Messages

271

Atamara / Re: Atamara's Fate

« on: May 13, 2016, 07:06:20 AM »

They were playing to win.  That is how we play games so I don't fault them for that.  They beat the Kobiyashi Maru.  They beat the other players and even the code of the game that is meant to discourage that.  Awesome.  Congratulations.

What should have happened next is that someone should have done something to break the power block.  Like I said before I favor the idea of having all cities secede, but that is just one of many options.  The devs are here to deal with odd things like this and should have done something effective.  They did not.

The players did it in the end, but they shouldn't have had to.

272

Atamara / Re: Atamara's Fate

« on: May 13, 2016, 03:01:33 AM »

Yes.  That absolutely happened.  I don't hear anybody saying anything else.  The Cagilan-Taran alliance beat everybody else.

And once that happened something should have been done to reboot the island.  It was not done in a timely manner.  I think we all agree on that too.

What I have said since the beginning, and what some people say did not happen, is that the players of Atamara did cooperate to END that situation.

Ending it was the primary goal of myself and numerous other players who worked together to get it done.

We succeeded in that effort.  We broke the alliance and started the largest war on Atamara since the end of the last great war.

I saw the possibility of a reborn Abington forming in the south.  The entire peninsula was united in alliance for the first time since the end of the last great war.  And they were marching to war against the League who had subjugated them for years.  After a months' long conflict in which half of the League had been requested to NOT get involved.

Minas Leon and Rielestone had been at war with a League member (Talerium) for months with specific "do not get involved" statements to the rest of the League.

Talerium had formed a new infiltrator realm that would take stabbity stabbity contracts from ANYBODY.

The creators of a new Darka have said in this thread they were a day away from seceding from Talerium and creating their new realm.

And of course Tara broke out of the Cagilan-Strombran-Taran Federation and kicked off the first new MAJOR war in years.

All of this was happening because we had finally succeeded in making the League of the Eagle leadership realize that the old power blocs had to die for the good of Atamara.  The League of the Eagle's primary mission (OOC) had become to divest control of Atamara from the four realms of the League through whatever means necessary.  Gone were the days of Cagil bellying up to a conflict and saying "we're bringing all of our friends to this one."

Every nation outside the League of the Eagle had been fighting for months before the final split occurred.  And the final split brought that war inside the League with major fighting between the Taran and the combined Cagilan-Strombanian armies.  After months of small and medium sized armies marching and fighting across northern and southern Atamara, the three largest armies on Atamara were at war with each other in MAINLAND Atamara.

These are the undeniable events and wars that were taking place throughout Atamara and involving every realm on the island.

273

Atamara / Re: Atamara's Fate

« on: May 12, 2016, 07:49:49 AM »

The thing I miss most about that island is the friendships I made in Darka and CE. They crossed over the years and many of those people are the reason I continued to login because they made the game that much more interesting Umbar, Indirik, Lavigna (Lavagina), Conquard, Munnegan, Valgin, Gorath, Paxwax, Salvador, Fury, Merlin, Juane, Randall, and Ghostdragon, just to name a few. Few of these people reached even outside of the game and summoned me back to play.

That is Tara for me.  I always kept a character or two in Tara just to keep up with friends there.  I never had a single role in the government or really did anything of much regard there other than marching when the general sent out orders.  But I just enjoyed the nation and the people there.  It was my home in BattleMaster more than any other place.

Then I saw several Tyrants disappear one after another, saw Tara in disrepair and ready to fail, and I had the audacity to think I could do something about it.  So I ran for the Tyrancy and won.

At first I just did whatever it took to stabilize Tara and make her stronger.  I had never looked at Atamara from the slightly-OOC perspective you need as a ruler.  It took a few days or maybe a bit more than that.  I made some mistakes.  Shanandoah for one.  I dealt with other leaders.  I studied the diplomatic situation on the island.  I started to realize that it was locked.  Hard.  That it stifled good gameplay.  And that is when I began to realize why we had lost so many Tyrants recently.  They felt helpless.  Trapped by the situation as much as anybody else on the island.

So on the one hand, I pushed to make Tara more active.  I got an awesome general from Carelia who knew how to do things, and we made Tara fun to play in again.  Revitalized it and got things shaking up both inside and outside Tara.

