Editing Round 48 Rita Repulsa

Hi. Rush here.

I had such high hopes we had for this round. 

Swamp Fox messaged me out of the blue and asked if I wanted to do a bit of a re-run of our FIRE THE LASER round, this time with himself, Wurstmeyer, Gothia and Rio. 

That's a shockingly powerful line-up. So of course, envisioning flames and destruction, I said yes.

It didn't exactly go as planned, and our realm was essentially dead by the second week.

So that means this roundfail is a tale of two halves (an increasingly common format to these roundfails). The first half I took notes, and so is relatively accurate. The second half I took no notes whatsoever, and so my memory - which is prone to inaccuracy and flights of fancy - will have to fill in for reality.

This roundfail has undergone precisely 0 revisions before being pasted into the wiki, so is a little rough around the edges and possibly a bit, well, edgier than usual. DEAL WITH IT BITCHES.

Ahem.

==WEEK 1 - A WURST WINCING==

The first three days seemed to go pretty well. Wurstmeyer in particular was very impressed with his own performance. Everyone else made the hits they needed to position themselves well to run, and Wurst would say things like "we got a good chance to be the runner realm - if we play our cards right" and "like, very good chances" and "I'd say like 80% chance with some hubris". 

That's a 20% chance of hubris forecast right there. I don't know about Germany, but here in Scotland, you take an umbrella with you on those odds.

It all started with Chunk just casually dropping an eye-popping top op update towards the end of day three: 

'''Chunk:''' #3 Take My Breath Away (Bobbo): 25.1 K OP / 25.5 K DP in 12 hours with 2.94% Temples  and 92 draftees (5:4) [range 892]

'''Rush:''' lol I don't even cover that pre-temples

'''Rush:''' oh wait that's his sui? who cares, making me panic over here Chunk

'''Wurstmeyer:''' no one can hit him @Rush

'''Gothia:''' yeah it's not a sui if he leaves more dp than he sends op?

'''Rush:''' well that's just not okay

'''Swamp Fox:''' go check the big explorers and see who's the meat shield

'''Rush:''' @Wurstmeyer you're supposed to be the big dog, what's going on here?!

'''Swamp Fox:''' He'll send in a few ticks probably, I think the garous at the end are his next wave

'''Ivetza:''' We obviously missed the lyc, he'll hit me easy in three hours

'''Rompar:''' Not just you

'''Swamp Fox:''' He can take his pick

'''Rush:''' He's gonna fuck someone up

'''Wurstmeyer:''' Draft up!

'''Ivetza:''' I draft. Won't help

'''Wurstmeyer:''' If you draft up, Chunk's sheet says you're fine.

'''Rush:''' IVETZA STOP PANICKING

'''Ivetza:''' Shut up you war wanker! Where the fuck is our top op @Rio, stop playing fast attacker like it's a mid round converter!

'''Rio:''' Hey man, you're the one feeding the runaway!

You know, you'd asked me at the start of the round who was most likely to blow up early, my money would have been on Ivetza. He'd already managed to forget to build enough docks to full send and so was self-limiting his op while he scrambled to sort out his boats situation. Classic nublette behaviour. 

But it wasn't Ivetza who would feed the potential runaway. It would instead be Wurstmeyer. Multi-round winner Wurstmeyer. Scourge of OD Wurstmeyer. Ruiner of Rounds Wurstmeyer. Neuterer of Blops Wurstmeyer. Pusher of Kool-Aid Wurstmeyer. Tutored and groomed personally by Rio - also a multi-round winner - presumably up a quiet mountain retreat somewhere where monks and other multi-roundwinners hang out. 

That Wurstmeyer.  

''2026-01-27 16:18:32	Victorious on the battlefield, Color-Coded Child Soldiers 🌈 (Wurstmeyer) (#7) conquered 49 land from Bearly Legal (Calvin) (#4).''

