Granted, though PDM stands to gain nothing by being tagkilled and having this process play out again next set like it has many sets in the past.

Have you seen PDM FSes? Against a prepped LaF? Not trying to be overly self-deprecating, just realistic.

PDM will respond with our brand of vigilante justice to alliances that farm us, just as we have in the past with LaF. If I can walk away from this having earned LaF's respect and preventing future outbreaks, I am satisfied.

At this point if we went all-out on hitting them they will still finish top 10. At least it's a mostly-war set for the server.

1) Warring PDM is a waste of your time. Beating us proves you are not the worst alliance at conventional warring. You gain no respect from fighting us - all you can do is lose respect. If you fight us you have to have a reason (which in LaF's minds I believe they do).
2) I don't care if we walk away having earned LaF's respect... I just want to make it hurt for them now and prevent future outbreaks.

meh, I'll stand for LT and say 1 hour? fluff happens :p
nukes were probably unjustified. PDM policy does allow for their use, but I think the intent was for it to be in extreme cases, rather than what we got.

I'd like to buy the world a home and furnish it with love,

Grow apple trees and honey bees, and snow white turtle doves.

I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony,

I'd like to buy the world some Coke and keep it company.

oh and Thomas, I think the farming and attempted farming back and forth is more amusing than an out and out war. Back in the days where I wasn't working as much as I do now, I did sit up all night for warchats etc.
These days I am getting too old for that sh*t. :P
at the end of the day, LaF are amusing themselves, we're amusing ourselves, who gives a crap?

1) I agree with you there. LaF has a sizable numbers advantage and has better & bigger countries. PDM doesn't have much of a reputation at warring (one of the few alliances even less respected than Laf when it comes to warring)

2) You won't walk away with Laf's respect, our members are not connected with reality. They like to think that they can bounce retals, when they're actually pretty horrible at it. Even worse, they like to do RoRs and our policy of giving only a 24 hour window to a country after retalling us is designed to allow our countries to smack around lightly defended retallers as much as possible. They don't check news before they grab, and have often ended up doing retals without posting them on the retal board.

They're also selfish, and a few of them spent hundreds of millions on jets to grab PDM in our 'farming fs' and then asked on our boards for someone to GS them into DR because their defense was too low. I've yelled at those idiots to buy some turrets.

They're delusional about their ability to bounce retals and the quality of their countries. Some people, like LT, actually run good countries, but there are other LaFers who have gotten sloppy and are unwilling to face the facts.

If we can't face the facts about our current mediocrity, then you won't get our respect, and it will be our fault. Furthermore, Laf won't return to the skill & respect it used to have until our members stop screwing around and admit that they are not playing to the level that we have in the past.

i think that applies to a lot of clans these days though rockman. A large part of it I suspect is that it's mostly worn out old vets still playing because of our obsession wiith the game, without giving a fluff enough to excel. Worse, the few genuinely new people joining the game for the first time aren't getting taught how to excel because of that same veteran apathy, and the consequence is that those with the fire to do well and excel don't have the knowledge and skill to do so.

Pdm HAS proven we can war in the past, however the war team we had leading the show back then is gone, except for me, and I am a retired fogey who plays a half ass country for fluffs and giggles. Participation in war has always been our problem, and under other war leaders, a loss of focus on our primary objectives.

The couple of sets I played in MD just before they left were a nice breath of fresh air, but Paradigm is, was and always will be my home.
Short form of the last rambling, I admit I am one of those worn out vets :P

i like the land exchanges. i personally think its much more amusing than all-x all day.

i'm sorry about not reading your wall of text rockman for your first few posts tho. i skipped most of that stuff because it just made my eyes hurt :( i just read the later ones because they were much shorter =)

too much stats, too big of a paragraph. nice work i guess haha but i'm too lazy to read all of that =)

like i said earlier, i never claimed LaF was right about everything nor PDM was right about everything.

