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Greetings peons, before I talk about anything else, I want to make public, the following arrangement. To make it easier to remember, basically this will henceforth be known as the rule of 55.

Direct wars and Resistance wars will be started at similar times, and elongated to ensure that UK and Croatian troops have wars to fight in at all times, and a theatre to grind medals (True Patriot, Battle Hero, Sky Hero, Campaign Hero, etc).

UK will win all divisions of all rounds in the Resistance War until the score is 55-0. Then, we will focus our damage on the direct war.
Croatia will win all divisions of all rounds in the Direct War until the score is 55-0. Then, they will focus their damage on the resistance war.

Before the score in the Direct War is 55-0, unless you are going for a medal fight in the Resistance War.

After the score in the Resistance War is 55-0, unless you are going for a medal, fight in the Direct War

In either war, after the scores are even at 55-55, UK will win all air rounds whilst Croatia win ground rounds.
In the Resistance War, UK will win the final ground round.
In the Direct War, Croatia will win the final ground round.

ps: protip - if you have to move to Croatia to fight, then that's the Resistance War. If you can fight whilst based in a UK region, then that's the Direct War

In other news, there's been a couple of murmors recently about how nothing changes, I'm awful, and we've just swapped one TW for another. I posted in the congress group message outlining the difference, and feel it's poignant to publicly state my reasoning. In terms of workload, our arrangement with Croatia is heaps and bounds easier than the previous arrangement with the US.

As there is a relatively high amount of coordination between Croatian troops, things are basically a breeze. Compare this with the previous arrangement, where I was regularly having to spend upto half of our daily income in COs and funding to ensure we won battles we were supposed to, and the convenience of having a country that can control their damage, and mobilises their military to correct overfighting is clear to see. As well as that, thanks to a decent chunk of pack buyers, Croatia has regular rounds where they make a certain division epic, resulting in additional prestige points for UK players who are in that division, and turn up. The most recent one was last night, in D1. I would encourage all players to keep their eyes peeled on the national feed, as information about the timings and divisions will be posted regularly.

As a final reminder, the previous arrangement with the US wasn't a training war. They agreed to not keep us wiped, and would sometimes stick to the regions that we said we wanted them to hit. Things gradually got easier over time, but ultimately there were still times when a round we should have won, ended up being lost because American troops fought over medals, tanked for shits and giggles, or just generally disregarded the fact they weren't supposed to win. This is no longer the case. If you see Croatian troops fighting hard, 9/10 they're either making a division epic, or trying to elongate the war, in line with the notion I outlined at the beginning of this article.

Outside of training wars, we have set Croatia as our natural enemy. This gives us an extra 10% firepower in the direct war, which will help when we need to hit a bit harder to elongate it. Especially for troops in lower divisions and with lower strength, 10% can be a big difference, but the main reason that I proposed this was quite simple. We have no threats, no other issues, and no Natural enemy set. It costs us nothing to set Croatia, they don't mind us doing it, and agreed it wasn't going to impact anything - so I proposed it. Admittedly, it won't have too much of an affect, but, it costs nothing, and we lose nothing by doing it - so why not!?

We've continued to renew our MPPs, and we'll hopefully be expanding our stack by 1 or 2 countries this month too. I also proposed a new welcome message in line with feedback from congress, and Woldy. The new message will keep new citizens in game, by linking them to an MoHA 'catch all' guide, with basic information about the key elements of the game. This article can, and will, be amended over time to make things easier to digest, and include new content that will be created this month. It also offers citizens a wider variety of options for support, as opposed to the previous welcome message which just threw people towards the NHS and hoped for the best.

The only other thing going on right now, is me fielding constant training war requests. Today hasn't been too bad, I only had 2 people asking, but there may be scope for us to have additional training wars, if we really feel the need to. I'm not massively for training wars, and I really doubt that we need more than 1 anyway, but ultimately if Congress and the general population want more places to dump their loads, I'll happily oblige. To give you a general idea, if I accepted all the proposals that weren't insane that I've received over the last few weeks, we'd currently have 7 training wars. Including the insane ideas, we'd have 13. So yeah, that's pretty much it!

PS: Anyone still interested in helping out in Gov, please do get in touch. I've managed to convince three additional people to help out: but we are still a tad short handed.

Until next time,
~jamesw