''2026-01-28 00:59:54	Take My Breath Away (Bobbo) (#3) invaded fellow dominion Color-Coded Child Soldiers 🌈 (#7) and captured 73 land.''

Wurstmeyer said we'd missed the lyc's spec drop and that led to him getting hit, which was his polite way of saying "this is your fault too you bastards".

Alas, Swamp Fox was so disgusted by Wurstmeyer's performance that he abandoned.

''2026-01-29 22:00:21	The Pink Ranger made my Megazord feel funny (Swamp Fox) (#7) has been abandoned by its ruler.''

Fair play, I say.

The timing of the hit on Wurst was especially disheartening for me as a blopper, because when you watch your team's best fast attacker go up in smoke there and then, the chance of war goes from "maybe, we'll see" to "not a fucking chance pal". We'd geared up for war already. I was sitting on 11% towers and swimming in mana with nowhere to direct it.

Talk shifted to taking a Wonder instead. 

Balls. That meant all my early war magic was going to be diverted into lame-o cyclones. Glad I built 11% towers and tanked my econ to blow hot air at some Wonders. Do I sound salty?

==WEEK 2 - A BOBBO BOTTOMFEEDING==

The good news was that the Wonder the realm had agreed on was the Ivory Tower, which would at least make us virtually immune to wizard blops - and thus our attacker realmies would be less skittish at the prospect of war. Which is how I like my attackers. The bad news was that after committing all my war mana to cyclones, some other realm blundered in and sniped it. 

''2026-01-30 11:04:43	The Ivory Tower has been destroyed and rebuilt by Elephants (#3).''

We had a brief discussion and then committed to war. Ineq (alison) was the sole dissenting voice, but we assessed that they'd probably be fine in a war - too smol to be a target. 

''2026-01-30 12:58:07	Green with Envy (#7) has declared WAR on Elephants (#3).''

Immediately after we declared, Ivetza started complaining that he still hadn't totally sorted out his boats situation and they were starting to do test sinks on him.

'''Rush:''' IVETZA STOP PANICKING

'''Ivetza:''' Could you use bigger all caps? I can't quite read those

'''Rush:''' You better sort those boats of yours out Ivetza

'''Rush:''' "He's a few boats short of an invasion", that's what they'll say about you

The sinks didn't amount to anything however, and Ivetza didn't have any further grumbles in the war. 

It seemed Realm #3 didn't really have much blops firepower - perhaps like us they had also exhausted their wiz taking it down in the first place. By the time they'd had the opportunity to recharge, we'd already taken the Wonder off them and were now protected.

I'd gotten my war after all, so I was happy enough. But #3's lyc, who had already destroyed Wurst, would hit into our realm a bunch of times during the war. He was dying and on his way out anyway, so it didn't matter in the grand scheme of things, but it was pretty annoying. 

''2026-02-01 06:03:24	Take My Breath Away (#3) invaded fellow dominion Color-Coded Child Soldiers 🌈 (#7) and captured 71 land.''

''2026-02-01 23:09:06	Take My Breath Away (#3) invaded fellow dominion Rito Revolto (Rompar) (#7) and captured 52 land.''

''2026-02-02 11:56:00	Take My Breath Away (#3) invaded fellow dominion Rito Revolto (#7) and captured 50 land.''

The two hits on Rompar were bottomfeeds. Everyone agreed that this lyc was a bellend. 

We let the war run for five days until it expired, confident they couldn't really do anything to hurt us. 

==WEEK 3 - A GOTHIA GONE==

At the start of the third week, we lost Gothia to a mix of apathy and inattention. He was already playing as an explorer / blopper due to low expected activity, and like others who had taken the blops route this route (myself included), he had seen the writing on the wall this round and lost interest. He had stopped following top op and was training dp based on vibes. This created two problems. The first one was that he fed one of the two big dogs in #11: 

''2026-02-07 08:59:35	Hepatitahades (Rury) (#11) invaded fellow dominion Lord Zedd (Gothia) (#7) and captured 102 land.''