i have stated many times LaF is wrong to hit PDM 17 times in 24 hours, PDM wasn't right to retal with nukes without letting me know first =) but its all done now, and i think in the end we probably generated enough ghost acres for each other and amusement for the rest of 1A that in the end it's not that bad.

i'm fine with not having this result in a conventional war. we obviously had that as a possibility, but we aren't going to be butt sore that it's not going to happen.

and rockman, you are right. LaFfers (including myself) used to be all anal and crazy to try to get those t10/rank 1 spots. i honestly play much looser now.. just like how you started this reset untagged, something which you wouldn't have done in the past.

the reason why, and we all rehashed this many times is LaF is an alliance built on landgrabbing. which worked well in the past, in these modern times i've seen only a few ways of real landgrabbing:

1) farming the same 5 untags all reset. (there used to be more untags) to do this effectively you have to end up DR camping or news camping, of which the latter pisses off other alliances because you are "two-stepping" even when you aren't really intending to do that.
2) farming a smaller alliance. (there used to be more alliance to grab so you don't end up farming the same alliance over and over, now you really can't grab any estabilished alliances effectively without pissing them off).
3) land trade with your own alliance. (seems like everyone was hating on RD for this last reset)
4) land trade with other alliances. (i haven't seen this done in everyone's best interests, if you work it so both sides are happy then its pretty much #3 with different tags, otherwise one side will be more pissed off about it than another)

other than that you have the trusty explore button for getting land, which is pretty much the only safe/publically approved way to do things.

so netgaining becomes just min-maxing your all-explore country to its maximum potential (public market playing, using formulas to figure out when to stock/destock/etc/etc.). another thing about min-maxing an all explore which i really hate is the fact that you want to run with as little military as you can get away with, because more military=more expenses=less min-maxing. this is a clear outcry from the past where you had much more options in the game and where you had a strategic component which is your military count of your country determining your might.

i can see why SOL/SoF is prospering, because tbh warring is definitely more fun than netgaining by far now.. and in the end playing a game should be about how fun it is... which is why this game is dying because the fun factor is decreasing.

i get a little tongue-in-cheek in responding to PDM this reset only because i honestly see them as a factor who plays loose and is probably open to using nontraditional means. maybe via messing around with them we'll figure out new ways to play this game again where it's fun for all once more

i totally see your point. i'm a worn out vet myself. hell once h4 settles in and i don't have to do interim head duty, i'm going back to retirement where i belong ;)

If all clans got into the spirit of single tap, single retal we'd possibly be able to get somewhere with LG'ing again. i know that other than 1 tool in ICN who decided to be an arrogant prat over like 0.6% of a land return justifying another retal for even more land, I've had pretty good relations with grabs/ retals with basically everyone. Too many bad attitudes.

Something for PDM/LaF to pioneer maybe?
Topfeeding definition perhaps needs to go back more to it's more original def so that we can see intelligent and competitive midfeed grabs, atm 'topfeeding' is more about trying to get away with being excessively fat compared to your neighbours without taking a risk of losing ones land. If you are a landfat country who gets grabbed, and can't get the land back, have a clan mate running a retaller country get it. Oft times the retaller will be running landthin for just that reason.

Meh, ramblings of an old vet I suspect

"land. If you are a landfat country who gets grabbed, and can't get the land back, have a clan mate running a retaller country get it. Oft times the retaller will be running landthin for just that reason."

there's already alliances who do this.

about single tap, single retal. i think the theory is nice, but we need to have a way that works where skill is also involved. there is no skill in me being 20k and you being 20k both no turrets and we just hit each other back and forth 1:1 gaining ghost acres all day.

oh of course, the concept is to make the LG, then stock def and hope the retal bounces :P
friendly banter with the guy you are grabbing is also a must imo.

imo i like different retal policies (w/ exception of archaic topfeed definitions) because it's an added strategic element to game an alliance's retal policies against them. (e.g. evo profiting tons of acres off nub PDM grabbers by following PDM policy)

oh of course, the concept is to make the LG, then stock def and hope the retal bounces :P
friendly banter with the guy you are grabbing is also a must imo.

i am trying to make the point of competitive LG'ing, which I feel modern policies strangle.

