The Full Story

Or as close to it as anyone is likely to get.

Let me preface this with the fact that I expect the usual Forum and Anti-H? Trolls to have a field day picking my words to pieces - as they would if I posted that the sky is blue and the grass is green. I hope that those who aren't so closed minded get some insight into what is happening in this game we play.

KP

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Harmless have been in this game from Day 1. We are a military alliance who make no apology for the fact that we intend to stay the #1 alliance for as long as we possibly can. We therefore play the long game and we track and remember as much info about people, alliances and events as it is possible to do in the vastness of Illyriad.

Having been around for a while and having been the preeminent alliance pretty much from the beginning we have naturally made enemies - people who don't like our style (White hated the fact we wouldn't play dirty), people who've been on the wrong end of our defense of the defense-less, people who made bad decisions on which side of a war to join and paid for it, people (like those in VIC) who were desperate to join the White war against us but couldn't due to the integrity of their leader at the time refusing to break their NAP with us. In short - quite a few people with beef against H?

Now, we actually like competition so it was with interest that we watched the majority of those Anti-H? people *finally* get their act together and form Consone and it was with a wry smile we saw their stated mandate to "Defend their members" (against what or whom?). After all - everyone knows that a strong offense is one of the best forms of defense.

We've had a constant stream of intel from friends and other sources about their real intentions, but given the debacle that was the VALAR incident (more on that later) we decided to let it run and see what happened, to give them the benefit of the doubt, and if it was going to end in conflict, an opportunity to grow stronger instead of acting precipitously against them.

What happened was depressingly familiar given the known history of those who make up Consone. It started out as random acts of aggression in harvesting resources, settling provocative locations, attacking encampments etc and has steadily built up into a pattern of member alliances doing whatever the heck they want and, when people complain, threatening with the whole weight of Consone behind them. One Consone alliance even tried this with H? and when we wouldn't back down brought in their Consone level diplomat (Jasche). In that case they backed down when we called their bluff - obviously they did not feel quite strong enough to challenge us yet. Other alliances have not been so fortunate.

We had considered that Consone's sheer number of players meant that at some point they would massively outpower us - at which time they could pull the same stunts with H? as they were doing with pretty much everyone else, and therefore we should probably see who else had issues with them and might be friendly in case push came to shove.

As it happens we barely had to lift a finger - we had contact from many other alliances (usually those with whom we'd had previous diplomatic disagreements which were worked out fairly for all concerned) and those alliance leaders confirmed the patterns we had observed. Consone alliances were just going around doing whatever they felt like and backing it up with the confed's power. They would even post rules about how they expected other alliances to behave toward them (in harvesting for example) and then violate those same rules in return - even against training alliances.

Even with this wealth of corroboration we didn't really want to act - and that has a lot to do with the old VALAR. In that situation we seriously misjudged things. Before we declared war on VALAR we carefully weighed up the friends we thought they had and the military strength and production strength they ought to have had with their population (despite having been active with their armies recently) and we figured that if everyone came on board it would be a pretty even fight.  What happened in the end was that VALAR themselves crumbled instantly and *not one* of their friends came to help. The result was an embarrassing rout and it was H?'s fault due to our misjudgement so we came to terms as soon as possible and with as little damage done to anyone other than the worst of their leaders.

So - with that in mind, despite all the stuff going on and the bullying we saw, we waited, for months. Then, recently, came the incident with RHY (with whom we had been friends for a while due to a diplo issue we worked out to everyone's satisfaction).

RHY had an incident over some mines. They thought they had worked it out and were in the process of complying with the agreement when ABSA showed up and basically acted like a-holes. I've seen the messages from Neytri in response to RHY's attempt to deal with the unsolicited and unnecessary attacks and they demonstrate a cockiness, arrogance and aggressive tone which has come to typify Consone dealings over the last few months. You'll have seen some of those messages in another thread on this forum.

Fortunately for RHY - they had an ally, someone with the bark and the bite to stand up to the entire Consone confed and this meant they didn't have to put up with the bullying from Consone as so many other alliances had. Both RHY and H? knew from past events that the moment RHY acted against ABSA that there was a good chance it would be the entire confed that would weigh in to muscle them over but we confirmed with RHY we would back them up and prepared for the worst.

Sure enough Consone acted true to form and came in with guns blazing. The only difference this time was that their victim had backup. As soon as Jasche realized that someone had done something to bring H? into a conflict he tried to recover the situation (trust me on this - had H? not got involved Jasche would have let the whole thing run and let RHY burn). However, despite Consone's belated attempts to recover the situation, we feel that enough is enough and this time Consone need to feel the heat and deal with the consequences of their actions and track record.

So, despite the fact that we are outnumbered, this is war and we'll find out how good Consone really are.

KP