Beltshumeltz

Player Info (Beltshumeltz)
Forum PM	link
Alias(es)	Empress Althena, Beltz
Joined	1999
Alliance
Current Alliance	iMag
Alliance History
Former Alliance(s)	Berserk
Contact Info

Beltshumeltz (aka Beltz), is the name of an alliance server player who has held many positions of leadership since late 1999. He is noted to have risen to power fairly quickly; not long after he began playing. He has also enjoyed success as a leader under his alter-ego Empress Althena.

He first became somewhat known as a council leader in the United Council of Nations during the SOL-UCN War (2000). He became better known once he became president of Devil's Advocates for 2 resets in 2000. Later on, he would found the Imaginary Numbers and the short-lived, but successful Berserk. He has come back to Imaginary Numbers several times, and also has a long history of playing in Survival of the Fittest during leadership breaks, though he was never a leader there.

He is also known for being somewhat of a popularizer of spam tags, message bot recruitment, and for being capable of rapidly building a decent alliance which, most of the time, significantly disintegrates upon his departure, due to a lack of proper delegation and creation of structure.

Analysis of leadership

Beltz is known as an effective and cunning leader, though he also has some major shortcomings. While he has brought considerable and exceptionally rapid growth to small or new alliances at least 4 times, he has never managed to solve his major faults such as creating an infrastructure that could survive well upon his departure.

He usually handles several aspects of the alliance personally, such as foreign affairs, recruitment, writing strategies, training and planning war tactics while leaving tasks such as leading war chats, division leadership and internal affairs to others. When his alliances are smallest, he sometimes also handles internal affairs and leading war chats to an extent. While his alliances are at their peak, he usually drops leading war chats altogether, and delegates regular or routine foreign affair tasks.

His style differs from most other alliances, in that he has almost always exclusively worked with complete newbies. Most have been recruited from lower level tournaments, the primary server and sometimes even from Utopia. In the days of Earth: 2025, he would seek out good writers from within his current alliance and give them the task of writing a customized recruitment message. He would then send the messages out using various message bots and handled the members from there, until they were assigned to a division with a leader. Message bots, along with other types of bots have been virtually eradicated from Earth Empires as a result of better security measures.

Another of Beltz's methods is getting the newbies to play a point-by-point strategy (written by him) for the reset and chosen depending on current goals such as netgaining, warring or building tag protection. He then tutors them 1 on 1 on a forum thread where the member is required to post his advisor page daily for updated advice.

During wars, he has said that he is against top-down killing strategies and prefers instead a mixed, tactical approach where he analyzes the entire enemy list daily to exploit weaknesses. He usually will assign an unusually high ratio of artillery barrage targets while killing as a priority only countries that have weaknesses that can be exploited. He also likes to use a website-based target list for a good portion of the attacks of the day, while using warchats only once or twice daily for the major kill runs.

His war strategy is thus more tactical in nature than a top-down or mid-ranker killing strategy, and requires daily spy ops on all enemies as well as an active tactician that can find ways to exploit the targets while making sure that communication errors are now being made, such as a warchat leader killing a target that was artillery barraged the day before.

In foreign affairs, due to a high level of interest in politics and history, he has rarely made blunders or provoked an unwanted war. In both the last two alliances that he has led, in 2002 (Berserk) and 2004 (Imaginary Numbers), he had successfully obtained complete tag protection within 2 rounds of leadership despite starting out with 2 and 10 members respectively. He has however stumbled, in particular while he led the Devil's Advocates in 1999 where a war with LaF or HAN became inevitable despite the intended netgaining and tag protection building goals of the reset.

Beltshumeltz is known to frequently employ propaganda, with varying success, to achieve his goals. He has so far used propaganda to cause mass desertion in many wars such as the DA-SWORD War(1999), the iMagNum-KoK War(2000), and most successfully in the iMagNum-Quebec War(2001) and in the iMagNum-M4C War(2004). In all of these wars, a good amount of members deserted, and all 4 alliances disbanded or were absorbed in a merger the next round. Propaganda tactics included mostly slanderous ingame messages, blameful declarations of war, effectively fighting on Alliance Talk and uncovering and making public cheating by enemy leaders.

His main downfall in leadership has been exactly what made him successful in the first place. By personally handling recruitement, training and the political aspect of foreign affairs, his alliances were left without any experience in these departements whenever he would leave. Thus, the training system quickly detoriated. Members stopped following strategies, recruitement ceased while members gradually left and due to a lack of knowledge of politics, the alliances often stumbled into bad wars, the most famous of which was the iMagNum-Horizon War(2001), where the Imaginary Numbers ended up getting massacred by ICN and SOL after the newly appointed leader Fang attempted to bully the much smaller Horizon.

