What someone said above about republics versus kingships and the like.
Tara is a Tyranny. Basically the Tyrant can do anything he wants. Within reason.
And when I broke with the federation in the end, there were no protests. Strombran's actions against Caergoth made that easy in the end. There was a lot of "if they want to betray the federation let them break first" thoughts going on. In the end though, because Strombran and CE shared so many characters I knew they just were never going to do that.
The politics of the federation were interesting. Tara and Cagil were the longest and oldest allies and had fought as brothers forever. But there were very few players that had characters in both realms. So even though they were brother realms, they didn't SHARE a lot in common. Strombran was formed by Cagil and many of those in power in each realm had characters in the other realm. Cagil and Strombran were very much two sides of the same coin. One giant two-nation realm if you will.
Strombran could do ANYTHING and Cagil would never break federation with them. And if Tara broke federation we would be destroyed by both of them. A year ago, when I first became Tyrant, our only allies were Talerium and Caergoth. Not counting the Federation. Cagil and Strombran were allied with everybody else. If I had stood up to them at that time, Tara would have been destroyed. Period. End of Line.
So instead I started a year long effort to chip away at the alliances supporting Cagil and Strombran. I put pressure on them. I talked to other rulers. I put pressure on them. Just a little bit. Never too much. And as the months went by, Cagil was so secure in their position that they let them all go. And Tara tested our armies against Minas Leon and then Suville. We taught our people how march again and we turned Tara's army into a seriously potent force once more. And then Strombran pissed away their last alliance.
And that left Tara the only nation with allies outside the League. Allies that had experience fighting and just might be able to tip the balance of what a combined CE-Strombran army would do to Tara.
Basically, I spent a year working to turn the politics of Atamara sideways. And I got a lot more help from the other rulers than I really expected. Everybody disliked the status quo. It's just that nobody knew how to end it. Even I didn't know how to actually BREAK it all in the end. All I knew how to do was weaken and pressure it...and for months people have seen that pressure going up and up and up.
Everybody wanted a change, but nobody knew how to do it. Then the leader of CE started up an OOC discussion in the League about breaking everything up. We never came to an agreement about how to do it, but we did come to an agreement that something had to be done. And then that slow ratcheting pressure that was slowly breaking up the federation got turned up one more notch by Strombran and...snap...
I pulled Tara out of the federation and it was GOTIME.
An interesting thing that I want to point out. While most people say the League of the Eagle won the game back in the day, it wasn't the League that actually...held sway. Or it wasn't the League that really stagnated the island. It was the federation. In the League we could still go our separate ways and do stuff. In the federation, we were lockstepped to each other in ways that are really hard. Especially when Strombran and Tara detested each other as much as they did.
The League did not have to die to break Atamara free of the stagnation it was in. The federation had to die. That is a very interesting difference. Most people see them as one and the same, but they really never were. The League was an alliance of nations that mostly worked together. The federation of Tara and Cagil were the two most powerful nations locked together in ways that nobody else could break. Except themselves. And that would never happen until the playing rulers decided it had to be done. And we did decide that. And we did it. Because we knew it was the only way break the stagnation that had fallen over Atamara.
It is sad that the devs decided to sink the island after we spent a year making it more exciting. But that's not on us. We did what we needed to do. We made Atamara better. And we were on track to putting it back on top as the best island to play on if my projections are right. And considering that it took ten years to build the situation we were in, the fact that we broke it in one year is pretty awesome in my book.
It's just a damn shame the devs shut it down after we succeeded. Or least made one big step on the succeeding ladder. There were a lot more steps to take. And we were well and truly taking them. Hehehe.
