State of Play

Day 2,213, 01:39 • Published in Ukraine Canada • by New Faustian Man

I thought I’d write something about the current state of play in the New World
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_____________________________________________________TWO HQ_____________________________________________________

Firstly, a few words about what happened recently within TWO HQ from my point of view. As we all know Cookies Crisp has been relieved of his duties as TWO SG. I’ll clarify here [ unless I’m gravely mistaken [ I’m pretty sure I’m not ] ] that this was because he had the temerity to propose a vote on eSpain’s ejection from the alliance – and NOT due to the trolling that followed. What I find strange is getting impeached over exercising his right as SG, doesn't it put a serious question mark next to the point of TWO having an SG in the first place? Its on record that once certain protagonists saw the vote wasn't going to pass they changed from endorsing Cookie over to Spain's "side", so its not as if the proposal wasn’t with some justification. Cookie has been set up as the fallguy in order to hastily paper over the cracks within the alliance it would seem.

As such, it seems the impeachment was punitive, a means to oust an SG who took the leadership role seriously. What happened afterwards regarding the name-changes was funny and probably not very productive I agree, but no real harm was done. What it told us though is this:

a) opposition to Spain in the alliance exists;

b) and certain elements within the HQ will do anything to ensure its not given voice;

Evidently this includes, if need be, toppling a democratically elected SG. Cookies is a very experienced politician going back years, no one’s about to tell me he went into that meeting armed with just a hope and a prayer. Shame others, who’d evidently promised their support, didn’t have the courage of their convictions.





However all this is not really what I wish to address with this article. We had some genuine excitement in the game with what Cookie did, most of this was based on the possibility TWO might collapse and we were about to get a level playing field again, alas it wasn’t to be unfortunately! However a lot of the divisions within TWO came to the surface, and its become clear the old EDEN mantra that SPoland are all about SPoland [rea😛 self-interest] is what’s irked Spain’s opponents within the alliance to show their hand. Funny that. We all witnessed how tenuous TWO’s inner structure actually is, and I think its safe to assume it could easily have gone the other way.


_____________________________________________The Resident Superpowers_____________________________________________

Now onto the point of this article, discussing change and the potential for it in this game.

The only active agents capable of altering the face of the New World are SerbHun and Spoland, the only two remaining ‘brotherhoods’ in this game, brotherhoods that have existed since V1, and which operate to all intents and purposes as a single entity in the global political sphere. Of the two, you would assume Spoland the more important in terms of catalyst for change. Spoland are in the enviable position of straddling the two “sides” of Erepublik: the SerbHun and the CroUS. Spoland can comfortably ally with either, and have done in the past. This is their ace-in-the-hole. The prospect of losing Spoland to CroUS and thus have the global Damage tally turn against them, is what has (up until quite recently) stayed the SerbHun hand against acting to rectify many of the problems of their alliance.







Should Spoland-SerbHun go there separate ways, Spoland could expect to immediately sign MPPs with Croatia and the eUS, probably China too and a host of other smaller nations. SerbHun on the other hand have pretty much already plateaued in this regard, barring a few mid-sized and smaller countries. The heavyweights like Greece, Romania and Argentina that would (in all likelihood) make up the nucleus of any new SerbHun-led alliance are already in the SerbHun sphere of influence, so there would be no noticeable increase over TWO, indeed anything SerbHun were to lead would, in all likelihood, be a much smaller affair than TWO.


___________________________________The Redundancy of the SerbHun-SPolish NAP_______________________________________

At the core of the TWO alliance is a Non-Aggression Pact securing the peace between the heavyweights SPoland-SerbHun, this allows them to prosecute wars against nonTWO states safe in the knowledge they won’t have to contend with Damage coming from eachother. Because Serbia don’t need Polish Damage and Poland don’t need Serbian damage in their MPP-supported campaigns – due to the fact both are overwhelmingly stronger than their traditional enemies, and because of the advent of xDeterminers in Resistance Wars ensuring whatever help Poland or Serbia could give eachother is meaningless anyway as whatever they could contribute to eachother would be bested (and then some) in a RW with a high xDeterminer factor, means that the instances when Serbia and Polish soldiers will fight side-by-side are even less likely to occur than before.

In other words, Serbia and Poland being allies in the positive sense is almost entirely redundant.

Prior to the introduction of Determiners what Damage they could share in pre-congress elections as they each tried to hold down wipes was hugely important. But no longer. Ofcourse the argument they still pose a threat to eachother if they were in opposed alliances carries some [well, quite a lot of] weight, but flounders because it doesn’t take into account the traditional strategic interests of both countries: the Polish objectives of a strong colonial empire and the Serbian of conquering its near-neighbours and traditional enemies [and only then pursue economic bonuses], neither of these aims conflict with eachother, therefore are unlikely to lead to open war. Poland chose that path long ago, and are unlikely to diverge from it now. In other words, a gungho all-for-one-and-one-for-all EDENtype approach to the game is unlikely to emerge in them now, not when its something they pointedly rejected years ago.

