Join the new world

Greetings, Mad Paulys. Over the last few days, there have been some strange orders coming out, and I wanted to take the time to basically go over some of the background information behind these. Before we delve right into it, I want to basically just recap the world order as things stand.

Pacifica is for all intents and purposes, no longer an ongoing concern in and of itself. Whilst the USA does have the odd fightback here and there, there has not yet been a meaningful deployment in their favour, presumably as there is little value in putting them back on the map before some kind of surrender or peace deal with Asteria appears. Whilst there is murmurs of the incoming President being tasked with this as their main priority next month, unless or until such a deal is signed it's very unlikely that the US will return to the map in any sizable form.

That being said, the USA arena is getting more and more interesting. The fightback, whilst infrequent and so far unsuccesful, has started to gather pace. Various battles against Hungary are going epic. Other pacifica nations are beginning to deploy their troops, fight hard, and fly even harder.

As interesting as all of that heating up is, it pales in comparison to the events that unfolded yesterday across the channel. Instead of talking about the reasons why, which I'll leave to the French themselves, I'll instead talk about what happened.

The President of France proposed and supported a military takeover, which would result in the country becoming a dictatorship. You can read about what this would result in by checking out the wiki: here. Basically, dictatorships are not smart. Firstly, it costs a million CC to propose, and another million to undo. Secondly, like an occupation, the longer a dictatorship goes on, the more determination grows, and the harder it will be to keep the dictatorship active. Thirdly, and most importantly: a country loses half of its income during a dictatorship; the moment a country does not have enough money in its country accounts the dictatorship will be automatically cancelled too. Thus, from a purely game mechanics point of view; no dictatorship should really be in the game anymore; it just doesn't make sense.

This alone was enough to make me deploy the UK. However, as the war went on, I found myself seeing more and more reasons to deploy; the majority of French damage fought against the dictatorship, whilst outside forces fought for it. As well as this, the majority of French players seemed to be fighting against it too; thus, I made the decision to send as much damage as I could to help, and I used my own personal funds (and some from various UK players who sent me money to help) to support democracy too. I do not make a habit of interfering with the internal affairs of another country; but it's clear from the following picture, that whilst this may have begun as an internal struggle, it quickly became something much bigger.



This is the point where things became clear. Whilst I had already published our orders, and instructed our MU commanders to pass on orders to fight for Democracy, the more non-French players fought for the Dictatorship, the more I realised we'd have a big fight on our hands. We did, and after some huge tanking on both sides, I'm happy to say that the Dictatorship side lost, and in no small part thanks to the help that we mustered. I give myself a pat on the back, with a nice pat on the back to UKs Finest, and Vettige Swa too. Of course, everyone who fought did well, and together, we did some pretty impressive damage:

Finally, a final short paragraph in explanation at some other odd orders we sent out on Wednesday, when we deployed to fight for the USA, against Hungary. The reason we deployed, is quite simple: better the devil you know. Despite all of our history with the USA, we've been wiped by them before, and we'll probably have some kind of frenemy relationship in the future; geography dictates this. But, based on their size and power, they couldn't hope to keep us off the map indefinitely. Hungary could. As well as that, our allies Serbia and Romania have both been engaged in wars with them; Balkans be balkans yo'. Thus, we mobilised our forces for self-preservation, and also, to help our allies. Many have complained Asteria has made the game boring, Asteria farms; our allies are waking up and engaging in war. This brings back an element of intrigue to the game, and is something I think we can all appreciate - a return to real war, is a return to an eRepublik that we can get involved in. Thus, we mobilised. This is not indicative of a move to help free the US; as I stated at the beginning of this article. This move was in our interests, and also in the interests of our allies. Whilst we were nowhere near the hugest hitters, to be able to mobilise such damage at short notice, and outdamage some countries much bigger (and also actually allied with the US) was quite impressive, so kudos to all who fought!



That's all for now, folks
jamesw