Round 18

Round 18
Winner 🥇
Player:	Pasi
Dominion:	Display of Power (#28)
Race:	Lycanthrope
Second 🥈
Name:	Jcinnz
Dominion:	🔱 Every things better down where it's wetter 💦(#24)
Race:	Merfolk
Third 🥉
Name:	xiang1121
Dominion:	Fervor (#13)
Race:	Troll
General
Changes:	Round 18/Changes
Valhalla:	Link

Round 18 began on May 7th 2020 and ended on June 26th 2020. This round saw the introduction of an in-game defence calculator, and the introduction of Click-Through Protection.

Round Win Story

I wasn’t really keen on writing this due to my heavy workload straight after round, so I am writing this quite late and it may be inconsistent to what actually happened as I am writing this 100% from memory. But this is how I felt the round went from my point of view and I am sure some of my closest rivals in the round feel some stages went different.

So before the round began we formed a pack that consisted of Gabbe, Mriswith, Slat3r and me. Our plan was to go two fast and two slower. Ended up with me being lyc, Slat3r kobbo, Mris merfolk and Gabbe human. Mris needed to convert and struggled to find a race and ended up with merfolk which he immediately regretted, which was a shame.

Round started decently well for us, I got my first hit in 10 hours oop and Slat3r few hours earlier. After that it was quite smooth sailing with us growing stronger by the day until I made my first real mistake of the round.

As at that point I was ahead of everyone in military numbers we knew I was main target for any war. I was in prime position to start pushing some real offence for the first time in round and start taking out those explorers that were running borderline defense, and there were many.

Before war was to be enabled I had scouted top realms barrack spies to see how much spies they had incoming to defend myself from black ops. So I trained spies to cover those potential attacks and I also upped my docks a bit for better protection. What I somehow missed was a realm of 3 lizardfolk 2 halfers and a converter. I am sure someone in pack had mentioned that threat but I somehow did not register that threat and it ended up with them snaring me few hours after war was active.

Instead of going for a proper op push I instead had to train to be able to send out without Ares and obviously no self spells hurt my numbers as well. I think I did recover from that snare quite nicely, but it allowed Koenigsegg to hit all those explorers that I had looked to hit and at that point he gained control of the round.

The most negative thing about war was Slat3r getting suicided and he never recovered from it. Shame it happened on his return round too.

At this point I was just hanging on and trying to have enough op to send always when koenig did and stay somewhat relevant long enough to back up our converters. Inky had gained good position and escanor was rising the ranks too.

Inky was seen as farmer since OOP and he somehow kept finding that one undead on bigger suicide than what he normally was sending when he really needed a cheap hit. That also looked majorly suspicious but maybe it was a coincidence. OOP farming I guess ended up being the end of his round, though fair bit later.

We had 2nd war into our realm by Warlock who was Inky multi/friend during that period too. Did not bother me, but did some damage to converters before they could enter guard.

Next big moment was when #11 did war koenig and as a reply #18 did war us. Ultimately they did not have enough op strength to hurt me and instead we performed a well coordinated snare on Clyde who we viewed as main converter threat to Gabbe. I think it was less than minute to get him down. He had cast midas earlier that hour we snared him. He might have been disappointed. On his Ares drop I then hit him and they had another attempt to sink me if I recall, but that was not going to work. On that snare our random MurkiMurk came clutch and went out of guard to get him to 0 wizard strength. We might have struggled to op him for the hit if he did not show up there! Top guy!

At that point koenig was stronger than me by a fair amount and as he was sunk for a longer period there I had to keep counting his boats all the time to make sure he would not have enough to hit me.

So game moved on normally there until we saw koenig to start saving draftees again for a scav push on top wood elf or fw. So we started to look at if I can scav drop him there. I saved my plat bonus and kept resources to trade for enough plat to get it done. In the end he did the final push few hours later than we estimated and it allowed me to train enough to have no problem in hitting him if he goes for the hit.

I was thinking that this was a good time to try to make moves or kill my dom to benefit Gabbes round. There was a good chance everyone on top was getting hit as Escanor was packing op there too. Koenig then hit the wood elf or fw (don’t remember which) and what followed was I think the best moment of the round for us.

We were hitting koenig that was 100% certain and there was no way he could avoid it. We knew Escanor could hit whoever he chooses to hit after. We had noticed koenig had surreal perception on and he had been stacking resources to do a wall dump too. Due to him having surreal perception on we started to play with him a bit there as we knew he would see every op we made. So we kept draftee killing only to see that he released some wiz/spies after every wave and took plenty of castle spies to make him push resources into his walls. We noticed very early in hour that he did exactly what we wanted so we started to work on getting him to invest as much as possible into walls, especially if we got him to invest his plat (a bit under 1 million if i recall) we knew his round was done. So we played this cat and mouse thing with taking ops, draftee killing etc every few mins for like 50 minutes and saw him do just as we wanted. I think he left some spies but not very many and invested 100% of his resources to walls defending a hit he could never avoid happening. We thought we should hit a bit earlier than at the end of hour so Escanor could asses the situation and not just try to blind send me at 1 sec after I send.

Hour change came and koenigs realmie went on global boards cause he did not hit me in those few mins. Maybe that was one of the reasons he went for koenig instead of me. In escanors shoes I would have done the same in that situation and hit the killing blow. On koenigs return he could have hit Gabbe but opted to full send on escanor if I recall and then his dom was farmed to bits.

Koenig played a very good round. His scav dumps always seemed to produce one more hit than I would have originally thought so they were very well timed and he used his position really well. Even getting sunk and gotten hit earlier (tho it did help him with reduced building costs on his bf when sunk) he was still running the game until that point.

I think between first war on us and getting koenig here I was playing my part of “hanging in there” decently well. I made one very bad hit on a spud, but I would have been required to stay home if I couldn’t hit there due to someone training op so better to get land than nothing at all. I remember I was less than 1k short of 3 people there too. (This event might have happened before first war too). The other thing I recall from those times were hits I skipped due to Escanor potential sui. I could have hit koenig once and wood elf i think twice at least without this threat and in hindsight I think i should have due to Escanor just doing lizardmen sends on his 75%.

At this stage it was me, inky and escanor left and first inky got suspended so it was me and escanor after that.

My plan was to never defend escanor but make sure I would be able to always hit him back if he decided to go for me. In the end that situation was on until he was suspended. We thought I would win this trade off and I think escanor thought he would win it. In the end we will never know for certain but I think it’s tough to win trading vs lyc who gets to hit 100%+.

After that I could only lose the round. Quite big change of events after I thought I was going to kill my dom and take some people with me to support Gabbe who I thought was our best dom for long duration of round.

Rest of the round was quite straightforward. I was only really concerned about 2 #33 wood elves entering range together and rr to 100% forest but I don't think it would have been enough either. There were some thoughts about me bottomfeeding to allow mdk to hit them on send, but he just straightforward hit other of the wood elves while in my range. There was some complains about it but what can you do when approaching 90% draft rate. Gave him more land too and woulda been out of my range for possible 2nd hit.

The rest of the pack trained high spies and wizards (Mris trained 3+ wpa and spa after he released his op to concentrate on blackops) and we had a really boring end of the round. The last hit we snared a human that jumped into range, and then I explored to beat Mris arcanine lyc land by 1 acre.

I can’t really thank my packmates enough, they really helped me thru my first round of attacking in this version of game and I don’t think there was any decision I had to make based on my own thoughts only. Nearly always we also found a plan of action everyone thought was the best. This round really showed me how great proper teamwork where everyone works for what is best for realm and not anyone's dom in particular is. Thank you!

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