The Economist ~ Alliance grassroots

Day 944, 00:44 • Published in United Kingdom United Kingdom • by Spite313
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Dear friends,

In my last article I spoke about society, and how we need to work on integrating our society and state in preparation for V2. As a natural extension of that thought, I come now to our alliance. For many of you, alliances are ever-present but little understood organisations, and so I hope to first of all lift that cloak of mystery, and then later talk about where I think the alliance should be looking in the future. I hope to show that there is not only a necessary connection between every citizen and their government, but their alliance as well.

So what is an alliance? Once upon a time it was a necessary reaction to the war module; a few neighbouring friendly countries banding together to protect against military aggressors. For a long time it was nothing more than MPPs. Now however, alliances are gold hungry monsters, which consume the majority of gold in the new world. Alliances and wars burn more gold at a faster rate than lana or indeed anything the admins have managed to create so far. Both alliances generate huge amounts of gold, unimaginable to most. In terms of raw value of productivity, both alliances have daily figures hovering somewhere above seventy five thousand gold. These are my figures, based on estimates extrapolated from tax income, not ingame numbers.



Coupled with this is an incessant jostling for power. I say jostling, because there are no clear victories, only marginal and localised achievements. Both alliances are led by a handful of individuals selected by national governments. However behind these elected leaders is a shifting and undefined number of emeritus members who provide advice, manpower and occasionally leadership to the alliances. These individuals are constantly focused on how to push the alliance to overcome its opposite number, and constantly trying to out-guess their fellows on the other team. This necessarily creates a distance between you, the citizen, and them, the emeritus.

To me the future of Phoenix lies in two directions. Firstly social plans need to be laid, further efforts at direct communication with citizens. This brings the populations not just the leadership into the alliance. At the minute this takes the form of individual citizens posting articles like “UK loves Germany” or whatever into foreign media to try and build ties. This is admirable, but we need to develop this into something which is led by the alliance. Our diplomatic corps, which is perfectly capable of fulfilling the traditional role of an alliance, can be expanded to include a wing solely focused on developing relations with citizens, and bringing them closer to the decisions which are made by command. This is something I think both the governing bodies of Phoenix and the citizens themselves want, and it’s something we should be looking at doing in the coming months.

Secondly we need to develop our understanding of economics as an alliance. I was Phoenix Treasurer for six months, and so can speak from firsthand experience. Phoenix is miles ahead of EDEN in terms of economic prowess, but the leap from exploring an idea to implementing it is difficult, especially in an area like economics which is often seen by CPs and military commanders as secondary.



This article is called Alliance Grassroots because that is what each of you reading are: Individual threads, twisting together to form twine; twines twisted and knotted to form rope. The rope of our alliance is made up of each of you and your contribution through tax, productivity and consumerism. Every gun you buy, every button you click, drives forward the alliance. The average amount of gold each citizen generates in tax globally each month is around 3-5. Each citizen gives a little, but when those small amounts are added up, it makes a hell of a lot. This is the basic principle of governments and by extension international governments: Concentration of assets.

One of the basic principles of war is to focus your power. As Machiavelli said, don’t risk everything unless you’re backed by the entirety of your forces (paraphrased of course). When we talk about forces we of course naturally think about soldiers, armies, points against a wall (or not, in V2!). However this is an incorrect understanding of the principle. Each army is nothing more than the tip of an iceberg, and like all icebergs the most impressive part of it is invisible to the eye. When soldiers fight they consume resources, money and gold. A soldier without weapons, tickets or finances is useless. The most important part of war, and the true source of power, is resources. Those resources come from a strong citizenry, and focused handling of money. To read more about this, see this article on the nature of war.



To push the advantage and win as an alliance, Phoenix must draw power to a point. Better management of resources, more communication with national Ministries of Finance, stricter leadership on issues of finance. They need to draw together the money and resources to win. They need to be patient as well. It’s easy to knee-jerk react to an attack without preparation. War should always compensate the cost of undertaking it. There’s no point spending thousands of gold for little long term gain. With these two things in mind, we can take the heroic victories in France and we can build on them. We can enter V2 with the resources we need to cement our global leadership. We can win...at least for now.



Note: for our RL American readers by social programs I don't mean Phoenix will be a giant welfare state. This is just a turn of phrase. I mean we should focus more on the social aspect of the game, like communication.