And on the other hand I began working with those who wanted to bring down the federation.  Because once I looked at the federation with the slightly OOC-eyes that a ruler should use, I realized that bringing it down was the only way to breath life into ALL of Atamara.


As for this being a ruling clique versus everyone else thread...I see some rulers who didn't get things their way complaining that they didn't get their way and being glad that the devs sunk the island.  And I see other rulers who worked with the other rulers to fix things being happy that they did and wishing that we all could have seen the aftermath of that.

274

Atamara / Re: Atamara's Fate

« on: May 12, 2016, 03:35:09 AM »

Not ignored.

He is accurate.

But it is not always a point of view that people see without being guided towards it.  Sometimes with a gentle hand.  Sometimes it takes a clue by four.  Sometimes it takes mods or devs or whatever you call the people assigned to watch over the game to enforce that view.

As for the other post...I do find it amusing that he would suggest that Tara was acting dishonorably towards the Federation.  Tara was the only member of the Federation actively fighting the enemies of the Federation.  Cagil was doing its best imitation of an ostrich while Strombran joined into an alliance with our enemies and helped them grow in power and territory.

Strombran was the serpent that poisoned the Federation.  Tara was the last defender of the Federation's ideals, and when it became clear that the Federation would fail to reign in Strombran's foul machinations, it became Tara's job to protect all of Atamara from her villainy.

 

275

Atamara / Re: Atamara's Fate

« on: May 11, 2016, 07:09:16 AM »

I think I do need to be clear on something though.

BattleMaster is a competition.  Everybody is trying to win.

What the Cagil-Tara alliance did was win against EVERYBODY.  They beat all the other players on the continent.  They beat a game engine designed to weaken large nations and to make it hard for larger alliances to march to support each other.  Through diplomacy and military force, the players behind the Cagil-Tara alliance smashed everything and everybody.

I think that is awesome.  And admirable.  Winning is not a four letter word.  They did what all of us wish we could do.

What is best in life?  Or games?

In the words of Conan it is "Crush your enemies. See them driven before you. Hear the lamentations of their women."

The Cagil-Tara alliance did that.

And I honestly and very happily applaud them for that.


What messed up Atamara after that is that there was no gameplay for "after win" in BattleMaster.  The game was designed to make winning all but impossible so there was no plan for what to do when it happened.  And when it happened nobody came up with one.  That's not something I put on the players.  The devs should have come up with something.  My twenty-twenty hindsight thinks resetting the continent by having all cities secede would have been one way to do that.  But that's twenty-twenty hindsight.  And I honestly really don't fault the devs for not having a plan either.  The game is supposed to stop that.  And they didn't want to be in the position of taking away what players built.  That's why my twenty-twenty hindsight says to congratulate them, give them some virtual medal of some kind, and then reset the island.

The point in the end is that winning Atamara was not bad.  Not having a plan to reset Atamara in case of a win wasn't even really bad.

What was bad was not doing something to reset things.  It should have been done.  And it should have been the devs that did it.

In the end, we players took the bit into our mouths and did something about the problem.  But it should have been handled years earlier.  It shouldn't have been up to us players to fix it.

And once again, winning in Atamara was not bad.  It was amazing that anybody managed to do it.

It was the lack of follow through after the win that hurt the continent.

276

Atamara / Re: Atamara's Fate

« on: May 11, 2016, 02:30:04 AM »

Oh, I agree.

The Cagilan-Taran alliance never should have "won" Atamara.

Or if it had, somebody should have done something to break that alliance.  With 20-20 hindsight I can say that it would have been best to have a "Word of Tom" after the last great war when it became clear that nobody could stand against them.  This issue with that, and probably one of the reasons it never happened, was the way the Cagilan-Taran alliance was formed.  It was an alliance of brothers forged in battle.  Or at least that is how the Tarans saw it.  There is nothing that could cause the Tarans to turn on their brothers.

Anyways, hindsight says that SOMETHING should have been done many years ago to force the alliance to break up for the good of the game.  There should have been an official finding by the devs or Tom that the continent had been "won."  Announcement to the continent.  Then have some roleplaying event that breaks all alliances and returns all diplomatic settings to neutral.  Or maybe have something that caused every city to leave their nation.  Or just inform the League of the Eagle that they had to find a way to break up the alliance or else.  Make it all an official part of the "congratulations you won" announcement and finding.

