Round 37 A Stiff Drink of Creamy Eggnog

Quite possibly the worst round I've played, ever, and that includes that one time we had to have Rio throw away a round win - this was back in Classic, so he didn't have one yet at the time - as a policing action to stop a Troll who was fairly blatantly farming people. Ah, tetre, how I do not miss you.

The strategy was okay, helped by an inexplicably low MT Halfer (#9 Luffy) who tossed up tons of plat on a regular basis. Probably about 1m of my stolen plat was taken from him (on ~1.36m total) earlier in the round, and that could have been more had it not been for Luffy switching FG to end at 2am my time at some point. What didn't particularly help was the opposition, though. Now, we can argue that is their goal, but with the round immediately thrown off balance with one realm completely obliterated despite not even remotely being the strongest and us missing a beat that got our FW (Calvin) hit, the runaway was pretty much preordained from day 5 on. The #13 Merfolk (Dean/fishsticks) was also a royal pain in the arse on account of running what felt like max temples all the time, and with them being in the runaway realm and us or 9 looking like the main late contenders at that point - this was before 5 Icer (neophyte) converted very nicely, or before 8 Gnome (mris) got gifted a few good hits - we had to defend some crazy OP early on, and our strats outside of Rury never really got going until it was too late for poige and not really at all for me. (And Erix decided he wanted to fuck up #9 WE / Lud.)

A human that never gets over 33k peasants is a human doomed to fail, and well, that was my peasant count for the round. Acreage was so depressed, not aided by a lack of acres flowing upwards, courtesy of a bot DP bug, that various sheets started pointing at Masons as the best building, despite having all of 530 DMs - normally I'd not even consider Masons before 600 DM or equivalent. By the time people actually started handing out acres, it was too late, and though, on the last day, I was probably fourth or fifth OP in the game, I opted to not hit because I really wanted to not give #10 Troll a 'free' hit (/trade with 13 Halfer). Lucky Tidnab - would've been an 88 % too. I also missed out on hitting mris on his sui because, as I thought at 2:45am: 'It's an hour fifteen until he gets home, next hit brings him out of my range, and I'm still recovering from illness. I'm not gonna wake up for that.'

Then he wasn't hit. Oh well.

Thanks to pack and realm, congrats to #13 for getting B2B pack wins, and a pity about how the round overall went. Reading tip of the round: a good book on the Balance of Power in post-Napoleonic Europe. Or just the wikipedia page on it.