Hi. I've been doing this CW thing for a bit. It sucks a lot more now than it did back then, but oh well. That gold ain't gonna farm itself. Those other clans are going to run themselves. Gotta keep on doing.There is no real way to get a sense for what has happened in the last year we've been doing this. You can dig through the forums to get a pretty good idea of what has been happening, but that takes time and having to read several hundred posts by Xpedience, xxAvengerxx, Ionviol2 and badFriction. You don't want to do that. So I am going to tell you all what happened. It is a fair amount to cover, and my memory is either bad, or I was not privy to some of what happened. If you have items to add, or different perspectives, then please post them. I will edit or add them in to this grand endeavor.In the beginning, everything was held by Civilians. So it once began, so it shall again come to pass. On day 0 of CW, every single province on the map was not owned by any clan. It was held by a neutral faction. To get on the map, you simply had to select the province you wanted and apply to the tournament for that province. Every single province on the map functioned as a landing zone with regular landing zone tournament rules on that first night. There were lots of clans flying around at that point, and you would see the more successful & organized ones setting up in areas where they would eventually become entrenched. IR out in the East. AOD dead center of the map. Panzacs out in Turkey. Goons in West Europe.On the first night, NDP was sporting a single tier 10 tank, Jim1973's IS7. We otherwise ran with a stack of IS3/4s, mid tier mediums, and a single S-51. We tried landing in a few different locations spread over different time zones. I remember our let's-make-a-wall-with-our-corpses-and-cap strat on Paphlagonia did not work out so well against some Panzac variant. Paphlagonia being Komarin at the time. I think. The only place we managed to land successfully that first night, completely unopposed in fact, was our spiritual home Hessen. The next several days saw clans expanding from the provinces they had taken on that first night to begin taking the still large number of unoccupied civilian held provinces around them. Important to note is that at this point you could still gain gold income from provinces not linked to your HQ. You could generate income from a province held out in the East while your HQ was chilling in the UK. So while those satellite stacks would eventually get taken, this would forever fuel clans dreaming of holding single gold provinces spread all over the map. Other clans got right down to business and started bumping uglies with their new neighbors. The level of play and team composition back at this point was so bad that a modern 6 stack could probably take 90% of the 15 stacks back then. Not the case all over, but on average, yeah. Those clans who hadn't been ready or just lost every fight for CW the first night were now clogging up the landing zones all over. This continued until all the empty spaces were filled. And when there is no space left to grow, you must then either fight your neighbor or talk with them. This is the point when everything started to suck.At this time, the 4 original Goon clans were operating as a semi-coordinated for the only time in our history. We busied ourselves eating up empty provinces, arguing who got the gold, and murdering our new neighbors. Condi (Fuck Condi) was the biggest and meanest of us. NDP got to show 5PANZ who the true masters of Germany were. Marder She Wrote (MS-W) and Stug Lyfe (SGLE) got kicked around by LNF who had multiple tier 10s. Big brother Condi (Fuck Condi) and NDP put paid to them in the end, showing them who the true masters of France were.There were several obvious big blocs of clans forming. Iron Raiders did that thing that they did and devoured the whole of the East with their 4 clans. Their style at this time was largely to NAP the clans that their Western borders had reached, entice them to stack attacking clans further West, then move in and start taking territory from the clan they had NAP'd. On some occasions they even completely enveloped other clans as they expanded. RIP the QC pocket. AOD lay heavy across the center of the map. BG who actually had big boy tanks was holding the majority of the money in the Middle East. 3E lay like some obscene blue scab floating north of the red tide of AOD provinces. SG was in the Balkans, Panzac in Turkey and CB in Italy. Spain was still largely Spain, but ROKA and DOKSA had that mostly under wraps. Eventually. 