The second problem was that I had pegged my dp to Gothia's, foolishly assuming someone as reputable as Gothia would do the bare minimum of checking he was safe, meaning I could afford to be a lazy git and not bother. And so I had the same dp as he did - just a bit lower on land. The old meat shield tactic. And since there were two big dogs in #11, that meant I was on the hook for getting hit by the undead. I chained dp and prayed.

''2026-02-07 12:59:44	Gonorrhonos (Erix) (#11) invaded F**k Facebook, F**k Instagram, and F**k you (AgFx) (#1) and captured 92 land.''

Phew. AgFx to the rescue. 

You know, I get saved like this more often than I'd like. Either my meat shield eats the hit I could have taken or, when I don't have one, there's (almost) always a better hit than me available. Sometimes being a slow-assed blopper with sucky landtypes is an advantage. Maybe you should've gone Sylvan instead of Icekin, AgFx!

Anyway, that was the end of Gothia. Without so much as uttering a single "farewell" or a "god speed you beautiful bastards" or a "btw I hit abandon guys", he abandoned us.

''2026-02-08 09:00:20	Lord Zedd (#7) has been abandoned by its ruler.''

We were in bad shape. Fast attacker extraordinaire Wurstmeyer, dead. Nomad threat Swamp Fox, dead. Blops support Gothia, dead. Blops support Rompar, bottomfed and effectively dead. Boat-challenged Ivetza and FA-playing-like-a-converter Rio were still alive and in the game, just not in a way that was ever going to frighten anyone. And me, I was suffering the major drawback of being a slow-assed blopper: I didn't have the econ to continue growing while the pair in #11 were smothering everyone with their op, so I stuck dancing to their tune. 

That left Chunk.

Chunk had been full on greedy explorer mode from day one and was now far and away our best shot at winning. He was almost 100% efficient, except for training 6 spies one time when I pointed out that he was vulnerable to a snare and likely to eat a hit later in the round if he didn't sort that out. I started having flashbacks to playing with Mithrandir, and had to have a stiff whisky to get me through the PTSD.

As great as it is to still have a dog in the race, this killed absolutely any hope for war. I knew as soon as Chunk became our best shot at winning we'd be in full babysitter mode all round. If we went to war with #11, he'd get eaten alive. And it wasn't likely anyone would come to us for war, except potentially #11 to eat Chunk alive, because we had the Ivory Tower.

The phrase "hoist by my own petard" comes to mind. 

Not for the first time this round, I considered abandoning. Maybe I would if I got hit. Just do a Gothia and nope out, and save myself three weeks of caring about logins. You know those shitty moments when you're lying in bed, keen to get some sleep, and it's like 11:52pm and you're just going, well, I need to stay awake another 8 minutes to cast stupid Ares so I don't get hit in this pointless round. Could just sleep. But noooo, gotta cast Ares in, oh, 7 minutes now. Fucking what am I doing. 

Buuuut it also felt kinda shitty to leave the others in an even-more-dead realm, so I delayed the idea for the time being. 

==EPILOGUE==

And that was all I wrote for this round, because what ensued was three weeks of nothing. Fortunately it didn't turn into a babysitter round, but it was still a strange one. 

The oother notable event this round was when #6, Cronel's realm, warred us for the factory. We'd thrown everything behind Chunk to help him explore ftw, which meant taking the Factory off some realm (I forget who) so he could enjoy lower construction costs. His economy was so insane that he was able to chain land for a week straight without manually training any troops, and just relied on his WGs pumping dp troops in. But a triple feed to #11 mid-round essentially scuppered his chances of victory, giving #11 a quite sickening steroidal boost that would secure their victory. But when #6 came for our factory, it wasn't totally clear that Chunk couldn't win, it was just vanishingly unlikely - so we weren't willing to let it go.

