Not that it was particularly mandatory for your piece, but it is worth noting the one group that did not drop the ball at all *after* the raid - while the natives may have made missteps before it to allow it to happen, while SWORD, TGW, and everyone else couldn't pick a path after it went down, they were solid in theirs. They moved right to a new region,
with alts, leaving their mains in Westphalia and contacting as many people as possible to WA up and cross up. They made sure to reclaim nearly every active player from TRR to their new region as they were ejected from WP. They did not flame, or spam, but resisted as effectively as they could alone and with dignity. They did kept their allies and embassies up to date on things. They spoke up in the second Lib thread especially. If they'd crossed harder prior in their existence and built up even more base influence in the first place, or had as much as the top 4-6 nations had on a dozen or two nations, it would not at all have been possible to clear in a month...as is, it took 9 or our 11 Ro's, and having nearly all of them use the delegate's seat to avoid double costs, to get it done in that timeline.
One thing about this operation remains curious to me, though. Maybe the natives can answer it. Who *is*
Etlara, author of the first lib? Does anyone actually know them? Are they a puppet of someone else? Are they active on Discord? Because they're sure not very active on site.
One page of forum posts,
only a few pages of RMB posts, mostly in one chunk a few months ago with sporadic posts since. And yet they showed up and wrote what is, for all intents and purposes, a fairly good lib, with only minor rules violations. That's with no visible experience, again. Maybe
The Grand Puffle Republic, the co-author, actually did most of the work and just found a native to submit it? I don't know. It's just odd, odd enough that I got seriously asked more than once if this was a raider sleeper meant to sink the odds of a later lib by pre-empting with a "meh" one. (It's not).
Unibot played that up. Around the same time he
claimed he did not ghost write this one, only most native libs. The whole thing was just an extra layer of odd behind most all mainstream defenders actively fighting a liberation.
*shrug* It's not really consequential, in the long run. I'd just certainly be interested in an investigative piece on the topic.