The forums have got a little bit boring as of late, so I've decided to go on a little bit of a rant. Whether you want to read it or not is up to you, but I will warn in advance it is going to be long. As most people probably know, we are at war with Mutiny as our next direction of expansion. There are a multitude of reasons for this that I won't go into because they don't matter and aren't particularly relevant to the conversation. Before the beginning of the war, I believe most people would have rated Mutiny to be somewhere in the top two of the big three tribes, the actual ranking being dependent on who you talked to. That at least is what I gathered through asking players from my tribe and through having a reasonable idea of what members in Mutiny and P.T.G think about their respective tribes.
So obviously when it came to STD vs Mutiny, the question was how it was going to play out in the battlefield. I remember talking to Dan from Prometheus and at least from our conversations he was relatively confident in Mutiny's abilities or perhaps it was just a case of putting on a strong front. On our end, there was the general perception at least from most of the tribe that it would be a close match but we would win, especially if P.T.G decided to attack us also, which was an assumption we ran on when deciding to commit to war. For most people in STD, I think it was a case of thinking we were overall better in terms of individual skill, size and teamwork. That may be true, but I looked at it differently and I'm going to be ranting mostly about why I was confident when it came to the fight and how this has affected the actual war. To put my confidence in the war into one word, irrespective of skill, size, leadership and why I think we would probably be likely to win (of course things can change) at the same size or possibly even smaller is because of geography.
There are generally two schools of thought at the top level as to how tribes develop geographically and they get to the core of the identity of a tribe. Take STD as an example, for the most part, STD members are very interwoven geographically and it is mostly where new players have been recruited that you find clusters containing villages from only a single player. This is shown to a lesser extent when it comes to the ex-Rage/Wett members, though this has been changing slowly, but could be seen pretty clearly in STD/S3XY. Below I've put a map showing this:
Map of STD's top 15 players
A note is that if you included every member (alas I did not have enough colours) the contrast I am about to show would be a lot better.
The second school of thought is embodied in Mutiny, a lot of individual clusters that join together to create a bigger whole. It is the mindset of I'm the king of my area, he's the king of his area and so on and so forth. This map is a lot clearer cut than the one I put above and shows exactly what I am talking about.
Map of Mutiny's top 15 players
To add onto this briefly, this is not a hundred percent accurate rule, but more of a general observation. There are obviously exceptions to the rules on both maps above.
As I have time, I'll briefly go through P.T.G family and their tribe layout as it is an interesting mix of the two styles of geography. P.T.G are a bit of interesting case as you can see a clear distinction between the Koreans and the Non-Koreans in terms of how they interact. The Korean players, the likes of Niceday, Pongdang, Attack, Voice Trap etc. in the north west are interwoven whereas the non-Koreans which the bigger players are mostly ex-Ban as well as ex-ABC exhibit that similar individualism to Mutiny.
Map of P.T.G Family's top 15 players
So the question really is, which style is better?
My personal opinion is that the former is, but the latter comes with its own strengths which is why people use it. Mutiny is clearly not an awful tribe at least individually, so why is their spread like it is? Generally this style indicates a couple of things in top level tribes. Firstly lack of tribal coordination or easy growth and secondly very strong individual players who can generally get stuff sorted on their own. People also actually like playing this way more than the collective way asides from a few weirdos such as myself (I know Hells Toy Master is another big proponent), having your own turf is not only a nice ego boost in terms of you being able to say you own such and such part of the map, but it is also strong on the local level both offensively and defensively on an individual level. It also, if the tribe falls apart for some reason gives you a higher chance of being recruited or being safe.
The way STD plays is not particularly individualist, we value tribal level coordination very highly, so we've ended on top of each other. It comes with its own strengths. Whilst no-one really gets their own turf, access to help is a lot easier and it is more potent on the tribal level offensively in terms of close range noble counts. It does however rely on STD succeeding, a lot of players will be in big trouble if we fail. As well as that, communication between players is very important, not much ground will be made if communication is lacking if this is the formation as you don't need to talk to anyone in order to get stuff done if you hold the entire front. In that way, it is a double edged sword.
So why do I think being collectivists (so to speak) gives us an inherent advantage all things equal? It comes down to numbers. To take one example, before the start of the war, we were planning on hitting Condolences in particular as one of our main targets. Condolences only really has himself to rely on on his front, though Whalecome has nobled some villages later. Meanwhile he is within nobling distance of Foxslayer09, Fastlane, Erig, -Daemon-, Kekua, Ashoka1 and Slap and Tickle. Essentially Condolences is in a 1v7 situation, which even for a top player is not an enviable task. STD gets to share the load of attacking and you get seven times the pressure in terms of noblemen than in a 1v1. Of course there are certain situations where this is advantageous as you can set up situations like this to bait your enemy into attacking your best defenders. There is a similar situation set up for Sentient Watermelon also, though less on that front has been done yet.
What this has resulted in during the war, though PTG taking revenge for Mutiny chomping on their inactives has been a factor at least with condolences, is the individual players, when being surrounded by multiple players getting the worse end of exchanges resulting in our own advantage. On the other end, Mutiny does not have enough firepower to get through tribal level defending with perhaps only one or two players threatening with nobles per major frontliner. All in all this makes the war, purely based on the geography a lot easier.
Regardless, I am looking forward to seeing how the world plays out over the next few months and whether there will be any changes, but I just thought this was an interesting titbit to share.