A Short Treatise on the Early History of Illyriad

HonoredMule wrote: In one case (the Consone war) we knew a large force was being gathered against us and already starting to push us around

It's likely our relations with Consone alliances did in fact go icy right as they went public, but this would be a corellation rather than a causation - especially considering we knew about Consone for some time before they went public.  When they did, we were already ready with a long-considered public response.  But it was at the point of going public that several participating alliances started using that freshly announced power for not-so-subtle political coercion, and attempts to resolve conflicts at a lower level immediately became much harder.

When they failed, the next point of contact was Jasche, and quite frankly, he handled all diplomatic issues very, very poorly.  His response to everything was vapid praise coupled with delay tactics, and he secretly gloated that he was masterfully manipulating us while in reality only pissing us off and making easily resolvable disputes worse.

I use the term misbehaving because suddenly several alliances with limited experience holding power had a lot and in short order started having their character redefined by the least scrupulous of their members.  Alliances misbehaved in that their behavior suddenly included things they'd not be doing or allowing to continue if they still had a healthy fear of reprisal.  Up until this point almost any player could find safety in either a training alliance which would be defended by many large powers, or by joining such other existing powers.  But suddenly most smaller powers weren't large enough to deter harassment from a power governed too loosely to reign in its own actions.

The idea may well have been pure (though a couple key players directly intended the new power to be used against Harmless at least).  But it was not a viable model for diplomacy or governance, especially without more experienced and mature leadership.  Both anarchy and war were, unfortunately, inevitable.  Some participating alliances were just caught in the crossfire, and we tried our best to get them to back down early and relatively unscathed.

I do indeed openly admit that we used secrecy of alliance for entrapment.  Frankly, I don't think this truth is half as bad as we looked to some when we in one swoop declared confederacy with the alliance being attacked and counter-declared on the Consone alliance attacking.  Had we not been in secret confederacy, we'd be in violation of our own non-interference policy.  It was the confederacy that legitimized our involvement, and only our other allies actually knew it to be a true, pre-existing alliegance.

But I think it's important to note our confederacy itself was not a ploy against Consone.  We were on a fast track to allying with them anyway, before their conflict with Consone arose.  Then when it happened we kept quiet with the intention of letting an arrogant power bite off more than it could chew.  We did not however set out to bait Consone into full-scale war with us, and in fact were shocked with how cavalierly the entire confederation insta-escalated a small conflict to all-out war against this tiny opponent.  I'm not sure if they even noticed at this point some Harmless members had joined with the victimized alliance.

(Almost no one knows this as it's a freedom rarely exercised, but while we have a policy of non-interference at an alliance level, our members actually have freedom to pursue conflicts at a personal scale and at their discretion.  Players must have permission if more than one person is involved, and their support from the alliance is limited to none.  We were always built to promote limited engagements, but they rarely happened because that personal discretion still had to fit in our code of conduct lest our members be deemed at fault and forced to make reparations, and fear of the great, mighty Harmless made just causes or significant external provocation rare.)

What we did set out to do was let them pick a fight with a small, weak target which when attacked would grow in strength from our support, teaching the (expected few) participating alliances the danger that comes from bullying.

We wanted the takeaway from that encounter to be that at any time a victim you're targeting could prove far less vulnerable than you presumed.  But I won't blow smoke up your rear either.  We couldn't have been happier when all of Consone declared war.  We felt a large scale war was inevitable, and we wanted it to be on our terms, and Consone couldn't possibly have given us better justification at a time when they were no where near ready for the can of worms they'd opened.  It also happened right when were were in the final stages of gathering adequate support to withstand them if they did come directly at us.


Edited by HonoredMule - 21 Feb 2014 at 07:17

BellusRex wrote: The entire post still doesn't come close to describing how engineered months before hand the whole Trove War was. I was told by an H? director as far back as July, months before the conflict begun, that H? would not let anyone threaten their control, and that they already had "at least 5 scenarios planned to bring down Consone"

Wow.  I've no record of that particular statement being made, but even if it was...  We play smart, but you give us way too much credit if you think we ever had that level of influence and five different plans for your destruction.  We had one plan to engage Consone with the intent of training it in the art of diplomacy and hopefully exposing its destructive leadership.  It was the threat Consone posed to Illyriad's community values that brought Crows and Harmless together (where previously we'd regarded each other with healthy respect and been on very friendly terms, but felt confident in our ability to face any foe that arose alone).  So that would, I suppose, count as plan B.