503rd and 7ID occupied the areas that would later come under the control of ROTA. And already no one cared about Africa.Iron Raiders pretty much ran the show at this point. They had expanded pretty much as far as they could, bordering nothing but their core allies. Except CORE who fought on forever. This group, the IRs, the AODs, 3E, ROTA, GVN, and some others (Tank Busters lol) were now what would become known as the. Their avenues of expansion were South (BG - skilled opposition), South Central (SG & Panzacs - scrappy opposition) or West (503rd - skilled /7ID/goons - scrubby opposition). They settled on South Central to begin with.At this point Goon central command began to realize we were next. Spies and being able to read the map and all. Oh, and 3E/AOD had started rolling up our nearest and dearest 503rd (miss you Faratia). We plotted and schemed. There might even have been communications with other clans. I mostly just moved chips and kept out of all the diplo nonsense at this point. The course was clear: We needed to attack the one clan that we had direct map contact with. We had to attack the AODs.This is the start of the grand old Northern Alliance conflict that would go on for the next several months, and pretty much leads in to why the Clan Wars map got as screwed up as it did. AOD/IW/whoever put tons of pressure on the Balkans, but SG and Panzac are ever the greatest bastards to come out of that region. That became what amounted to a chip grinder, and I can't recall precisely, but I don't think they were dislodged at that time. AODs, ROTA, 3E, GVN, and eventually the Korean clans out of Spain ganged up on the Goons, and someone murdered CB3 in Italy. Things were looking pretty grim for the good guys at this point.Oh, and MLP happened.I want to say we put up a good fight before we went down. We pushed AOD as hard as we could. AOD main was on the front lines, and while we could not put an A team out like they could, we had enough chip stacks to make them getting bodies in battle a problem. CONDI had the only A team, and 503rd should have as well. While dealing with crap floating in from the LZs, including a wayward MLP stack, we as Goons finally started to get organized. With all 3 clans with stacks on the front lines, we had AOD on the run and down to their last several provinces north of Crimea. 3E and ROTA were looming in the North, and Netherlands was leaking AOD-W chip stacks every other night, but we were making progress. We needed CONDI to attack AOD each night to tie down their A team so we could work the other teams. Again, victory through attrition. Then one night CONDI didn't move their stack. When asked why, they responded 'Because we didn't want to', Fuck Condi. This let AOD swing their A team onto 503rd, and this saw them knocked off the map soon after. SGLE and MS-W started moving stacks just North of Italy to get to the front. One night CONDI was supposed to move their chip stack out of Venice to let Marder through, but forgot to move the stack. Instead of showing up to fight AOD, they sent their A Team to Venice to make sure MS-W didn't take it. Fuck Condi. And when we finally fixed the bottle neck and were able to corner in the AOD HQ, Condi decided they would rather not block it in and instead go attack in to a gold province. That they lost. FUCK YOU CONDI. And that was the end of the Western front. GVN, 3E and ROTA were pouring in from the North, and we had no way to effectively fight all those Mice. Oh dear god GVN road.Ok. It is everyone's ideal map now. One without Goons.MLP is sitting like a big pink sore in IR's side out in the East. They've pulled back from the sack of Moscow and are now sitting in their home around Stalingrad.South Central is still grinding chips.Then the Southern Alliance kinda fell together.SG. Panzac. MS-W. CB. BG and their auxialaries. NDP. SSGSish. MLP?AOD also happened to lose a clan at this point and FORGE happened. Some other nerd wrote a thing about them MS-W and NDp re-landed Italy and started pushing through. They were walking home. MS-W had gotten REALLY good at this point, and boarded Wolves in 3 days, then proceeded to win just ebout every fight with AOD/ROTA as they moved back in to Western Europe. NDP, MS-W and MLP then proceeded to clear out IW, GVN, ROTA and 3E from the old Goon territories. MLP was napped with IR, and they would/could not act against each other, but this didn't say anything about each other's allies. IR's contribution to the defense of their allies was a chip stack in a LZ every few nights. While we prepared to lend assistance to South Central by way of Italy, a request for a 48 hour truce was asked for by AOD/ROTA. They were pretty much fed up with the other half of their partnership in IR, who was collecting a disproportionate amount of gold for the effort they exerted, while AOD and crew were getting kilt out West. Net result of this was AOD/ROTA flipping sides against their former Northern Alliance allies. 