Dirt Warfare

Dirt Warfare is a style of warfare devised by bcfoss, emphasizing the relationship between material gain/loss and morale. It reached it's zenith in prominence during PrikPack v3. At the time of it's conception in late 2017 it was often paired with the edgy phrase 'There is nothing more dangerous than someone with nothing to lose.' With the disappearance of Techno-Gods, the conventional wisdom is that Dirt Warfare is no longer very relevant. However, recent servers have had a trend of creating Magic-Gods, with Dirt Warfare once again being employed in response to this phenomenon.

The main concept is that the deciding factor in warfare is the will or morale of the fighting forces, and that the most effective way to change the morale of an opponent is to add/remove their material wealth. Operating with this understanding of warfare, the ideal army is not equipped diamond/netherite, but with the least expensive equipment possible, so that a loss of equipment causes the least amount of friendly defeatism and also minimizes the feeling of success the enemy will feel.

In a typical case of Dirt Warfare, an inferior force (having possibly already been defeated in a previous battle) will pursue a strategy of guerilla warfare against a better armed force. Direct engagement should be avoided in favor of harrying tactics that wear away at enemy morale, punctuated by frequent attempts to breach enemy defenses (with stone pick or worse)in order to steal material wealth and plummet enemy morale.

Countermeasures

Following PrikPack v3, Dirt Warfare became less and less relevant but it was still employed throughout 2018-2019 during PrikPack v5 following the aftermath of the Thirty-Seconds War and on PrikPack v6 after the nuclear strike on Prikington. In both cases, the technologically superior forces began the act of spawncamping worldspawn with large pits and obsidian boxes in order to stop potential cases of Dirt Warfare.

Controversy

One big problem with Dirt Warfare is that it is, by design, miserable to fight against. In most cases it isn't very enjoyable to employ either. This means that employing Dirt Warfare will in most cases cause a net loss of interest in playing on the server, thereby accelerating server-death. PrikPack v3 was killed within two days of the advent of the Great Dirt War.

Dirt Warfare in all its forms

This list presents all times Dirt Warfare were used, successfully and unsuccessfully by factions against technologically or mystically superior opponents in chronological order.

• The Cadogen Crusades, nobel617's attacks against Cadogen during the Cadogen Server.
• The Great Dirt War was one first instance of Dirt Warfare where one side was vastly technogically superior, J.INC fought against the rest of the server until its termination.
• During The Calamity, both sides quickly resorted to a terribly destructive form of Dirt Warfare in which battling the enemy was completely disregarded, and only the destruction of their property was prioritized.
• The Massacre on Midway, where following the superiority of baconpancake36's equipment attained via Blood Magic, the Scæþing Republic resulted to brutal dirt warfare.