^that is exactly what we were doing that you guys got mad about. Grabbed then tried to outrun Retals.

Doing 1 or 2 hits and doing it is one thing, having 20 people do it is another

btw didnt laf and pdm go through this just a few sets ago? maybe i was a year + even but i can definately remmeber this exact thing happenning not too long ago

or is my memory that bad?

It wasn't 20+ people Ivan it was 5-6

Historically LaF has done this to us regularly with 4-8 countries. In previous rounds we ran extra retallers to compensate. This round we thought we were allied and were unprepared so we resorted to other aspects of our retal policy than land grabs.

If you nuke all of LaF week 2 or week 3, that will teach a lesson.

Or you both could join in like I mentioned


SoF + LaF vs. Collab/Evo/NM/PDM

You shoulda recruited me this set :P

tarnava: i meant friendly single taps, not 4 or 5 countries triple-quad tapping, and where there is also a reasonable chance for the other side to retal.
The concept I am trying to encapsulate here isn't coming across so well. That atmosphere of hoping the retal bounces, or hoping that you come out in front after a successful retal.

Why should I allow the other alliance a reasonable chance to retal? I want to keep my land.

And the other alliance doesn't want you to profit at their expense.

from a warclan perspective, i don't see a problem with any of this, it would have been an excuse to war. Win or lose, laf would have suffered because they would be forced into a war which reduces final networth.

With less neutrals thanks to netgainers farming the living fluff out of them, its no wonder people can't laugh off a loss of acres in an exchange. In the good old days you would get to 30k acres, someone would take 1k off you in an exchange and you would laugh and say hahaha time for me to buy some turrets.

Now its more like, you looked at my land the wrong way I am gonna cut you up motherfluffer.

not stalling having fun.....this is a game remember we all gotta have fun and enjoy this game....we all want it to be like it was yrs ago.....fun....we all need to come together for the game....and enjoy it (i am no tree hugger i just love earth)

tarnava: because the game is in a state where we can no longer afford that kind of attitude. Doing a single tap on a similar NW country then buying up to avoid the retal is the sort of thing I mean. Crap like a massive country relentlessly farming out a tiny country with no hope ever of retalling is disgusting IMO.

I'm trying to argue towards a more active and friendly natured grabbing atmosphere, so that both all x and landgrabbers can profit and have fun.

country:country retals would suit me fine... but I doubt everyone would see it that way.

Wow. I go two days without checking AT and all sorts of neat fluff happens.

Country:country only for L:L seems reasonable to me. Most of earth players, however are soft, relying heavily on tag protection and running a land-fat country.

All policies posted within the policy thread reflect each clan attitude towards land grabbing, in which every clan are trying to deter others from grabbing them (top feed policy esp).

Also with each clan having their own policy, to make things clearer and fairer, any retal should abide to the retalling clan policy not the attacking clan.

i dont understand what people don't like about PDM's policy (other than the missiles and ops, I get that :P)

we'll take out the ops part, it's stupid. missiles are something we use infrequently, something we invented as leverage because we can't war efficiently on our own. options are basically use force other than SS/PS when we are bullied, or politically whore ourselves to another clan.

but, i feel like our policy of country:country L:L and escalating clan wide is one of the most sensible policies on the server given the environment. no self-protecting legalese clauses, no archaic topfeed definitions that discourage landtrading, etc.

if we 'topfeed' you, you can not only take L:L, you can game our own rules and end up with significantly more land than was taken from you (ask Evo).

if you can't afford to take your own retals, you don't get L:L.

pretty fluffing straightforward and reasonable.

the rest of you living in 2002 need to get off the high horse.