He has made numerous attemps to solve this but so far to no avail due to further blunders on his part.

History before leading

Important characters: Don Machiavelli, Stone Princess, Slay

Important events: No Limit Soldiers vs New Monsters

Beltshumeltz started playing in 1999, in the reset immediately before the famous FoG War. He posted on Alliance Talk and asked around about fighting alliances. The No Limit Soldiers, led by Don Machiavelli, were proposed to him as a pure fighting alliance, that believed in fighting for their honor and always backing their allies. While this was a concept that most alliances upheld, it was officially NLS's motto. Beltshumeltz joined, and at the end of the reset participated in his first warchat once NLS declared war on the New Monsters for no reason near the end of the reset, and promptly lost.

The next round, No Limit Soldiers would play in the FoG tag, which Beltshumeltz participated in for a while. However, he later joined the very short lived "Short Fuse" alliance, a predecessor to RED, before joining a 30 member newbie alliance called Knights of Solamnia, which was themed on a fantasy novel and led by Slay.

History as a leader

Knights of Solamnia (KoS)

Important characters: Slay, Hellsfury, Fingolfin, Croaker, Wench.

Important events: Prelude to SOL vs UCN war

KoS was led by a player named Slay. As it was a newbie alliance with very little activity from leadership, Beltz quickly found room to help. A few days after joining, he offered to help Slay with a few things such as recruitement and teaching strategy. Even a few days later, as he was the only one doing work, he asked if he could become Vice-President, which was accepted.

Given this new position, Beltz began making more drastic changes such as asking for volunteers for work and creating divisions. He also recruited a lot of members, which included Hellsfury and Wench who would become some of his important lieutenants for the next 3 resets.

However, it did not take long for Slay to feel threatened and rather than ask Beltz to tone it down, to ask for permission, or anything of the like, Slay decided to immediately boot Beltz out of the clan.

Beltz created a Gamerstown website, and a new KoS tag. As he had recruited or trained most of the current members, about half of the clan tagged up with him. They then had a very minimal war, and a certain level of friction occured between the two, such as Beltz and Slay landgrabbing each other.

At that time, Wench was Beltz's coleader and did a large amount of work. Beltz also tutored her a bit in tourney.

By the end of the round, Beltz's side was quite stronger. However, Beltz was still in some ways a newbie, both as a leader and a player. He inquired about "mentors" on Alliance Talk, and amongst others, the clans Forrest and UCN offered to help him.

After speaking to Croaker and Fingolfin, Beltz decided to join the UCN.

Wench, on the other side, decided to join SOL who she had befriended, with a position equivalent to Beltz's own position in the UCN.

Guardian Council in the UCN

Important characters: Fingolfin, PIBM, Kaz, Hellsfury, Wench.

Important events: SOL vs UCN war, creation of the Devil's Advocates.

Beltz joined the UCN at the very beginning of the SOL vs UCN war reset. Since he was bringing some 30 or 40 members, he was given leadership over an entire council. His activity that round was decent, but not great. While he was very active in the war as a very active player would be, he did not really train members, lead warchats or recruit. He led one warchat in total, in which Fingolfin ended up insulting him over some misunderstandings, of which both were partially at fault. Beltz due to inexperience and a lack of initiative, and Fingolfin, for losing his temper and blaming someone for following orders to the letter.

What happened was simply that Beltz was asked to find a kill target while waiting for Fingolfin to return. Fingolfin returned a whole hour later, a while past the warchat starting time. He then blamed and insulted Beltz for not taking the initiative of launching the attack regardless.

Although that incident was minor, Beltz also overreacted and began plotting with one or two leadership dissidents from other councils. Nothing ever materialized out of this.

At the end of the reset, Beltz had befriended Kaz, a famous top-netgaining player, and a popularizer of strategies. Kaz mentored him, teaching him a casher strategy which did very well back then. It was a indy to 2k acres to tech to 160% res/bus, to casher strategy.

Beltshumeltz then wrote his own version of the strategy in prose and published it on a website with the help of Tumi from La Cosa Nostra.

While he stayed in touch with Wench of SOL, there was a certain amount of tension between the two as due to their common past, and their equivalent positions in enemy alliances.