Realm #6's war was a strange one. It was clearly a blops-heavy realm, but instead of targeting Chunk who would have given them all insane numbers with fireball and lightning, they targeted me - a comparatively much smaller dominion and a wiz race. And not just a wiz race, I'd been terrorising chaos league players so I had wizards riding around on top of my dryads. Wizards stacked on wizards. But they elected to fireball me. And I had a decent spa, but as soon as they declared war and started snaring me, I dumped another 2k spies. Which they matched by training several thousand extra spies themselves.

They weren't all successful at fireballing me - there was only one player who just went Cosula-level insane on ratios just to keep hitting me with fireballs, a new player called ethereal. This had the irritating result of knocking out a chunk of my peasants consistently, while never quite reaching the threshold to trigger burning. So despite Wurst's mechanic specially designed to prevent days just being fireballed constantly, I spent days just being fireballed constantly. Eventually, on the last few days of the war, burning kicked in. Ethereal was either taking direction from the experienced bloppers in his realm on how to maximise his annoyance to me, or has a natural gift for being annoying, because he kept close tabs on my dominion through the war and did everything he could to fuck me over - plaguing after fireballs (which bloppers chasing ranks don't do - they do this to maximise pain/damage on threats), swarming when his fireballs brought me to low food, trying to assass wiz and disband spies, and stealing plat if I ever built up a stockpile. It all felt weirdly personal and strangely targeted, though as far as I know I hadn't done a single thing to #6 the entire round. It was suggested he was chasing mastery, but that didn't explain all the other behaviours. He finished well below the 5k threshold for the Rush Ranks too, so will be crushed down by the new-ish formula designed to disincentivise silly ratios and poor economy management and promote utility to your realm mates throughout the round. I call it the Cosula Coefficient.

I initially tried to fight back with Vaelith, as my successes against him on wizard blops were similar to his vs me - high. But he had such a low population that he wasn't worth the resources, and despite him being on insane-o ratios he wasn't in chaos league like me, which meant I was taking full losses blopping him back (losing tons of dryads, whereas his fails would lose him an archmage or two at most), so I switched to hurting their undead instead - Undeath for Everyone (Craghack). A massive explorer, he gave me the big numbers that bloppers love to see. And like Vaelith, I was the only one blopping him, so he felt the same annoying prolonged pain that I did until burning eventually triggered. 

They took our Wonder, we took it back almost immediately, they took it down again thinking we wouldn't have time to knock it down a second time. But they were wrong. The Factory stayed in our hands, and their top explorer got to enjoy its benefits for maybe a day while also being fireballed constantly. Meanwhile our top explorer, Chunk, was completely unharmed.

God knows what that realm was doing. Their top attacker, God is silent. Now if only man would shut up. (King Jota) was the only spooky threat in the realm. At one point I thought he was gearing up to hit me, as his spec drop with the war bonus definitely gave him the op clearance to get me. But I had caught his spec drop the same tick he'd dropped them, and was able to get ahead of his incoming op in time. But dumping spec dp in addition to having a shit economy as a blopper in addition to being blopped by a small psychopath did not leave me in the finest condition. 

Later in the round, after we were totally off the rails, I was just declaring on realms to farm fireball kills. Nobody in the realm cared by that point, not even Chunk, so I was just free to mash the war button on whoever I fancied. 

This took me to #1, the realm of pottymouths. They had a big gnome explorer -  F**k power levels, f**k super saiyans and f**k you (Yami). Their realm at that point was not really a threat in war so they were a good option to farm. 

''2026-03-06 11:56:39	This is a PG-13 show (#7) has declared WAR on F**k me 11 finally did something this round (#1).''

And so I set off fireballing the gnome without a care in the world, enjoying the big numbers. 

And then #6 came along just five ticks later and ruined it.

''2026-03-06 16:19:37	Oops we did it again (#6) has declared WAR on F**k me 11 finally did something this round (#1).''

