Stopped in randomly out of the blue for a little nostalgia and found this little gem of a thread. Needless to say, I'm thrilled.
In this thread:
My old teammates won a crown.
Chigs are going to lose (from what I can tell).
Chigs are still trying to explain themselves and revise history.
MissChievousPixie is still spewing nonsense.
Some things never change! I'll throw my two cents in just for the fun of it, realizing that it doesn't matter, it makes no difference, and no one cares.
When MC left, Apoc was at its height. We had great position (or so we thought, at least) and we had vision, one aspect of which was shoring up our borders -- specifically the northern frontier -- which we were executing at the time. Our initial skirmishes and forays against the Chigs, while having mixed success, still inspired hope and confidence. We were gearing up for the inevitable conflict with the Chigs, and that gave us a collective purpose. The betrayal of the chipmunks stung at first, but that very quickly subsided and was actually, in retrospect, a positive turn of events, providing us with both a rallying cause and some immediate strategic advantages. There were some plans already set in motion to secure pacts and agreements with other alliances to establish a coalition against the Chigs, and more were in the works.
Then MC left. And yes, admittedly, it almost immediately started going downhill. But it's false to state that the decline started prior to MC leaving.
Was it just timing? A coincidence? Would Chigs have beat Apoc anyways? Maybe. It's speculation, of course, and eminently debatable.
Apoc fell apart for a lot of reasons (don't say it's all MRA because that's what Albatross is, and they're going to win Chi), but the two biggest reasons, in my opinion, are areas that MC would have had a direct impact on -- Chigs flipped the tables on us and led an effective coalition AGAINST us, and leadership -- or lack thereof.
As much as the Chigs liked to put down Apoc as the drastically inferior MRA, they knew they couldn't beat Apoc on their own, so they enlisted the aid of Neph and OoA. Chigs seem to get defensive about this issue and have denied in the past, for reasons unknown to me. But it's the truth of what happened -- whether it was brilliantly masterminded by the Chigs or just loosely coordinated -- that Apoc collapsed because it could not defend so many fronts at the same time.
Would this Chig-led coalition have even formed with MC still in the picture? I don't know. Probably. But without American Standard or MC, there was no left in Apoc who was good at working those behind-the-scenes arrangements, those cloak and dagger deals, those subtle political and diplomatic maneuvers that are so important. What would MC's counter have been? We'll never know.
And in general, there was no leader to take over after MC left. Leadership, in my opinion, is the single biggest reason Apoc lost the war. Boiler basically became the leader by default. He led by example -- as a good player -- but he's not a leader. He admitted it himself then and I imagine he'll admit it today. To make matters worse, we had a council that really had some lowlifes. GMan was the bar none, like-nothing-I've-ever-witnessed-before, ultimate coward. He tucked his tail and pissed himself at the first sign of trouble. Plumbersteve was a total slime ball. Although he lasted a little longer, on his way out he stabbed us in the back and then took a dump in our bed while we were down. And Darius Nax -- probably the second worst "leader" with respect to diplomacy and politics in the history of Grepolis, surpassed only by yours truly. But I think DN gets a bad rap for trying to "sell out" when his diplomatic overtures were really just clumsy and oblique. To his credit, he tried to keep things together in Apoc when everyone else had bailed, and he fought the good fight for almost as long as I did.
(Yea, yea, I know you Chigs will respond with "you only stayed to fight because you had to, because we didn't invite you to defect." Except that's the ol' chicken and egg debate. DN and I would never have joined the Chigs. And you knew that.)
Obviously, leadership is crucial. My opinion of Jham has been thoroughly stated before. It's not good, I'll leave it at that. However, I won't deny that his style and methods were successful in many respects, and I give him credit where it's due, despite the fact that I don't agree with them. The point being -- MC's leadership was missing when the Chigs attacked Apoc. Had he never left, it would have turned out differently. How would it have turned out? Who knows? Not me. Chigs may still have won. Probably. But maybe not....
Anyways, thanks for the unexpected trip down memory lane. It's hard to imagine this server still going, but I guess that's part of the definition of boring -- it just keeps going, and going, on and on and on...
Congrats to MC and DN.
Good luck to OoA, keep up the good work.