3E, the IR clans, and some hangers on against the whole of the Southern Alliance, less MLP.It was over in about a week.During the time we spent off the map, MS-W ate the CW capable roster of SGLE, doubling the number of horrible people they had under one roof. Also Orgytron stole SGLE's gold before leaving. NDP followed in their footsteps as they cleared a path to Europe for us. Condi wandered off to the land of wind and ghosts, coming back to haunt some clans on occasion. The one who kept playing eventually ended up in one of the other Goon clans. Working with MLP and Marder to clear out GVN was a treat, and getting back to our ancestral home was huge. Some bunch of scrubs called RELIC started harassing LZs in the Med and took some provs we were holding in S. Italy. Affablle lot that we were, we napped them up and got to buisness Northier. NDP then absorbed a bunch of refugees from KHR and stopped being utter trash for a bit.Now the Southern Alliance owns the map pretty much. A collective of about 15 clans or so held about 80% of the gold income. No one really wanted to continue on with out and out Clan Wars for the time being. The focus was now on quietly farming gold, defending a couple of landing zones each, and eventually figuring out that it might be neat if we cleared the landing zone tournaments for friendly clans. It wasn't quite NASA yet, but we were getting close. Also, XUG invented the deathblossom at the expense of MLP.OK. So we had control of the map. We were young. We were stupid. We were really stupid. And we ruined the game in our hubris.All the major on map clans started meeting on Team Speak each night to talk about the state of the map. We would see what we had to do to help each other to ensure our continued dominance. This included, but was not limited to, clearing landing zones, or at least providing 'ghost stacks' (a 15 stack into a LZ that you don't actually fight) for offsets, coming in through LZs to plug breaches or chase down invaders, and swap territories to better fit our needs. Did I mention that we did this every single night before CW started? With each clan fronting 2-3 reps. So 40-50 dudes sitting around in TS figuring out how that night's fights were going to play out.If you think CW might be stale now, then the level of inactivity some clans got away with back then was criminal. With completely secured land borders, and 1-2 LZ facing forward, you generally had at max 2 potential fights each night. If you have friendly clans clearing for you on a consistent basis, then you could go a week or more without actually having to defend your turf. Hell, a certain clan didn't even have any LZs, and no hostile land borders Looking at you Gates. With this level of clears available the only action you would/could often get was from making foreign expeditions to Africa, or the LZ tournaments you were clearing. With all the pro clans already on the map, the quality of opposition in the tournaments was pretty bad. No offense to those clans who were real challenges/threats back then, but by and large the folks in the tournaments didn't have a chance. But since you could throw into as many tournaments as you had free chip stacks each night, you could have upwards of a dozen fights spread over the evening, and you were bound to get a few decent scraps out of it. This was the game for the next couple of months.Some clans took advantage of the LZ rules to get tons of action. NDP only had a single stack on the ground defending Netherlands, and another in Marder territory. We would regularly toss 3-4 stacks out each night to clear for allies/find decent fights. Participating in the tournament would result in a +1 for your battles fought, but the tournament fights did not. And you would not get a win unless you actually took the province from the owner. This is a big part of the reason why we have almost 1k battles fought. Other clan would do the same thing. SG would always be good for 2-3 a night. Ditto Panzac, Relic and others. Others, no so much. Rota stacks didn't often leave their reserve. Trying to get MLP to stack anywhere was like pulling teeth from some particularly cantankerous animal. The early LZs, Murmansk and Kanino up in the North east did not get much attention, despite being some of the most problematic we had.So we were now NASA, but I don't think the name had been floated yet. The Document certainly