I'll die before I surrender, Tim R27

Credit to mris for introducing this to the wiki. I never played DC so have no idea what the journals were but I like the idea of being able to record my thoughts, even if nobody reads them!

This was my 3rd full round of OD. Last round I packed with margoose and landed with Rio, Gothia, BB and Oment and they taught me a ton. This round I came in with a few simple goals and a vague idea of what I wanted to do; get hit less, hit more players and finish bigger. I knew I wanted to tech after it proved so successful for Rio in the previous round.

This time I packed with margoose again and landed with (can you believe it) Rio, Oment, Gothia and BB again! We also had some other great active players with us; Craghack, Cents321 and Volvandese.

Oment suggested I try merfolk as a great "learner" race and provided me with a great sim. At OOP I got off to a good start and over the course of the first 2 weeks I forgot all about my teching plan and followed the fast strat Rio and co were playing and managed to keep up with them quite successfully, we were hot on the tail of #10 for a while before the others realised they couldn't really keep up as attackers and deconverted.

I got some good hits on players as planned and had great pace (even got a HotD!). Then that bloody gnome appeared in my 85% and totally jammed up my round (and everyone else's) at this point I stalled and had long waits between hits and had to rely on bots for my hits because I couldn't train OP fast enough to catch anyone as they were all defending the converters at that point.

At the end of the round I had succeeded in all of my goals; I was finishing around 1k acres bigger and I hadn't taken a single hit all round. I was chuffed. In the final 2 hours of the round I decided to drop guard and make a bottom feed to try and finish a tiny bit higher. This was a mistake... A pesky troll hit me and ruined my 0 hit record! My only consolation was that he took a hit too!

It might not look like much to most players, but to me, an 80th place finish is next to winning (and I got Rio points!) - my goals for next round? You've guessed it - finish bigger and get hit less (going for 0!)

Many thanks to everyone in my realm, I learnt loads again and am looking forward to r28!

Unfather.