The South Pacific

This came up in #legislators-lounge and this is turning more into a discussion thread about Frontiers and Strongholds so... yeah, everything thread about Frontiers and Strongholds, people's thoughts on it and how people think TSP should cope with it.

For clarity, the Frontiers and Strongholds change is a technical change that Sedgistan currently strongly wants to implement (see here), despite intense pushback. It basically means that UCR's, if they are large enough can choose whether to be a Frontier (lose executive powers on their founder, but get nations to spawn in them) or a Stronghold (basically an existing UCR, though a founder can choose a successor to replace them as founder if they CTE).

EDIT: This is in the private forums because there's no reason to having it in public other than NSGP scoring points against us and getting unnecessary copage from them

In my opinion, this change would overall be problematic as it legitimises raiding of Frontiers (something definitely against our values as a strongly defender-aligned region), making them prone to raiding and even griefing in exchange for the incentive of recieving, what, 3 founded nations a day? More importantly (for us), this would mean that feeder regions like TSP get half of the amount of nations spawning in them than they do currently.

That F/S is coming is mostly a foregone conclusion at this point; the question is rather when and how we deal with it politically.

I'm not a fan of it, but I absolutely see why Sedge is pushing the change.  The majority view is that Gameplay has gotten stale and so they're wanting to do something to stir things up and increase activity.  It makes sense from that perspective, even though I think it is rather ill-conceived.  The majority view is that military gameplay needs successful raiding in order for it to be dynamic and attractive enough to pursue, and I think that is what Sedge is trying to create.

I don't know what our response should be, but it would need to be positive and not merely reactionary.  Instead of trying to preserve our spawns and protest that this change seems to tilt pro-raider, we would need to present our own ideas for revitalizing the game, since I think that is (and should be!) the end goal.

I say all this as one who isn't really involved in Gameplay, so pardon my ignorance in the above.  I've lurked a bit, so just my thoughts.