That’s significant for any new alliance featuring Spoland, gone would be the days of sitting atop easy 10/10s, able to invoke Serb damage at will. Neither Poland nor Spain have met any kind of competition on the battlefield for – literally – years. Can anyone really see them reject the life of luxury they’ve come accustomed to and sacrifice resources and the potential for resources in order to help smaller allies out? Seems a bit of a leap.

To quote verbatim a recent Serbian government article: “Serbia has no further intention to act the first line of defense and be under threat of wiping in every month or two, while others enjoy a break in their 10 resources.” Side-stepping any and all credible military opposition and ensuring its directed instead at Serbia [its "ally"] has pretty much been SPolish strategy since Terra folded and CTRL reared its head. Its assured them almost constant 10/10s, even whilst their close allies economies floundered.

If SerbHun are unable to coax more support out of them, its unlikely anyone in their new alliance could.

*

For the rest of the article, I’m going to discuss what would happen in the [unlikely] event that TWO folded. I’m going to assume a clean Spolish-SerbHun break, i.e. SerbHun going one way and Spoland the other, and no fragmentation of either brotherhood. Due to the long list of antipathies amongst countries I’m going to select only what I perceive to be a set of stable founder members, meaning a handful of heavyweights won’t get much of a mention, namely FYROM/MKD, Bulgaria and Turkey, all three of whom are in the position of sharing bad-blood with countries that would naturally make the line-up of SerbHun- and Spolish-led alliances.


__________________________________________________A SerbHun-led Alliance__________________________________________________

A lot has been written about the successor alliance to TWO that would feature SPoland and, in all likelihood, CroUS, much less what the opposition would look like.

We pretty much already know the nucleus of this alliance, as most are already committed to Serbia and to a lesser extent, TWO: Argentina, Romania, Portugal, Colombia and ofcourse official TWO member-states Greece and Slovenia. Suggesting Greece would enter a new SerbHun-led alliance is just that, a suggestion. But there’s plenty of reason to assume they would.

The question then is, What other countries might be tempted to join a new SerbHun-led alliance?

If I was tasked with developing a new SerbHun-led alliance, these are the countries I’d approach [Note: list is not exhaustive]:

Serbia
Hungary
Greece
Slovenia
Romania
Montenegro
Argentina
Colombia
Portugal
Uruguay
Russia
Germany
France
Sweden
Finland
Norway
Netherlands


Discounting the usual suspects that are already aligned with Serbia via TWO, the rest are primarily longtime victims of Poland or their ABC puppet-states and would be natural allies against an alliance that featured the Poles.


____________________________________________Military and Strategic Expediency____________________________________________

Serbia, the de facto leader of any alliance its part of, has had a problem for a long while with its inability to bring military pressure to bear against the eUS. Whilst it could quickly and ruthlessly suppress Cro/Alb/Bos after the latter had relative success in RWs, the eUS and its mobile Damage has been something Serbia has been unable to effectively counter. Recently the Polish ‘Atlantic wall’ effected a stopgap shield against an eUS attack against Aquitaine, but with the recent game changes the wall crumbled, re-opening the channel of attack.





A solution is Serbia aligning itself with countries able to relieve it when its targeted en masse. If we go back to the PEACE days, Serbia had the support of France, Germany, the UK, Brazil and Russia – of these countries, three shared a border with the eUS, and indeed two of them (countries that later became the eUS’s strongest allies), eRussia and eBrazil, were the main protagonists during Operation PIG MAC™, the invasion of continental North America, one of the main contested areas in World War III.





Since World War III the game has changed drastically ofcourse, both in terms of mechanics and the fluctuation in population sizes, and with the emergence of ONE we saw a lot of the old Phoenix powers, namely France, Germany and even Russia to a degree, lose out bigtime. People often complain about the Balkan-centric nature of this game, well a lot of that has to do with the alliance carve up post-Phoenix not just the overwhelming strength of the Balkan nations as a whole. With SPoland switching sides and aligning with SerbHun, the writing was on the wall for France, Germany and Russia. It has always just been a matter of when they would get wiped/near-wiped by ePoland or eHungary (specifically in the case of France and Germany) and not “if”. And it meant with those nation's unable to put up a fight, much of the world's Damage went on Balkan wars or the old terminal Rom-Hun war.

