Hello
I am an longtime member of the Paradox community and a member of the Paradox team in Stratis Imperia. I am also a fan of Dwarf fortress and i have played it quite a lot ,though probably not to the scientific lenghts as many other here's did, as i am usually pretty much beaten up for my crazy compulsion to have every object that can be made of gold in my fort be made of gold. Not hard to find gold in this game.
Ive also been lurking this forum for a few years, read quite a lot of ammusing story's. This is a lovely community, i like it, it has a lot of the elements that i like In the paradox forums too.
There are also plenty of people from Paradox community who visit this forum, and vice versa, probably for the same reason.
And since this game, before the arival of the paradox team 2 months ago, was mainly dominated by players from Poland who mainly speak Polish and have only a gibberisch level of knowledge in the English languaghe, some of us were actully quite pleased with having bay12 people on the server. You guys we know atleast, to some extent.
This Paradox team is everything you can expect of a paradox team. Skilled, up to the most crazily meticulous levels, used to this sort of ballgame all to well. Were doing good. We did well on the previous server. We made a load of planning for this new server. Who was going to get what province in Turkey, our country of choice.
Having other players in our country, especially one's you either cannot identify or actually were enemies on the previous server (a fool of a dutch admiral who bombarded one of our city's to pulp on the previous server thinks he's going to get a fun time with a province in "our" turkey!) is not optimal at all. First of all there is the security concern, as espionage in SI isn't that hard and potentially game breaking, it becomes important for a major team to only have players it can trust in it's country. Then there are the implications to our buildup fase, the fact that others are shaping province's in turkey deffinatly not how we like it, or might form a wall trough which we cannot rail. It might even be so that some team is deliberatly taking province's in our country of preference to later secede, maybe join another county and stab us in the back.
Afcourse, who is to say that we should have a monopoly on Turkey? Well noone, but this is a wargame and we are willing to fight to have Turkey, it is our right to do so. We can always warn people that we won't accept them as members of our country. And to be fair, there is plenty of space under the sun here. Stratis Imperia has 11000 province's and they are not quite all filled yet.
I would also like to, respectfully, advice the bay12 community to watch the actions of Sheb more closely. I doubt the Bay12 community itself wants to agitate the Paradox team, however many of us share the oppinion that Sheb's comments on the Hainan war thread on SI forum and on this thread here were not of a very diplomatic nature, instead it looked more like foolish, if not naive, aggitation while being so called neutral.
Know though, that Persia is welcome to start diplomatic talks with us, and hopefully we will during diplomatic talks both bring diplomats forward who are skilled and can better represent the view of their respective community, rather than having random bickering between isolated members sour our relations.
Though i am not talking as a representative of my country's policy here, personally i would rather have an alliance between Turkey and Persia, that an any other alliance partner considering the other teams.