Nothing like that happened.  Obviously.  And that obviously hurt the game on Atamara.

What I'm saying, from my experience, is that the players did break it up without the devs doing anything like that.  I helped do that after becoming Tyrant so I remember it very well.  We did what needed to be done.  We broke the Cagilan-Taran alliance and started the largest war on Atamara since the last great war.  I choose to celebrate the work we did to make that happen, and lament that we did not get to find out what was going to happen because the devs sunk the island.

Some people say we never did that and that we deserved to be sunk.  I say they are wrong.

277

Atamara / Re: Atamara's Fate

« on: May 10, 2016, 07:47:24 PM »

I am making nothing up.

I have stated many times that the Cagilan-Taran alliance "won" Atamara.  There was no way anybody could beat them after the last major war that broke both the northern and southern alliances.  That is a fact.

And the Ice Age shattered what little was left of the north that was still holding out.

When I first became Tyrant of Tara, one or more members of the Federation was allied with every realm on the continent.  And Carelia was being absorbed into Strombran.  Some might use harsher words, but I will be nice here.  There was no way to fight a good war when I became Tyrant.

Over the next year, we managed to end almost every alliance outside the Federation, and then broke the Federation itself, resulting in the largest war to hit Atamara since the last great war.

That is the pure and simple truth of what happened.  That is what many people worked towards and what I was happy to help get done once I was in a position to do so.

That is what we did in Atamara.

If you are saying that didn't happen, then you are simply not living in the same world that the rest of us worked in.

278

Atamara / Re: Atamara's Fate

« on: May 10, 2016, 07:21:00 AM »

Like I said, Miskel was a loose canon who did not have effective command of the nation he nominally ruled.

Quoting South Park "authority" just illustrates that more clearly.

 

279

Atamara / Re: Atamara's Fate

« on: May 09, 2016, 09:38:24 PM »

I agree that the Ice really did nothing more than break what was the last major nation that stood against Cagil.  I remember thinking that when it happened but I didn't have the power to do anything about it.  Even with all the bonuses the Devs gave Darka, it was never going to be enough to stand up against the Cagilan-Taran alliance.  What I wouldn't have given to have Darka still around when I became Tyrant...but the Devs destroyed them long before my time...

As for my activity in the time I was Tyrant...I logged in all the time and I worked all the time.  I didn't talk with Miskel very much because Miskel wasn't one of the smart ones.  He got all up in people's faces and angry and got himself kicked out when the people he was insulting got tired of him.  I talked with people who acted smarter and worked behind the scenes to help change other peoples' minds.

Miskel's approach would have resulted in one nation telling everybody else to frak off and then getting gangbanged by everybody else on the continent.  Believe me.  I thought that one out a long time ago back when he was doing his thing.  Miskel was not a reliable man to work with.  Too chaotic.  Too shouty.  He was simply not a reasonable ally, and from his own admission he did not have control of Cagil.  I could not trust anything he said to be binding.

My (very OOC) goal was not to start a single war and have a single nation wiped out.  That is one reason Tara never wiped out a nation under my command.  We hounded.  We raided.  We looted.  We did not try to eliminate a single nation.  Basically we sowed chaos and pissed people off.  And one by one we caused the alliances that united the entire continent to the Cagil-Tara alliance to fail.

My goal was not to start a short war that would kill a nation and otherwise leave the continent unchanged except for a minor border change and another probable expansion of the federation.  One by one, the actions I and others took shattered the single overriding set of alliances built over a decade that made it impossible to fight a good war.  And THEN we broke the federation that enforced those alliances after talking those old Elders in the League of the Eagle into agreeing it had to be done.

Atamara was sunk before we could find out how the fallout would land, but we completely and utterly shattered the power structure of Atamara and brought in a new age of war.

280

Beluaterra / Re: Netherworld

« on: May 09, 2016, 06:41:15 AM »

Hate mail...interesting idea...

I prefer plate mail myself...but...it could work.

