Round 49 The Vegan Cannibal
Snare by #6
To address the elephant in the room: I viewed and view #6's snare on me with intent of getting me hit by #9 Hussar / Weaser as breaking the rules, an opinion I've held for several rounds at least. I alerted RC, the rest is history.
Modern snare has two common modes: make someone hittable or make someone unable to hit. Knocking off economic self-spells is rarely used. Given I was neither smallest of the ones chasing Hussar, nor did I have top OP of said pack, denying a hit made zero sense. Bots were over 12 hours out from range, and Mithravioli in #11 / Erix was ~25k OP ahead though 10k DP behind. (Centaurs having 2pt turtle forced more DP out of me.)
A deflection play was an option I considered slightly belatedly, though still same tick as the war declaration. However, #6 Kobold was not vulnerable. We already knew #6 DE was not vulnerable from ops taken earlier that day, provided Ares remained up. As #9 was at this point stuck in a war with #3 after failing to snare Marie built Curie-ously on Becquerel's work / B, that was easy for the DE.
As per the good coke-addicted detective: "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." And what remained was a snare to try and feed me to Hussar.
Math
One common thread out of the Discord was to liberalise this use of snare for the future. So let's do some combinatorics.
Assuming the defender has half the spy ratio of a dedicated snaring pack of 5, the snaring pack is nearly 90 % to cap the target's WS at 0 under non-draft round snare rules, from full. This is 3 ticks of spells off guaranteed unless the target has more than 0.9 % Wizard Strength recovery. (Meaning 450 Mastery, a recovery tech, or being Demon as of round 49.) The pack also recovers a minimum of 12 snares in those three ticks, which will extend the snare another hour with high probability (~96 % at 0 extra recovery from target), even with the target having Illumination active. Thus, a dedicated snaring pack can and likely should be able to snare a single dominion for ticks, provided the defender has half the spy ratio of the attackers.
As this is from full strength, the defender also did not use Wizard Strength in recent hours for other purposes. (E.g. other self-spells or target searching.) Actively engaging in those at the 'wrong' time likely pushes the breaking points back another hour. However, as this is very dependent on actual behaviour, it is harder to uniformly math out, and as such is not included in this blurb.
Implications
There are, as always, solutions to being a snare target. Here, there are three options. One of the three will suffice.
- Run enough DP to be unhittable with your Ares off. For attackers, this means running sufficiently strong. At time of the snare mentioned in the first section, this pretty much was only Mithravioli with #7 Top Birthday Candle Extinguisher / Internetfett right on the bubble. Both were Merfolks with 4 OP / 2 DP Kraken for turtle and a small amount of spec O.
- Recast Ares every 7 (13 with Amplify Magic) hours while also running at least but preferably over 50 % SPA of a dedicated to snaring pack. Possibly every 6 or 12 hours depending on other factors.
- Grow out of range of the snaring pack.
It is left up to the reader whether these solutions are reasonable.