Monarchy Woes

So about a week ago, my kingdom declares the Smurfs and it goes to war. Things were looking good during hostile hours with our provinces hitting hard and barely getting a retal, but the instant it went to war, we were surprised by insanely active TM/Attacker elves (I'm impressed they had enough patience to pull a stunt like this) who completely destroyed us in the first day. Thinking we had just screwed ourselves, I immediately started planning our escape. Considering our kingdom has a lot of pride and a history of war wins, I knew if I surrender, it would be a pretty hard blow to us. So, I immediately began preparations for Mutual Peace, by sweet-talking the Smurf's monarch and a bunch of diplomatic mumbo-jumbo. Hopefully, they'd let us slide with an MP if I could impress them enough with my "politeness" (usually we on Utopia prefer to trashtalk like it's an artform).

By the end of the second day, I had negotiated a Mutual Peace and Ceasefire. However, to my horror after logging in, I noticed we pulled a 180 and now "WE WERE WINNING!" Somehow...either the Smurfs were intimidated by Attack Team A's razes, or they ran out of runes and mana. We were now about to throw away a war win. Of course, just as easily as we could turn the tables, they could turn it back...so I decided to wait. I noticed at least, that all thievery and magic ops on me had stopped and this calm time provided me a chance to grow into my barren acres. So we waited.

3 hours later, my absolute best, strongest, most active province, Buu, messages me saying he is getting screwed up the ass by 8 different TMs (landlusted for over 2000 acres and over 30,000 troops killed from meteors and nightstrike). I couldn't understand it. Why did they target him? He was around the same size as me and we had the same wpa. It should have been me. Traditionally, the leader is the one who is supposed to take TM hits for the kingdom since his bonus makes him most resistant to attacks, yet the Smurfs had decided to concentrate their full power on Buu. I realized why we started winning: the TMs switched strategies and focused all their firepower onto one guy, which allowed every one of our provinces to recover and start hitting for land.

Now we could win, but to do it was going to cost my best province an arm, and a leg, and perhaps another arm. I needed to give him time to recover, but I couldn't throw away the chance we had to win. The only solution was to accept the cease-fire, but backstab the smurfs on the MP and just continue hitting them full power after the cease-fire period was over. But this is like...the lowest most dishonorable thing ever especially since they let us go with an CF/MP when they were winning two days ago, so I was unsure whether to go through with it, or uphold my morals and screw the rest of our kingdom out of a war win. I decided to stall and wait for the CF. It would give me enough time to think about what to do.

During the CF, a couple of things happened. First, there was a miscommunication about start time. One of my provinces was unaware of the CF start date (he didn't read the forums and my HUGE MESSAGE THAT I POSTED IN EVERYONE'S LOG IN SCREEN), and attacked into Smurf after the CF started. I sent them a message apologizing on behalf of this province, and said they could make one retaliation. They took advantage of this, but instead of attacking the offending province, they targeted Rovenhagen, who was one of our highest honor TMs and stole a huge amount from him. This pissed me and the rest of our kingdom off, as we did not agree to retal by proxy. Satan Protege gets pissed that the gains were uneven and retals again. So begins a chain reaction until the CF turned into a complete mess and was dissolved.

We are now back in full scale war, but Buu has managed to recover somewhat. We now have an unfair advantage of recovering with more land (due to our war win) and I have their monarch asking me to uphold my initial agreement of MP. I used the excuse of this CF mess and blamed it on them for ruining the CeaseFire with their dirty tactics. Right now, it gives me a reason to cancel the MP agreement and press them for surrender, but I think we have already gained a lot of land and honor from them. Now Degar wants to start a dragon project, which I think is overkill for a kingdom that we are about to screw over anyway. I have decided to go through with the war plan and kill them, but I will not feel good about this win.

I'm not sure why it bothers me, since I have been much more ruthless in the past (bwahahahahaa razing Old School was the best thing ever), but I think it's because I am just getting tired of these game politics and diplomacy. It's been a good 4 ages since I've been King and it's about time I stepped down. Still, I can only trust Buu to be the one to take over my throne, but he also has past experience with monarchy and hates the politics. He just wants to play the game without worrying about plans and teams and organization. Satan Protege wants a chance to take a stab at king but based on the way he handled this CF and his quick temper, it would probably bring the downfall of our kingdom. Nobody wants to follow him either...sometimes, you do a job too well and now the entire kingdom has an irrational loyalty to you (uh it's just a game). I want to resign, but no one can take my place. Thus, I am stuck being Monarch once again. Maybe next age.

Posted by Paranda at June 12, 2005 11:53 AM

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