281

Atamara / Re: Atamara's Fate

« on: May 09, 2016, 06:38:31 AM »

I would remind you that I was a common noble when the second-to-last power structure was built.  As much as I would love to take credit for it, I had nothing to do other than following orders and marching to war with the building up of the power of the Cagilan-Taran alliance.

I am happy with taking credit for helping tear it down though.  Something that would not have been possible if the rest of the League of the Eagle elders had not agreed that it needed to be done.

Was it too late for some people?  Absolutely.

But it did happen.  And it did revitalize Atamara.  I'm very proud that in the year I was Tyrant of Tara, I had a small part in helping to overturn the power structure of Atamara and start the war that ended the alliance that stifled war on the continent.

My one big wish is that we could have seen the "Succession Wars" continue and find out just what would have happened.

I know some people have a big hate on for Atamara and are glad it was sunk.  Well I hate fish.  But I don't want fish taken away from everybody else because I don't like fish.  I guess that's just how I think.  I know some people don't think like that, and for that I am sorry.

282

Atamara / Re: Atamara's Fate

« on: May 06, 2016, 08:17:21 PM »

I agree that they had valid and well thought out reasons for doing what they did.

They believed that they needed to sink two islands and they picked the two that were least fun in their opinion.

I think they were wrong to sink Atamara, but I do understand the reasons for why they did it.

283

Atamara / Re: Atamara's Fate

« on: May 06, 2016, 01:18:43 PM »

Well Talerium often had some play going on somewhere, same with Caergoth, although the latter had a difficult situation we as players there said we'd rather be destroyed than sit still. Atamaran nobles could've changed realms also if that was the only problem.

Minas Leon and the other one or two nations up north were fighting Talerium as well.

The south was...buggered due to diplomacy but we tried to get it rolling.  And then Tara broke the federation and EVERYTHING changed down there.  I was rather happy to see all those nations down there getting together into a..."happy?" alliance.  Hehehe.  Of course I was afraid that the long term goal of that alliance was going to be Tara ground down and spit out but...hey...its a game.  That would be an exciting way to go...

284

Atamara / Re: Atamara's Fate

« on: May 06, 2016, 01:11:04 PM »

Even now, it just doesn't sink in with you that the rest of us are not impressed.

As I said before, I recognize some people had given up on the island, and I recognize that some people will never see anything good on the island.

The rest of us worked to make it better.

An interesting point is that the rulers and such of almost every nation were actually in the League of the Eagle.  Not as full members of course, but they had signed up at guild houses and could get messages sent to everyone rather than just full members.  And when we began discussing the end of the League of the Eagle and how we would do it, the messages were sent to everyone.  There were some 40 people on that list as I remember, from almost every nation on the continent.

We in no way hid our intention to change everything.

The war between Tara and Cagil/Strombran was VERY public.
The war between the southern alliance and Cagil/Strombran was VERY public.
The war between Talerium and northern alliance was VERY public.

Everyone on the continent got the rumors of battles and declarations of war that were broadcast for all to hear.

If you thought that nothing was going on on Atamara then you were either not paying attention or were unwilling to see what was happening around you.

You might not know everything going on behind the scenes and the REASON for all of that if your rulers did not inform you, but that is not anything I can be in charge of.  The rest, anyone logging in and reading their messages could see without any problem.

285

Atamara / Re: Atamara's Fate

« on: May 06, 2016, 09:05:30 AM »

Yes, Cagil and Tara won on Atamara because of two major things.

1) The two realms were united at the hip.  If you fought one, you fought the other.  Except for a very small handful of times.  Cagil declared peace with Carelia while Tara was fighting them and left Tara to try to sue for peace.  That was a bad time for Tara for a while.  But the vast majority of the time, the two realms acted near enough as one that it was almost impossible to break them.

2) Cagil was VERY good at buying off or otherwise convincing other realms to side with Cagil and Tara even against other friends.  No alliance was safe from Cagilan money or other forms of diplomacy.  Just about every war we won, we did so because Cagil pealed one or two nations off the other side and got them to come over to our side.  Of course, none of those nations still lived in the end.  Every single one was targeted and destroyed in later wars.  Only Tara and Talerium were never victim of such a strategy.

And yes.  In the end there was no alliance of nations that could hold against the Cagilan-Taran Alliance.  All nations that survived to the end did so because they became allied with Cagil, Strombran, or Tara and used the Federated Status of those big three to keep from being targeted.

