I joined this community in 2014 as a teenager deeply interested in politics. I had heard, essentially, that civ was a political experiment and that politics between people was the primary cause for international intrigue, nation management--the lot.

I've come to realize, and have realized for some time, that the traditional definition, or at least my definition of politics (I.E. committees, voting, full-throated republicanism or democracy, nations deciding not to do something because the people voted against it, etc...) is a total and complete fabrication, broadly speaking of course.

World events in civ are primarily driven by the same forces that drive people to sit at different lunch tables in high school. It's clique based. Who you drink with, who you joke with, and who you sit in VC with matters much more than who your "voter base" is, and that has a two fold effect of making it harder for new players to join somewhere like, say Estalia or any other traditional clique based nation, and makes for a server where events are pretty predictable. Whoever is not in the clique is either in the crosshairs, or isn't thought about at all.

That's not to say new players can't climb the ranks, and that's not to say that nations that are clique based are bad. I fully subscribe to the mentality I described above. Yes, Juniortide is Icenian, but I also am friends with him out of the context of Icenia. I'd hop on Rust with him, give him music recommendations, sit around and booze in VC with him, or give him advice on whatever. Icenia simply is the vehicle under which we do that.

I think there are some pretty blatant issues with this mentality too. It causes elections in nations like Icenia to be somewhat stale some months, causes the same war to happen repeatedly, and makes actual no shit political workmanship to be that much more boring. It also makes diplomacy a totally informal affair, which I both love and detest. I can hop in VC with someone and smooth things over quickly, but it's non-binding.

I don't know why I felt compelled to post this, it's just a thought I had when sweetening up some audio from an interview I did today.