So, two plans total: one plan to guide Consone to maturity through limited conflict, one fallback plan to prevent Consone from destroying us through superior firepower.  But only one plan where dismantling Consone was even anticipated.  We are older, mature players who stick to a code of honor, not Machiavellian masterminds with fingers in every pot in the land.  If that statement was real, I'd wager it was largely bravado and downright bluffing.  At this point I think it's safe to admit we were scared.

EE as a whole may not have had designs on Harmless, but we had solid intel that at least one influential person in EE did, as did Jasche himself, and certainly plenty of previously defeated opponents were grouped into this single confederation.  The tone of this conversation has been largely pleasant and focused on gathering information for posterity thus far.  I'd like to keep it that way so perhaps this is one can of worms best left alone before it turns personal or fragments into a re-hashing of every war and personal grudge that may or may not have been a factor.

Were we less afraid of what might come out of Consone, perhaps we would have read more into its disorganization - but we wouldn't have believed lack of intent sufficient to keep things from turning sour, as they were naturally going from the onset.  Case in point, we knew Jasche had us in his sights, but we didn't think he wasn't orchestrating the already occurring conflicts.  He planned on playing a slower game and fomenting conflict only after he'd more extensively influenced the participating alliances against us and built up a case for them to organize a more cohesive unified military structure.  These were much longer-term plans than the immediate chaos that arose from Consone's mere existence.  Even the immediate conflict wasn't something we particularly wanted - we knew Consone wasn't ready to beat us, but we weren't confident we were ready to beat them either.  They did outnumber us quite significantly in terms of population or city count, and we didn't yet have a very good idea how far military prowess could compensate for inferior production capability in a large, prolonged war, nor know how many other alliances would rally behind us because of how they were being treated.

But in the same vein, why wouldn't you have evaluated our intentions both in light of who we were and how we publicly responded?

Our reputation and value system are pretty well documented - we've a pretty consistent history of happily finishing fights but not starting them, and despite being a military-focused alliance we have what is quite possibly the most robust, considerate, and fair diplomatic infrastructure of any alliance in the game.  Heck, some of our greatest influence on the server has not been through force of any kind (even political coercion) but rather from leading by example: early newbie protection and care packages (yeah we led and possibly started that practice though it's since fallen by the wayside for us and become the signature act of others), creation of training alliances (obviously plenty of others took up this banner, but we created the first when the environment was far more hostile toward them), protection of training alliances including those with no ties to us - and less visibly: open sharing of treaty standards designed to prevent anyone from being drawn into an unjust war, holding our members to a detailed code of conduct, offering outsiders (both alliances and individuals) clear procedures for conflict resolution along with up front promises and specifics on what to expect, creation of an Embassy open to all and intended to foster wider friendly relations without expanding more formal political ties to a dangerous reach, etc..

When Consone went public, we didn't sit by and wait for it to fail or start a fire, nor did we attempt to sabotage them by fostering internal conflict.  We carefully and promptly, publicly voiced our concerns in direct response to their announcement, and did our best to work/continue working with the member alliances (and, to our considerable frustration, with Jasche).  Some advice was offered (and ignored or refuted as us trying to dictate), and I believe that was largely public as well.  Within an official capacity, our actions and statements were, I believe, both consistent and amenable to a much less violent outcome.  Frankly, had just a precious few key positions been staffed with wiser, more prudent players, it all could have ended quite peacefully.  This is also why we really focused our the attention of our terms on a few key players.  We felt they were largely responsible for bringing about a massive war which should have been unnecessary.  Yes we are a military alliance, and yes we like a little war.  But our history does indicate the limited extent of that like.  Even in the White War our bloodthirst dried up when the threat to our survival evaporated.  And remember Knights who say Ni?  They were an ally who stood with us against White, but afterward they became quite aggressive and undiplomatic themselves - we fairly promptly broke off all diplomatic ties to them, and left them to fail on their own.  Our Consone battle plans were a parallel development alongside more optimistic endeavors.

