where do we go from here?

Day 541, 16:40 • Published in USA USA • by scrabman

Okay, we lost FER and perhaps more importantly Romania lost Podolia and WSR. These are devastating losses. First, Romania has lost both of its high iron regions meaning that we are severely hampered on our ability to buy iron for manufacture of weapons. Secondly, we planned for months for our attack on FER and we saved more gold than we've ever used in any single attack and it still failed against the hordes of defenders. Even with PEACE forces spread thin by a coordinated attack by our allies they managed to come back and win all 3 battles. The prize for winning FER would have been the high iron region that is adjacent to FER and now that is also out of our reach.

So who is to blame for this? Nobody. Sure we could say that it is a lot of different things. I've heard that it's because PEACE had the audacity to not tell us when they were launching their attacks and that they happened to be on a day when we were doing War Games for half the day. I've heard that it's because PEACE cheated, which may be true but I don't know. I've heard that it's because nobody likes me ... which certainly seems true from the media ... but so what?



I had my Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and General of the Marines, my loyal and very accomplished top military adviser, Eugene Harlot, try to tender his resignation today. He wanted to fall on his sword and take blame for our loss today in a high level IRC room. I told him no ... that I would not accept his resignation because it is not his fault and that I would be depriving eUSA of one of its greatest assets to accept such an offer. But he was demoralized ... as am I. Over the last 2 days I have received more than 300 PMs (and I responded to most of them). I have been gearing up for this for weeks so we did not fail for lack of planning. I was messaging a bunch of other leaders and got commitments from many of them to send us troops today ... but it wasn't enough.

The reason why I think we lost is because we need more players to have higher combat strength. This was something that I have spoken about for a long time ... before I was President even. Our military has traditionally relied too much on tanks and less on individual soldiers and that has been the purpose of the War Games. Despite the fact that so many have whined about how they don't like war games. Let's revisit my article The Value Of War Games. In fact, I plan to move forward with our USA-Ireland War Games when we are able to reset them tomorrow.

With so many people who have the potential to raise their rank from frequent battles we stand to gain a lot from leveling them up. I'm at the point where I'm 50,000 battle points between levels and I'm only 24K into that next goal ... but newer players are much closer to that next level. This is where the Army comes into the picture. It used to be the middle point between the National Guard and the Marines and it has been the missing link for a while. However, this was one of the things that I had hoped to work on when I started my first term in office and I'm happy to say that we've been seeing some reform in these areas lately.

When I was first in the Army we traveled around the world and fought in all sorts of locales and got a lot of great experience while the government paid for moving tickets and sometimes for weapons too. At some point our military shifted more toward tanking, giving high ranked players Q5 guns and 80 gold to go to town on the wall. This practice, while effective, always seemed to leave so many people out of the wars which is why I wanted to get our war games working again. As you can see, real wars are very expensive to fight .. war games are not. I would like to see the Army scoop up these middle ground players and revitalize their interest in the game where they get to travel around and fight on a rotation basis and have the war games in the mean time between deployments.

I'm happy to say that General Armandez has stepped up to fill the role left by General Symrstar who served the Army with distinction for a long tenure. General Armandez has been working with Vice President Moishe, Secretary of Defense Leroy Combs, and the rest of the Joint Chiefs and they have been planning new ways to use the Army and the command structures of the various branches. They are exciting changes and I hope they will bring us more success and more fun as we continue with eRep. I have to commend all of our military for their performance over the last several weeks. They are truly an awesome fighting force.

In the mean time, we're broke and I have no regrets for leading this nation to the best of my ability. We need to rebuild our funds and come up with even better ways to use our resources. We will get through this and the next President will have a lot to build upon. We will rebuild. We are America (and so can you)!

Scrabman - eUSA President