Thoughts about Conquest Wars, are they worthy at all?

Day 562, 08:57 • Published in Italy Portugal • by Arthk

Hello there,

I've been whispered by lady inspiration right now and I feel that it's time to put some thoughts of my own about conquest wars onto paper.

Everything in this article is written based on my experience in this game. If you want to know I've been here since beta (started playing in mid June 200😎 and been active ever since.

You may ask: "Who the hell are you? And what makes you think that we should see you as an experienced player?".

Well, I've witnessed a lot of wars now. I've seen one of the first political takeovers that occured in the world, in Mexico, orchestrated by no more than half a dozen of citizens and their multi accounts (yes, it's true, the ones who did that confessed, if you understand Spanish simply read Charrito's articles. Note to Charrito: ISSUE THE DAMN PART IV FOR GOD's SAKE ! 🙁 ), witnessed little Hungary being slaughtered by Romania with no apparent reason, witnessed the first battles in epic proportions in the V1, when Spain attacked Portugal (that happened when I was President of Portugal), I activelly participated in the defense of France when Operation French Toast started (just to give you a hint: eUK, eSweden, eUSA, eCanada and eSpain attacking France at the same time, they all failed by the way). I saw the betrayal of Romania and Norway against Russia, watched that conflict until Romania PTOed Russia and wiped it out from the map just for high resources regions, watched USA trying to conquer Mexico and clicked the attack buttons against them when helping Mexico retaking their territories, I was PEACE GC Secretary General when Romania - Iran and Romania - Indonesia wars popped up and I've been Vice Secretary General since then.

But even more important than that: I've been dealing with a lot of diplomatic conversations, many of them delicate as hell (like the Argentina - Brazil struggle for Mesopotamia, thank god it's over, really). And this part is the one that gave me more experience and perspective about world wars and conflicts all around this new world.



So now, what are the reasons that lead to conquest wars?


- Real Life Hatred I aknowledge that this one is rare (thank god) but unfurtunatly there are some cases where it happens. What are the goals ? What does the attacker gets from that ? Either way it normally gets useless territories, spending quite an ammount of resources for them, a continuous hatred between both countries or simply a neverending war, full of hatred and blind flames. Normaly the world sides up with the defender, so this war could easily backfire and the attacker ending conquered and without allies.

To sum up, what are the advantages for the attacker side? Well, if they actually win they can always feel good about it, but that option has a high chance of backfiring. What do they lose ? A lot if you ask me.


- Natural Resources : I think most of the people are simple minded when talking about natural resources. Many see that having them all in high regions is a must, and that's not quite true. Here you need to "think outside the box", you can have just the same ammount of raws in your market without having the high regions. I'm not talking about medium regions,. those are pretty much useless. With international coooperation and with good organization you can simply import all the raws you need. I'm saying this because when I was Portuguese president I faced the lack of raw materials in our market, and we countered it without any type of territory conquest. We simply put our efforts in raising the value of PTE to stimulate imports and start a state financed program for investors in foreign countries with high regions, in order to increase the offer in our market, leading to lower raw material prices. Even now we have one of the most devaluated coins in the world but still we are managing to have decent prices taking in account our demand. And this is in a 2k population country, the larger ones sure have more capacity to do the same or even better.

This was just to point out that there are other solutions. You may argue that it's not as effective and it brings extra costs (which I disagree) but this was just an example, there are plenty other solutions, you just need to figure them out.

Now that I've stated an alternative let's see the conquest war for natural resources itself:

1st you'll be trying to conquer foreign land, causing hatred from the attacked country. Why is this bad ? Well, Hungary is a fine example. You bully them, they get angry, start advertising the game like there's no tomorrow and a baby boom happens. And then you get in trouble. That's one of the main issues when conquering foreign territory. You're never sure if you can keep it in the future. One day you can have a big and populated country and the other day everyone else has more population than you. This game is that unpredictable! And after that what ? Well, you'll have an agressive and large country trying to take their lands back (and who knows what else). Appart from that there are alliances that tend to help the attacked countries. Yes, you'll be hated by half of the world, and trust me, that's not a good thing.

Also, the costs of a conquest war are way bigger that the option I stated above, as you might know.

And finally: Keeping that territory. You may think that putting a Q5 Hospital there and moving population is enough, but I remind you of the two 300k + walls destroyed in one day (Podolia and West Siberian Region). Each time the game advances more people rank up, more people are born, the damage is constantly increasing and you cannot rely on big walls anymore. The recent events have proven that there are no invincible walls and when keeping foreign territory you're defending on your own most of the times. Yeah, no triggered Alliances.

And if you become way too dependant on high resources regions you risk getting crippled as hell if you lose them, simply because your market is not prepared to receive that kind of imports and the regions you lose won't be able to export to your country due to the trade embargo caused by the war.

What are the advantages? Well, if they succeed even in the long run they have high resources regions, and if they are populated enought they can manage it quite well. But the differences between those countries and the countries with those markets based on raw materials imports aren't that big, taking in consideration the product supply.

Is it worth to go through all this trouble just to have regions with high natural resources? That's up for each one of you to decide.

Moving on:


- Economy, Wellness and Rank: Yes, if no major problems happen (losing important regions, sudden increase of the product demand causing high prices, etc) you can have a nice economy, high wellness workers and a nicely ranked army.

But that will bring all the issues I stated above (hatred, risk of being conquered, etc etc) and it will cost large ammounts of GOLD.

Recently PEACE GC has proven that we can have all those advantages with the war without actually having the disavantages. The PEACE war games are a success and we have about 20 nations training daily, ranking up and stimulating the economy. And these war games cost something like 5 / 6 GOLD per battle to each country, since the war costs are shared (already taking in account the war declaration and the MPP signing).

So, in order to have that economical dynamism, the high wellness and the high rank, what solution you think it's best?

Anyway, moving forward to the last point.


- "For the lulz"


http://i42.tinypic.com/5ewhte.jpg

I could state here a lot of reasons why that's not a good idea (*cough* USA attacks on Azores that caused the failure in Mexico *cough😉, but they are all based on the same hatred arguments, so I'll take here a new approach.

Many claim this is a game based on war, that only with war we can have fun. Is it? What exacly is a "Social Strategy Game" ? I bet no one can define it properly. Well, it has a social component alright. To be honest that's what brought me to this game. The interaction with people of all communities is what I enjoy the most here.

The wars are fun IF they are rare and (like once Benn Dover stated on one of his articles) ultimate. Meaning it would be the last resource in a messed up conflict. Otherwise they start to be banalized and boring.

I'm personaly tired of wars, there are battles every single day, always the same thing, add bricks here, destroy bricks there, takeover this country, anti takeover our own, etc etc etc.

If you say that war is fun then don't let it be boring, because trust me, they will be boring when you see they never end and it's always the same.

You may ask "and when there are no wars, what should we do?". Well, that's our challenge as a community. The game has many ways to be improved without the war. The potential is there, it's up to us (and the admins) to take advantage of it. The career building can be widly improved, the political and economical systems also, and there is a lot of nice input for it to be fun. Starting wars just to have fun will be the end of the fun in the long run.



I want to believe we have the power to actually create here a better new world, we just need to work together to achieve that goal.


I guess that's pretty much all I have to say for now, hopefully this article will lead to a lot of debates and discussions on this matter, if you liked it please vote so that it can be visible for other people also.

Hopefully this will also give all the world leaders something to think about and consider their options wisely.

So then, see you next time !

Yours sincerily,

-Arthk,
A citizen of this New World.