While in the UCN, Beltz had befriended one of UCN's biggest assets, a player and software developper named PIBM, who also had the famous alter-ego War Bookie. As they both originated from the Canadian province of Quebec, they became friends and Beltz obtained multiple favors from PIBM in the future. The most important one would be to gain a message bot made by PIBM, back when these were a rarity in Earth.

Beltz also further befriended Hellsfury, who he had recruited the previous round in KoS. He became a sub-leader within the Guardian Council although his role is not remembered at this point.

Beltz disappeared from the UCN later in the round and temporarily joined Short Fuse. As that alliance quickly fell apart due to a war with TGABeltz looked for a new home, which he found in an alliance Kaz himself was creating with other top netgainers, The Devil's Advocates.

Devil's Advocates

Important characters: Spektyr, Kinjo, King at Republic, Hellsfury, Wench.

Important events: The Devil's Advocate vs Sword, Wench founds Pirates.

First reset, The Devil's Advocate vs SWORD

Beltz joined the The Devil's Advocates under a new nickname, "PAPA FLUFF", which was intended as a joke. This had the effect of giving him a reputation as a spammer and a jokster even though he would usually propose serious advice to leaders.

The alliance was successful at first since Kaz and his friends had secured pacts with many netgaining alliances. However, back then, there were at least 50 "decent" or legit alliances. The 10 or 15 pacts DA had were not enough to deter landgrabs significantly, and with 40 members only, it was easy for the whole alliance to be hurt dramatically if other clans landgrabbed them even only once per day.

The Devil's Advocate quickly declined and lost its top ranked countries to a few landgrabs, losing tag protection completely in the process. On top of that, most leaders left, including Strider, who was president, and Kaz, who was one of the most important leaders at the time.

A new leadership was needed and (incertain) 3 leaders volunteered, including Beltz.

The Members, in particular King at Republic, a vocal member, strongly opposed Beltz at first, as he was using his PAPA FLUFF nickname. However, he cleared things up quickly by writing plans for recruitement and for the alliance to recover, as well as explaining that he was serious about leadership. Since these posts required more than the average one-liner "SUBMIT TO FLUFF!" people came to trust him, and he won second place in the leadership race.

Spektyr was a relatively new earth player with no experience in leadership. However, he was thoughtful and would consider advice. He was also very active and capable of doing work. As Beltz had more experience and would brainstorm new ideas a lot, many ideas were implemented, and DA began to recruit. A minor amount of training occured, and members were given common strategies to follow.

While Spektyr was the leader, it did show to members that Beltz had a lot of influence. However, this was done completely with respect and there was no fight for power, unlike for Beltz's previous experience in KoS.

Another important leader was Kinjo, another original member of The Devil's Advocate who did a lot of work for Beltz and Spektyr without holding such an official position. He helped mostly with recruitement as about 300 members had applied to The Devil's Advocate after Beltz's spamming of the primary server.

Former KoS and Guardian Council member and co-leader Hellsfury also assisted Beltz, especially in web-design and other creative work. He worker on The Devil's Advocate Library Project, a thorough system of learning various aspects of earth. While it's web-design, and first article were created, it never went anywhere from there.

Their reset was already ruined due to farming but they recruited and reached some 60 or 70 members quickly, mostly from game 1b (primary). They also organized leadership a bit and some members that would become important later on were recruited, such as Ladijapri, Gdog and Kinjo.

In the end, a minor conflict escalated with a semi-spam alliance called SWORD led by a quite unknown leader called Diablo. They had existed in the previous reset and had about 100 tagged members. They were mostly farmland but they ended up declaring war on The Devil's Advocate, or perhaps it was the other way around.

A skill that Beltz was shown to have in the KoS 2 rounds ago and that would be used to his benefit many times in the future was used again in that war. Beltz had used propaganda as a tool to get KoS members to defect to his side previously. In this war, he gave ideas for Spektyr to write propaganda to get members to defect, as he knew that SWORD had little cohesiveness. After a brainstorming session, Spektyr wrote a message to SWORDmembers to make them believe that Diablowas using them for his self-interest, and that he did not care that they were going to die for it. Members were invited to detag, which many of them did.

The end result was the complete destruction of SWORD as an alliance. Many of them were killed, and about half of them defected. Perhaps less than 30 neither died nor survived and minimal damage was done to The Devil's Advocate as they had no structure or organization.

During this round, Wench either was leading a division in SOL that would become an independant alliance called Pirates the next round, or she had already created that alliance.

Second reset, The Devil's Advocate vs LaFamiglia

Important characters: Ladijapri, Kinjo, Spektyr, Gdog, King at Republic, Hellsfury, Don Machiavelli, Stone Princess, Wench, Aidan.

