Leadership styles
Leadership is one of the most important keeping an alliance moving and surviving. There are many styles of leadership and many qualities that an alliance often seeks for when they start out their alliance. The three most common types of leadership styles I have come across are Dictatorship, usually of two, a Council and the interesting democratic idea of entire alliance participation. Each has their pros and cons some work to a greater degree, others to a lesser. Whatever the case may be, each alliance has some form of leadership if it wishes to be successful.
Dictators are the leaders that make all the decisions themselves, war, diplomacy, who should be attacked, what cities should be handed over in a treaty and the rest of the alliance, usually, accepts this without complaint. A forceful personality is required for this style of leadership to be really successful, as a weaker person will see mutiny from within the ranks. Most dictatorial alliances have a number 2 who they can trust as it is almost impossible to run an alliance with one person, especially when it gets to almost unmanageable sizes. The Alliance Dark Judgement was one such alliance I encountered with a dictator rule of 2. It was a formidable alliance but when they quit almost fell apart over internal successor issues. Another one was the United Aegean Empire, when the Emperor quit he have Founder rights to most of his commanders leaving the alliance in a mess. In Chi, TOTALITY Avant Garde is like this, the dual leadership of Farg and Deathsycthe leads their alliance in their wars.
A Council is the most common form of leadership found on Chi, even dictators often have some form of Council to help them makes decisions, whether or not they actually do so all the time is another matter entirely. The Chi alliance Knights in Tights is one such alliance, as is insertnamehere. They both run with a council of leaders and other figures, of greater or lesser numbers, which oversee alliance direction. A Council is often seen in better light by the alliance members than a dictator as they know they can trust the Council to decide, together, on the best directions for the alliance as a whole rather than a favoured group, which is the trap of dictators if they are not careful.
The Democratic style of alliance is an interesting one and involves complete voting on all issues by the alliance members This makes declaring war, or agreeing to a Pact a chore when having to get all members to vote, how long do I leave up the vote? Is probably the most important question a leader asks when getting the vote up. It can also lead to problems in that a desirable pact or ceasefire is not considered desirable by your alliance, even though the merits are clearly there to see. That said, this form gets an alliance fully participating and they feel even more so that it is their alliance. Two examples I have encountered of this alliance was The Roman Republic on Beta and Deimos Arisen on Chi. The first alliance was one I lead in, and was a disaster, when I finally took supreme control I merged them to survive into another alliance. There were far too many players to actually properly lead. Deimos Arisen seems to do well with their democracy, maybe due to fewer players than most alliances.
Of course, one can amalgamate all these ideas together and decide on a completely different style of leadership, there is the Triumvirate + Council which is my favoured form of leadership, this involves 3 central leaders and an unknown number of others who are there to help make decisions. Another style is centralised control with various votes, either for leaders or for some big policy decisions. Whatever way you do it, deciding on how you will govern and lead the alliance is one of the biggest tasks facing the leadership of an alliance, and continues all the way through the game.