BellusRex wrote: With that said, I actually had no problem with H? acting against what they perceived (rightly or wrongly) as a threat to them. In time Consone could very well have been a threat. Strategically, they were totally correct to hit us while weak and unorganized. What I objected to and found so offensive was all the spin and outright deceptions they put out through the whole war as to cause, motivation, etc...

Of course there was certainly a major communication problem which was quite publicly visible during the war, and I alluded to it when I said "within an official capacity."  That war had a ridiculous number of participants and everyone had something to say everywhere they could possibly say it.  Consone was a very loose confederation, and many of the alliances who arose to ally with us were not well established either, but joining forces because of how they were getting treated by Consone members.  The result was practically pure white noise from both sides.  Armed with previous experience, we knew how destructive that kind of open dialog was, but many of our members with less experience needed to learn it for themselves.  Few if indeed any actively meant to decieve or spin the narrative on our side and though it was really hard to see it that way at the time, I suppose the same would be true of your side.  It really irked me when I saw Harmless members get drawn into an argument and end up saying something that was more rooted in their own misunderstandings or personal vendettas than the information readily available to them.  And to top it all off, there were at that time actually still quite a few forum participants who were not part of the war.  Back then it would never have taken weeks for someone to bother asking for an update on the largest war the server had seen so far.  No, they were as vocal and opinionated as the actual participants.  Whatever the root cause, a lot of slander and garbage went both ways, and I hated it.  I think that was when my presence on these forums first sharply declined.

But regarding things that were said and done in an official capacity, I believe we were very consistent in the problems we identified, the catalysts we predicted would cause war, and then our references back to those issues and requirements demanded during the war.  For example, before the war we said Consone needed a better plan for conflict resolution that included consideration of the outside party, and the confederation needed to do better than blindly lend its might to however individual alliances chose to behave.  The alliances just ignored the grievances of very small parties, and in other cases deferred all incidents to Jasche, who just swept them aside with platitudes and false assurances.  During the war, we directly reacted to that by cutting Jasche out of peace negotiations because he was a major part of the problem, and holding alliances directly and individually responsible for their own future.

The public debate was perpetually out of control - I can't begin to remember half the crap that flew around - but the few qualified to speak did earnestly try to stay on point with two equally valid justifications for our presence in the war: a pattern of failing conflict resolution, and direct full-scale war against our ally.  Twas this latter point that was most subject to subversion, as every voice on both sides felt it needed to in some unique way embellish or even re-invent this point.  A rare few of Consone voices had pretty coherent creative versions of the story based on how they perceived our secret and suddenly published confederacy, much as I previously described.  A big part of the problem there was how few actually knew what was going on.  Our part in the plot was largely managed in secret at a leadership level, and even for our own membership much was revealed later and then perhaps not adequately explained - often out of fear that sensitive intel would be accidentally exposed.

I think you can see that in this war, we've done a better job of keeping quiet and avoiding such wholly unhelpful debates.  I tend to operate somewhat as Harmless's unofficial spokesman, and even I am careful to speak up only occasionally, and only so far as to offer a little grounded/counterbalanced perspective for posterity.  There is no war to be won on these forums, and the people who try to fight one here say more about themselves than their opponents.  This is a conversation I can get involved in because so far it feels actually productive and informative.  I like to think Harmless grew and matured from that experience, because if we haven't we'll give away a moral high ground that at this point should frankly be near impossible to take from us, and instead just look like sore, pouty losers.  That, I suppose, is a good example of how one's position can so heavily warp how his words are received.

For what it's worth, I'm sorry for how the consone debate went down.


Edited by HonoredMule - 21 Feb 2014 at 06:43

HonoredMule wrote: EE as a whole may not have had designs on Harmless, but we had solid intel that at least one influential person in EE did, as did Jasche himself, and certainly plenty of previously defeated opponents were grouped into this single confederation.  The tone of this conversation has been largely pleasant and focused on gathering information for posterity thus far.  I'd like to keep it that way so perhaps this is one can of worms best left alone before it turns personal or fragments into a re-hashing of every war and personal grudge that may or may not have been a factor.