Important events: The Devil's Advocate vs LaF war, with help from Pirates, Beltz leaves The Devil's Advocate.

This time, Beltz became officially President, with Spektyr as his vice-president. Kinjo was perhaps head of Internal Affairs, and this was perhaps the first reset where Ladijapri and Gdog (also known as Buckeyefan) took leadership positions.

As a potential solution to the farming that took place the previous round, Beltz organized an FA and tech leech chain to assist his country, which played Kaz's ind-tech-casher strategy, as a democracy. Also, some of the stronger players were playing commy indy strategies, back when they were dominant for a long period of time during a round.

While Beltz was not yet a top netgaining player due to constantly warring in 1a, he had won a few lower-level tournaments with 40+ mil networth, and quickly reached the top 25 in 1a that round, despite playing as a casher, a strategy that usually peaks at the end of the round. At some point, he was the top ranked casher country aside from 2 Elitez countries ranked nearby.

Overall, The Devil's Advocate was now capable of holding its land and continued its expansion to about 100 countries. Its leadership team was strong although it was untested in a stressful situation, such as a war where the enemy fought back properly.

That round, Beltz secured a Full Defense Pact with Armageddon, an alliance formed from a merger of the No Limit Soldiers and one of it's closer allies, thanks to his contact with Don Machiavelli from his time in No Limit Soldiers. It was arguably a top 5 fighting alliance at the time, and Beltz hoped that he could deter bullying by making the pact public. Stone Princess accepted his request and posted on Alliance Talk to let people know that The Devil's Advocate and Armageddon were bound by the FDP.

At some point in the reset, a LaF member landgrabbed The Devil's Advocate, which Beltz retaliated. LaF then retaliated Beltz's own attack, and their FA Neal quickly dismissed him when approached to solve this problem. Beltz was inexperienced and quickly got mad at this lack of respect and prepared the alliance for war.

At the same time, members of the korean alliance HAN landgrabbed DA members, which Beltz retaliated. HAN was well known to have serious communication issues and a very relaxed style of playing, as they would usually over-retal or not allow retaliations by other players. They ended up completely wrecking Beltz's country with Artillery Barrages, transforming him into a 23k acres parking lot.

At the same time, the commy indies that were also protecting the tag were slowly dropping in rank, and The Devil's Advocate's netgaining was likely to not be substainable. Beltz convinced other leaders that a war would be a good way to make the reset count for something. While the obvious choice would have been to attack HAN, he instead asked Don Machiavelli to deal with them, as he was by far HAN's closest friend and ally. Michael of HAN contacted Beltz and while all he did was apologize and offer to allow more retals to be done by The Devil's Advocate, Beltz accepted and decided to fight LaF instead.

The thinking behind this was that LaF, as a netgaining alliance that often farmed weak clans and was very difficult to obtain pacts with, could be made as an example of. By being highly aggressive with them, Beltz hoped that a "suicide war" on LaF would deter not only LaF from farming them in the future, but also other netgaining alliances.

Unfortunately, Beltz was completely inexperienced at leading a war. The Devil's Advocate began with a few kill runs and did considerable damage to some of LaF's top countries. However, with 120+ top caliber players, this did not mean much. The Devil's Advocate was slowly decimated by LaF and some of his leaders began to turn on him, in particular a member called Aidan.

At some point, Beltz asked Wench of Pirates for help. With joint warchats, and thanks to Wench's superior experience at leading a war, this helped somewhat. Some other The Devil's Advocate leaders began to step up at this point, in particular King at Republic, who helped with warchats and would remain an important leader of The Devil's Advocate for years to come.

Beltz however, did not do well in this conflict. His relationship with Wench deteriorated as she blamed him for some of the failures of the war and inactivity from The Devil's Advocate. Beltz was not as active as before either, and some members doubted of his decision to fight LaF.

Near the end of the war, Beltz temporarily retired from the game. Some of his former friends such as Hellsfury and Aidan joined the soon to be doomed Pirates, while Gdog stepped up to leadership in The Devil's Advocate, a position that he would hold for years to come as well.

While the war was a complete failure as far as Beltz's involvement was concerned, he had learned of one of his biggest shortcomings and this knowledge would be an asset to him in the future.

As for The Devil's Advocate, thanks to an overall strong leadership team, they declined only a little that round, and would then consistently remain a top 15 alliance in average networth, top 25 in total networth, and a considerable fighter for the size they stabilized at, of about 50 members.