They instantly fireballed the #1 gnome down to base peasants so I was getting zilch fireballing him. Now I was pissed off. #6 had already fucked with me in a war directly with us, and now they were fucking with me on wars I declared that didn't involve them? In the spirit of realm #1: Fuck realm #6. Fuck their bloppers. And fuck whatever this weird crusade to specifically annoy me was. (Quite effective admittedly.)

There weren't really any ideal secondary targets to fireball in #6 except for their explorer Dark Elf, F**k FAs, f**k explorers and f**k you (Dean). Not ideal fireballing a Dark Elf, but it seemed #6 were totally ignoring him, so I fireballed him anyway. I had superior ratios from the chaos league, without being too crazy, but it was enough that I had decent success and was able to keep farming numbers when the gnome wasn't available to offer up his burning peasants. #6 didn't do a good job keeping the gnome at base anyway, so I ended up getting plenty kills from him in the end. 

At some point, #6 focused their attention to trying to take the City of Gold from #1. It was late round and that Wonder would do them little good. It was another bizarre decision from - and I mean this as generously as I can say it - a genuinely unhinged realm. I guess they expected our realm would just sit idly by and let them take the Wonder because we already had a Wonder of our own - perhaps forgetting, or being totally oblivious to the fact that our realm had a bone to pick with them. When Ivetza suggested we just send it to #0, everyone thought that would be quite funny. So when #6 brought it from 1.5mil hp or thereabouts down to like 500k, we sent it packing back to #0. 

''2026-03-08 12:08:28	The City of Gold has been destroyed!''

We figured #6 would try to take it from #0, but to our immense amusement, #1 quickly re-acquired it. 

''2026-03-08 16:13:28	The City of Gold has been destroyed and rebuilt by Taking a lollypop from a f*cking #6 year old (#1).''

Back up to over 1mil hp. And realm #6, despite their efforts to acquire a Wonder all round, still didn't have a Wonder. And they never would. We had crushed their spirits, their hopes, their dreams. 

But that still wasn't enough revenge for me.

''2026-03-09 16:52:42	Aye-yi-yi-yi-yi! Danger, danger! (#7) has declared WAR on Oops we did it again (#6).''

I went back to fireballing their undead explorer. And they couldn't exactly declare a war to poach my kills on that one. All was right with the world. 

And when he was fully burned, I sent my excess fireballs at Spy-see Hot Wings & Things (mcgeeal). Their tiny psychopath blopper had an encore with my dominion of course, but I'd learned my biggest lesson from him already in the last war - I turned off email notifications for hostile actions on my dominion, and was able to completely ignore him this time. Genuinely no idea what he did in that war, because I cleared all my notifications (and there were a lot of them) without bothering to check them. And when you can't see you're being constantly blopped, and I do mean this - they hurt a lot less. There is a psychological element to being hit constantly by blops. I bet if we could only do one Big Fireball or one Big Snare or one Big Sink instead of 15 little ones each time, you'd see a lot less whining about them.

They were able to trigger burning on me faster this time at least, which made me immune for half the war. It genuinely feels like cheating to be in a war when you have burning going. It's that op. Not that I was complaining. 

Chunk, again, was mostly ignored. #6 just made no sense to me. 

In the end, despite some competition, mainly from the hydra in #4 who seemed to also have free reign as usual to war anyone they wanted, I finished with the top fireball kills. And I finished squarely on 5k acres - a balancing act between avoiding the Cosula Coefficient crush affecting my Rush Rankings, while also not feeding fett's realm assignment algorithm more reasons to send me to ghettos in the future.

Mfournus, also known as M4nus, won the Rush Ranks this round though - and he was a stinky realm #6er. Boo, hiss!

Second place (and this is an even bigger upset) went to Fake Rush. That son of a bitch. Everyone this round trying to upstage me.

I was third. Still on the podium at least.

The Rush Ranks will be released shortly, if not already by the time you read this.

Anyway, this round majorly sucked. I should have abandoned when Swamp Fox did. 

Until next round!