I think it was a Gemini, or Phish that told me that TW-Orthia war.
no - you're mistaken. i'm sure some clowns will see fit to capture each other's towns on a small scale, but i know at TW-S we consider whatever is left of thunder gods to be public enemy #1.
city slots / culture are precious commodities so i don't think many city spots are going to be wasted trying to capture towns with people we're on good terms with. I know i'm not going to waste my culture on orthia when thunder kitties still need to be punished.
there were some epic P&P's going on at the beginning of alpha. tw-s was pretty ruthless and we had massive amounts of players joining from our parent site
http://www.tribalwar.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=1 (which is NOT to be confused with tribalwars.net another innogames browser based game that TW dominated like crazy). all the players from that site were indeed misanthropes and it was hilarious...
i remember some fresh alliance decided to declare war on us early on (i think it was the imperial empire - no need to go into the repetitive silliness of that name, they've already been bashed for it). Lobster just sent out a great worded letter with a one time offer for their top 15 or so players to join our rank, and that's exactly what happened. without launching a single cship their alliance lost something like 60k points. Considering this was back when only a
handful of people were actually able to build colony ships (let alone had conquest researched) 60k points was a lot.
the war vs thunder gods was interesting. it's too bad they all up and quit... right around the time i had cleared them out of o45 where i started and moved up to o44 to fight them too =/
i remember they snuck a siege in on a grabbathebutt who was legitimately afk and was letting his roommate try to play (bad idea) in his absence. anyway grabbathebutt returns just in time to see a slew of incoming attacks / supports. TW launches the first true siege break of world alpha and levache came to these forums to try and get all manner of riff-raff to stack that city with their biremes (another loliance!). it honestly was a close one - i remember our irc channel was off the chain that day. huge celebrations and everyone yelling "siege break! lollolololol." can't imagine that was a fun day for thunder gods - though we did give one of their better players way too much bp/culture.
siege breaks like that are so stupid if you ask me... nothing but a bp fest for the sieger and they rarely work due to obvious game mechanics - biremes are cheaper to build, and travel faster, not to mention the fact that the max LS fleet you can send out is somewhere around ~300 with most being closer to ~250. on the other hand there's no max to the amount of biremes you can stack in a city. 250 ls vs say 4000 biremes doesn't do much.