I don't know you personally, nor do I know most of the other the Independent leaders (I don't actually know who is leadership there and who isn't, except for Dave), but I have to say, in my short time in this game, I have seen enough backstabbing, dodgy deals, etc, to not be suspicious at times. And a sudden hostile secession followed by a very quick agreement with Indies is something that I am naturally going to regard with at least a little suspicion at first, even if it eventually turns out not to be like that.
Yep. I can definitely agree on that. Shame that they had to fall as they did, with people running away, but I suppose that's what happens in Grepolis these days.
First point Kal, we are straight shooters. We DO NOT use spies nor do we EVER take up any offers by a player to infiltrate another alliance. It's a HUGE NO for us. We shop players like that to their alliance, even enemies. Ask War Pigs, we shopped two of their players to them for those reasons and gave aforementioned players a good kicking to boot. We'd do that for ANY enemy, friend, Neutral, ANYONE because we hate that sort of player. We play an ethical game. No spies, not botters, no slimeballs who take pleasure in getting personal with other players (although we are only human, sometimes we'll react to a gobchite). You won't see us splitting up, changing our name every 10 mins and blaming each other if we started losing, or trying to buy time with all the BS I've heard from our enemies since war broke out. You'd just see us come back even harder. We are ruthless at times, we are aggressive, we play hard but we are always fair.
Indie are a class act, we don't need to lower ourselves to the levels of lesser alliances, we'd rather lose..
As for Awakening. Yes they got a fast deal. I'll tell you why. They came to us when it was literally 1 player who'd left Pandora because of a disagreement over him losing cities to us. I took one of his cities and disagreed with Pandora's assesment of that players performance. I threw 5 CS at him before gaining the city, 3 burned. His biggest mistake was probably thinking I'd not come back for another bite. I did, he lost the city. That said I think Pandora were rough on him.
This player come to us, said he had left and was going to bring disgruntled TOP Pandora players over to us. What has actually happened is they ditched the previous leaders, recruited a player who I know hates us (and will no doubt be looking to get rimmed by us again), sent some players to Blue Magic and have no intentions whatsoever of honoring the agreement. Basically they copied the Blue Magic blueprint for buying time as they used that old chestnut first.
So we'll batter them again.. We don't fight wars for rivals to benefit..
Hope that clears things up..