That situation became untenable when Strombran and Cagil chose to destroy Carelia which was allied with Tara.  Multiple Taran Tyrants resigned in a row over that situation.  And when I became Tyrant I was informed in no uncertain terms that I had to give up Carelia.  I couldn't say no because Tara was too disorganized to stand up to either Cagil or Strombran at the time.  But I did welcome all the Carelian nobles into Tara and used them to help revitalize my nation and make it strong again.  The Carelian general became my general for instance.  And I spent the next year working to get the other members of the League of the Eagle to realize that the situation as it was could not continue.

I was of course smart enough to never SAY that.  Not when it would have turned into a Taran clubbering at the hands of the other nations.  But I and my general had this understanding.  He did things I of course would never condone.  And when it came out that he did that...well...then he had to be ordered back...but...you know...the army marched, broke some stuff, and then came home.  Refitted.  Went out and hunted some monsters.  Came back.  Refitted.  Went out and smashed something somewhere else.  I would of course apologize and call them back.  Dang general getting a bit frisky and all that.  Not that I ever told him to go do it.  Honestly.  I didn't.  Though I may have made some idle wishes known.    So he played the belligerent and got our armies moving and doing things and marching as a real coherent force while I worked to restrain my overzealous general for the League of the Eagle.   

Then Strombran bellied up to the table and went further than I was ever prepared to go when it came to stuff like that.  Heck.  They played belligerent, admitted in total in the League of the Eagle, and basically dared anybody to call them on it.

Like I said.  I spent a year trying to get everybody to see that the current power structure was unworkable.  That it stifled the continent.  And I was not the only one who was doing that.  I wont give out names, but I was in contact with a LOT of people who were working very hard to break up the League of the Eagle.  People both within the League and without.  And in the end, we convinced the entire League of the Eagle that we were right.  It had to be broken up.

Once the League came to an agreement on that point, we talked about doing it in an orderly manner that would have kept us on top and in charge of the surviving power structure.  We actually came up with several very interesting plans to do that.  I generally argued for plans that would significantly weaken all four of our realms.  Each one would have broken up into two or three realms, each with no more than two cities to give us parity with the other realms on the island.  My proposals were the most radical.  We had a lot of very interesting plans on "how to fix things whilst remaining in charge" as Shulee so elegantly put it.

In the end though, we did not initiate any of those plans.  We couldn't really agree on any of them.  All we could agree on was that the situation had to change.  So...we just rolled the dice.  Granted, I'd spent the last year LOADING my dice, but when I pulled Tara out of the Federation and started the war, it was one heck of a roll of the dice.  And there was every chance that Tara would be utterly destroyed doing it.  There was no guarantee at all of remaining in charge.

The "elite cabal" at the heart of the League of the Eagle just agreed to shake everything up, bring down the power structure as it was, and see where things led.  There was every possibility that we were sealing our doom in a war that would destroy all of our realms.  We each wanted to make certain it was the OTHER realms that fell of course, but we were all willing to accept the risk that it would be ours instead.  Or all of ours.

None of us knew where it was going to lead, and I'm very sorry that we never got to find out what was going to happen.

I generally focus my projections on two direction.  Best case and worst case.

Best case.  Talerium, Minas Leon, Tara, and the southern alliance work together to smash Cagil and Strombran, forcing some of their dukes to break away or die, and leaving them a shattered group of city states.  It's MY best case.  Sue me.    Then Tara breaks up into two or three nations that are each no more powerful than any of the other nations on the continent, and...bang...power structure reset with me in charge of Foda and that's about it...that would have been my happy "ending" for the war.

My worst case ending was Tara getting into a knock down drag out fight with Cagil and Strombran, only to be jumped by Minas Leon and the southern alliance when they decided that they could still have a chance of taking out Cagil and Strombran without Tara on their side.  Now I was doing everything I could diplomatically to make sure worst case did not happen to Tara, but our little Tyrant and General Two Step had pissed off most of the realms on Atamara to a lesser or greater degrees.  So...yeah...I consider the worst case scenario to have been VERY possible.  Maybe even probable.

But that was the risk we all took when we decided to destroy the existing power structure on Atamara.