a mega-alliance was able to keep cohesion. It may take some months but the boredom after the victory always pushed these mega-blocks into disarray, so we need to persevere. When the new world order has dawn the bonds created between communities that stay together irrespective of victory or defeat, having 100% bonus or o% bonus, having 20 territories or being wiped will be key for their success because they know in whom to trust. This is the way for the Portuguese community, integrity and perseverance.

Integrity in the way we support Portugal and the communities with whom we share our values

Perseverance in strengthening our community, lets evaluate our victory or defeat based on the number of active player in Egov rather than the number of territories we hold.

Força Portugal
Thank you loyal communities of TEDEN