heh, I've always felt that the summation of RD's political power since returning to EE is who they can screw over to "help out" LaF to maintain LaF's sometimes facepalming suppoort (i.e., landtrading when LaF was anti-landtrading, unevening the even war, allying with SoL when LaF was in a trough, etc). Even when RD was smacked by LaF, they always came back. PDM is better at netting per-acre than RD is, but RD still uses a more extreme "find a partner and dance" model, whereas PDM moved to more open grabbing style pacts. Ironic because PDM adapted after fighting the wars to allow RD to landtrade, while RD aligned with the enemies who wanted to kill landtraders, and now those alliances support landtrading themselves. So how can PDM lose politically when all of the alliances that fought against them re:landtrading now embrace the alliance that used it the most for the most gain (and most competition vs LaF players) and event do it themselves in some instances? I'm certainly biased toward PDM and against RD in this assessment, so grab some salt.

Both MD and SoL come out as major political victors this set. SoL put up a solid war effort which I'm sure will energize them and help with recruiting. MD got smoked by overwhelming numbers, but they get the moral victory for SoF needing to call in massively overwhelming numbers. It was like India and China going to war, and then India calling in the USA. Hmm... that's actually a plausible scenario. Anyway, the extra irony is that LaF seemed to essentially be called in for "ruining SoF's netting" -- something SoF doesn't often taken into account when attacking others (unless it's looking for a netting tag to squish...) and in calling LaF in, SoF/MD also took down LaF's netting, which sucks because I'm playing there. So that means another political victor is Evo, who will win ANW thanks to LaF taking time off netting to fight MD. :(

I think we can all agree that it was an interesting round regardless of your take on it.