Currently both France and Germany have regained much of their core territories, for the first time in a long while. But that is unlikely to last indefinitely. And as the eUS and ePoland sign an NAP that is going to ensure France minimal military assistance when Polish armies once more strike for Rubber in Poitou-Charentes, you have to question the logic behind France continuing on its CroUS trajectory. All this strategy has done has contributed to an almost perma-wipe for nearly two years. Under Phoenix (with military support coming from Serbia and co.) both Germany and France were viable opponents to Spoland. Ofcourse, like I say, it’s a different game now in terms of mechanics, but Franco-Germania boosted by Serbia-Hungary-Greece-Romania-Argentina-Portugal damage would nullify the ease with which either Poland or the eUS could prosecute their wars. And Franco-Germania plus Portugal would all share a border with the eUS, allowing the considerable Damage backing these countries to be channeled against the eUS, Spain or possibly even Brazil.

To this, most people would say: replacing Spoland with Franco-Germania on the Serbian MPP stack is just idiocy.

Perhaps. On paper Serbia presently has superior allied damage [theoretically] at its disposal than at anytime in its history – and yet, has been pretty much neutered since the break between TWO and CoT. What happened then was a swapping of allies, Bulgaria and FYROM/MKD moved into alignment with CroUS, and Greece and Romania came over to Serbia’s side. On paper this appeared win-win, in practice however, not so. Why? Because Serbia’s nemesis are CroUS and Turkey, and its against the damage of these three nations the majority of its offensive operations will inevitably butt head. Recently this has meant its stood alone against this foe, facing economic woe and seeing a long-planned Air Strike against Albanian-held regions in eIndia fail due to lack of support from the rest of the alliance. Compare this with its achievements during CoTWO: the greatest success Serbia experienced in the era of TWO was when it worked alongside FYROM/MKD and Bulgaria as part of a CoT allied with TWO. Since then Serbia has struggled to execute any kind of offensive strategy other than, by their standards, the small feat of gaining a 10/10 economy, and even that is looking impossible to maintain from hereon.

Therefore damage-for-damage’s-sake has proven the wrong turn for Serbia. FYROM/MKD and Bulgaria although numerically weaker, shared Serbia’s enemies. This was the magic formula, allowing Serbia to get all the way to China in the CoT/Fellowship days – but when TWO and CoT parted ways, we saw Serbia rendered toothless, culminating in its recent lackluster showing in the invasion of the eUS, contrast that with Poland who eventually ended up with [nearly] the entire North American continent! Whereas Serbia were sucked into local dogfights, scuppering any chance they held to go on a ONE-era world tour and still imagine they could hold onto their Balkan assets.

Consequently, having ‘buffers’ against what the previous Serbian government likened to Serbia acting as a “first line of defense” against CroUS/Turkey should be of prime military expediency. Irrespective that the Damage output of Franco-Germania pails into insignificance next to Spoland, we’ve seen the evidence that this isn’t necessarily all it’s cracked up to be. A properly supported Franco-Germania would supply a fresh point of attack, one that could assault either Poland, Spain or the eUS.

Lest we forget: the eUS-SPolish NAP effects Franco-Germania and Serbia in much the same manner: it renders the former easy pickings to Polish advances, and returns the latter as the eUS’s favourite bulls-eye. In other words allowing both the eUS-SPolish to thoroughly shaft longtime allies out of pure self-interest.





Unfortunately I have grave reservations whether e-nations like France, Germany or Russia could wrest themselves from the political influence of the eUS. Germany specifically often looks more and more just a client state of the eUS and I have doubts whether it could muster the kind of resolve required to transplant itself from the CroUS side to the SerbHun.

Unfortunately a lot of players from Northern and Western European states have bought into “SerbHun-is-the-font-of-all-evil” spiel, despite the fact their own states have been overrun by ePolish troops going on years. That’s a side-effect and spill-over of the poor political sway states like Germany, France and Netherlands had during the TEDEN days. Everything was channeled into the idea SerbHun was the true enemy that had to be countered, and this grew and grew over the years, getting an almighty shot-in-the-arm when CTRL emerged, so that we have this strange picture were the almost constant Polish colonization of countries near and far is somehow of less significance than the – by comparison - infrequent SerbHun forays into France, Russia or wherever. But anyway.

Much of this article was always going to be wild speculation, and unfortunately I think of all that I’ve wrote the prospect of Franco-Germania re-aligning with SerbHun is probably the wildest of all. Despite the eUS-SPolish NAP.

In all honesty I think this game is now stuck were it is. RL issues have been imported ingame ensuring a setup like the Phoenix alliance next to impossible, so we operate with CroUS on one side and SerbHun in the middle and SPoland deciding which one to back and render the most powerful.

I’ve gone into a lot of things which state clearly that damage-for-damage-sake isn’t always the best option, especially not for Serbia. Unfortunately I believe some parties would rather just settle for the status quo than try something new that could potentially prove more effective on the battlefield than SerbHun-SPoland.




NFM