had not. It was time to start pruning the weaker members.Poor old LNF had been stuck up in North East Russia in the early early slot. They were not able to fight effectively in that slot, and since the LZs weren't being cleared most of the time they had little support. You would see expeditions up there every week or so to plug a breach and chase down invading stacks before they got close to anyone else. In our meetings some clans, mainly AOD/MLP, said that LNF's performance was 'not acceptable', and that they should not be a part of our alliance any longer. This might have been one of the first things we voted on. LNF was out. They were given a week to vacate, and RS was shifted up to their position from the Middle East. That was pretty much the last the game heard of LNF.Next was CB. CB had been holding down in Spain, and were always asking for more gold for the 2-3 clans they were running at the time. They got some places in South France from Marder, but were asking for more. CB had performance issues, then they at one point had their phony war with RNT where they chased each other around Spain to disincline other clans from attacking the area. And VonCyblos was pretty annoying. Either way, they ended up pulling out of the alliance, but were not asked to forfeit their territory, and were essentially NAP'd with everyone. I think Cafe Doksa knocked them out of the place eventually. We were now down to the clans that would become NASA.503rd Joint Fighter Wing Typhoon Witches (“503TW”);Angels of Death (“AOD”);Brothers Grim (“BG”);HavoK (“HAVOK”);Iron Wolves (“WOLF”);Marder She Wrote (“MS-W”);My Little Pwnies (“MLP”);No Dumb Pubs (“NDP”);Panzac (“PANZA”);Red Sky (“RS”)Relic Armoured (“RELIC”);1ª Cavalaria Blindada ROTA (“ROTA”);Sturmgrenadier (“SG”); andSuper Secret Gentlemen’s Squadron (“SSGS”)NASA, or the North American Server Alliance, was everything that we had been doing up to this point, put in writing, and given a framework on how we would operate going forward. The document itself was put together by the finest lawyers this game has ever produced. It was weeks in the making, and then required multiple meetings for amendments and new drafts before the work was done. Meetings at this point were ballooning to multi-hour affairs, and were separate from the map manipulation meetings we had before CW each night. We were following Robert's Rules of Order , had an elected chairperson, and were taking minutes that were duly recorded on the secret Goon hosted NASA forum. This was all going on through August and early september, and resulted in This. The NASA Partnership Agreement . It was voted on, ratified, and the only thing left to do was sort out who got how much gold. Shouldn't be any problems there, right?While this was happening in TS, some things were starting to happen on the map. Good old 3E had reformed under the Forsaken Hope (FH) tag. This group was actually pretty good, and broke open the gateway to Europe by landing up in Scandinavia. Troms specifically. That area was the responsibilty of RS at this time, with Wolves covering to the East by Murmansk. PC and LEG had already made small incursions there, so RS ahd no friendly chipstacks to draw on. FH proceeded to carve a path south and, I believe, took RS off the map. Support started coming in via the Troms LZ. This was bungled several times, and since no one had a free HQ, it was bringing in single stacks at a time from a different clan each night. Except when some clans lost their fights in the LZ tourney. Or ended up with 2-3 simultaneous fights and decided to skip this fight. In the end, It was 503rd jumping in that did most of the work. They had a free HQ to do work with. HavoK, a relatively new clan at this point, also did a lot of the heavy lifting.The Worst Thread Ever led soon after to ROTA going after WKA in south Scand, with help from GVN who had been hostile co-habitants with WKA for the longest time. WKA were good. Really good. NDP and other clans ednded up having to cycle stacks in to the right to help keep rpessure up to deal with some of the losses ROTA suffered. Also CONDI appearance in the ROTA LZ around the same time. WKA did eventually get chipped out of the area, and proceded to become a real nasty LZ clan for a few weeks before dissipating.We also had the BRAVE FOUR show up. They got set up in Spain to prepare for a psuh into France, but then NASA dropped a million stacks on them. They would later see some significant success in NE Russia (that place again). I am pretty sure Nebocema eventually backstabebd that group, either before or after the fall of NASA, and that was the end of that organized group. the individual clans would remain active for some time. BS and CD were largely broken down to their compent parts. Good RUSS is still around as Good RUSS. STFU got disbanded, reformed as UFTS, and then the cool half split off into DOS. Cool.So about that gold. We had a collective income at that point of around 192k per night, with another 8k available if we stole Spain and a few other spots. So we had 14 members, with 15 clans on the map requiring gold due to AOD/AOD-W being counted as a single partner. 