I think you are looking at it wrong. For a continent to have a capital that continent needs to be thriving. If you prevent it from thriving by beating the pulp out of any and everyone you shouldn't be rewarded for ruling over a continent in ruin. Either way, I do have some suggestions and criticism of the way y'all are doing things.
- Its hard for you to claim a system is broken when you sit around and only pick on new people. Go to war with Hilo instead of waiting for a new town to rise up only to be promptly squashed by the combined power of Hilo and Eldritch. I know we joke about y'all attacking each other often but in all seriousness you can't be complaining about a lack of war when you ally yourself with the only town that can offer a fair fight.
- You need to be helping towns grow. Hilo is much worse than y'all in this department but I've seen neither one of you do anything to help other towns grow. You simple sit around and crush anyone who even begins to expand their borders. If you were instead help towns grow and promise not to hit them more than 1-2 times per month no matter what you might find you have no trouble getting capital because people don't feel like their going to be immediately wiped out.
- The final point is again something Hilo is worse at than y'all and even Crypt could pitch in here to make this a more clear option. Be a nice capital. Make people like you. If they like you they may be willing to give y'all points to be capital because its better than anyone else having capital and also not having a capital. (Imagine if you could provide capital policies that benefited everyone on the continent). At the very least, don't do the opposite like tax people harder and embargo items.
And as for your ultimatum... I'll be interested to see if it works. I'd be pretty surprised if you could actually both obtain capital that way. Seems pretty hard to do given that if you get X amount of points from a battle, the other side loses X amount of points.
And as a final point, if you just want to fight and aren't as concerned about capital, don't attack people. Promise them you'll only defend yourself. Now towns can feel safe making tgens and not feel like its a useless endeavor. And with tgens they can now place inhibs and attack y'all.
TL;DR: Ruling with an iron fist is only a good idea if you don't want competition.
if there is no capital then let it be. Thats your own fault that you have destroyed every single resistance to your alliance. And made it so auru couldnt resist anymore.
play fair.
The issue is that the only way to capital is through conquest, and we still want to participate even though none of you do. Just because everyone except for our
one ally don't want to compete should not preclude us from achieving capital if we have the means and motivation to do so. It's not our fault that our enemies told all the new players on the server that we were some big, bad tyrants, and that they should join the fight against us. We did not provoke fights with
anyone. While our war with NI went back and forth for a while, ultimately that conflict was started by
them, not us. For example, we only attacked Sudkuste because they were allied with NI, and they were closer to us, and more convenient. Skuhoo and I, along with the rest of Eldritch,
have/had no intention of making enemies with every player on the server. We avoid implementing policies that would have negative effects on other towns, and would have been (and still are) glad to try and help new towns get into conquest, because ultimately, we
don't want to have completely uncontested control over the continent, because
that's not fun for us either. The fact of the matter is. our enemies jumped at the opportunity to turn all the new players on the server against us, and then decided that they didn't want to fight since we were still winning.
I
do understand that some of you want nothing to do with conquest, and that's okay. And I also realize that some want to take some time to gather resources, practice pvping, and try to learn conquest better, which is
great (I look forward to people coming back for bigger and better battles in Conquest 2.0). But it still remains that we shouldn't be punished for wanting to be capital when no one else does. And while we could mock war with Hilo, a lot of our members are occupied with things IRL, and we don't really have the numbers to make it fun. In addition, we've been on the server for nearly 8 months now, and Hilo is the only town to have ever helped us. Back when Eldritch was a tiny little babby town, The Isle, Ignis, and Woodswork all attacked us, and Hilo was the
one town that stepped up and offered us help against them. And we know how you feel about seemingly unbeatable enemies. Pre-1.9, Elysium was basically untouchable, but those who opposed them worked hard, banded together, and fought the good fight, no matter if we won
or lost, and we all had
fun, because everyone gave it their all. So I understand that you all want to try and improve before throwing more resources into conquest. But you have no right to complain when you form a 3-continent alliance of effectively every town on the server, and all decide to stop pvping, because that denies us any legitimate path to capital, forcing us to win trade,
which we really don't want to do unless there's no other option.
P.S. While I do disagree with what Hilo (allegedly) did with the TGens surrounding Auru, other than that we have not done anything
but play fair. We didn't pick fights with the new towns, they were brought into it by our enemies.
Beating you legitimately in conquest is not unfair.