192/15 = lots of gold for each clan. Hahahaha.At this point MLP is sitting on 25k+ per night. 503rd and RELIC are down around 5k each. Some are at 8-9, others are at 15-16. There was a lot of disparity on who had how much gold, and we had to have a majority vote to determine what system we would adpot to distribute the gold. There were spreadsheets. Tiered structure. Graphs. Charts. Meetings and meetings and meetings. Inconclusive votes. One that I remember was that any clan required at bare minimum 8.33k/night, and then additional goldm would be paid out based on the various clan's abilities/performance. "Should have taken the 8.33k" is what you say to the clans who eventually lost out in the post-NASA environment. The major hurdles we had been facing were MLP not being willing to back down from keeping their 25k, and AOD subsequently pegging their gold income to that of MLPs. No model we put together could properly sustain a top heavy gold distribution like that. Eventually we had worked out what a voting majority of the clans felt would be a fair gold distrribution. ROTA, SSGS, MLP, AOD and IW were the holdouts. IE. The Bad Guys. MLP was essentially given the the ultimatum to either get on board or getout. They asked for 48 hours to take it to their memebrs for a vote.I believe it was that same evening when everyone who was completely oblivious realized that things were not going to shake out well. There was a lot of secret TS meetings betweent he various sides to get ready for what had to be an impending conflict. Ask FORGE about the MLP/AOD offmap allies who started swarming them around this time. It was also during all this that the greatest thing this game has ever seen took place. Killer of Lawyers (KOL) v Voth. KOL was the leader of MS-W, and like everyone else he could see the writing on the wall well before the 48 hours request. He was pretty fucking livid about the whole thing, for the amount of time he had spent doing all this, and for the intractibility of MLP from what we all felt were unreasonable demands. KOL, myself, and some of the leads from clans like SG, Panzac and RELIC were hanging out on TS after one of those contentious NASA meetings. I can't even remeber the whole thing, so if someone has a better transcript, then please forwrd it to me. I believe the gist of it was that Voth was trying to convine KOL that MLP's demands were just, and that he should get on board. This led to an escalating exchange because they rally didn't like each other, adn they really didn't agree. After several minutes of out and out shouting, Voth snapped and uttered the line that will live in infamy: "AT EASE CIVILIAN!". Voth was some sort of career military dude, and KOL was pretty much a peacenik. I got to hear squawks of outrage over the internet for the first time ever, before KOL blasted back at Voth. Something along the lines of "Jackbooted, goosestepping, tax-sucking parasite, facist.". Patreal pulled Voth out of there, and that pretty much set the tone for the 48 hours.So, 48 hours are up, and we (the Good Guys) are all hanging out in TS, waiting for our evil counterparts to show. Someone stopped by shortly afterward to let us know that MLP had voted 'NO' ( like 48-1), and that AOD, MLP, Wolves, SSGS, ROTA and BG would be pulling out of NASA. So there went what were arguably the strongest elements at the time off to one side, and the rest of us left holding the NASA flag on the other. Ok. So it's gonna bee good guys vs bad guys, what a classic, these teams a pretty evenly matched! No wait the Goons are feckless traitors and go over to the Dark Side after a series of secret meetings where we determine we would rather be on what we think is going to be the winning side as opposed to those scrubby allies we have more in common with. We're cool like that.So we haveAOD/w/r/aMLPSSGS/BPNIron WolvesROTABGNDPMS-WvsSGPanzac503rdRELICForgeHavoKRS declared independance from any group.War were declared. Threads were made. There was must posturing and posting.and a good link to how the map was looking back thenTime for the NASA civil war folks.

Edited by ChairInABasket, May 10 2012 - 04:48.