Round 46

Round 46
Winner 🥇
Player:	Rury
Dominion:	The Revenant 2: Bear With Me (#3)
Race:	Kobold
Second 🥈
Name:	Scuzy
Dominion:	Morbius 2: It’s Morbin Time! (#3)
Race:	Demon
Second 🥈
Name:	Zedijar
Dominion:	Titanic 2: Let it go (#3)
Race:	Merfolk
General
Changes:	Round 46/Changes
Valhalla:	Link

Top 100 Results

Round 46 top 100

Round 46 Win Story

🏆 Round 46 — “Round the Clock Ops”

The story of Realm 3’s march to victory

Or, as Eric put it:

“The story’s fine — more vibes than story though. Might be a nice addition to an actual story.”

So here it is, Erix — the story and the vibes, all wrapped into one.

Erix here – once again writing Rury’s round win story, with comments from others. Including Rury’s, who pointed out it should be Eric’s story with running the Spirit behind the Runaway is a guaranteed win as a Spirit. My contributions will be in this format. I’m here trying to hammer out this story like 2 weeks after the round ended, because no one else was willing to. If it doesn’t have someone’s name next to it, or is not in bold, you’re reading AI drivel.

ChatGPT: Every great story starts with a gathering of legends — and this one began when Erix once again rallied the gang for another round of Open Dominion. With Poige busy in real life and Volv returning from a break, there was a single open slot in the pack. In a totally “coincidental” move, Erix “missed” a message from Buckshot and instead picked up Lud off the waiver wire. Destiny? Absolutely.

Despite what they say, the actual truth was we were looking for 1 more and Buckshot had sent me a PM in discord. As many of you know, I don’t necessarily get notifications / alerts, so I never saw the message until the spot had been filled. Disco initially was going to take the spot, but since both our ops guys were USA, we were concerned about giving him the proper support to play FA, so we decided that time zone mattered and at the same time a wild Lud appeared and it all came together.

Pre-Round Plans

The early plan was clear: Fast Attacking (FA) looked rough this round. The consensus — go mid-speed and win through ops, coordination, and timing. Volv and Manno locked in Merfolk and Undead for strong ops play, Erix and Lud went mid with Spirit and Gnome, and Rury, in true Rury fashion, grabbed Kobold to play fast “for some reason.” When the round began, the pack landed in Realm 3, joined by a dream lineup: the Scuzy/Karp 2 pack, then Zed, MeeSAX, Sommarhydda, Syscero and Crag as randoms— the perfect mix of explorers, ops, and fast hitters. The placement couldn’t have been better.

I had previously played with everyone in the realm aside from Lud and Syscero, so knew what to expect. A solid group of reasonably active players who were willing to play as a team – and when you pack with Rury he’s the only win condition you need. Also, Lud and I had discussed race selection quite a bit. We knew that playing gnome would likely make it a lot harder for him to win, as with me playing spirit, (slower threats under a runaway and a spirit under a runaway pretty much never succeed, but not ones to turn down a challenge, we went for it.

Week 1 — Setting the Tone

The early round was smooth and methodical. No nukes, no chaos — just clean hits. Erix and Crag started strong with a handful of bot hits, setting the realm up for an early lead. But the real tone-setter came just 12 hours in: an Ares drop (naturally found by Karp) led to Erix’s first major hit on a live target. It was clean, efficient, and ruthless — the kind of hit that lets everyone know your realm means business. Moments later, Rury followed up with his own strike. True to form, whenever a target appeared, his first question was always, “Is there someone bigger I can hit?” He became the realm’s relentless spearhead, while the ops team worked overtime keeping everyone supplied with strength and intel.

I’ve said this time and time again – the real key to being a successful fast attacker is a combination of Ops and target selection. You can mod whore and spec dump all you like, or play as efficiently as possible, but none of that matters if you’re not getting the good hits. There is always someone that’s vulnerable – the trick is finding them. And this will be a recurring theme throughout the round.

War & Momentum

The first real war that mattered came against Realm #5— and it’s the one Lud called the turning point. Early on, days 1–4, Realm 3 actually lagged slightly behind in numbers. But then came the big plays: the coordinated fireballs on Kobold, Nomad, and Firewalker, followed by synchronized hits that dismantled Realm #5’s key players.That war wasn’t just a victory — it was the spark. From there, the team refined its rhythm:
• US crew opened each operation window,
• EU crew closed it out,
• And Rury’s daily “good morning” became the unofficial heartbeat of the realm.
• It wasn’t just about gameplay — it was about connection. Volv dropped his trademark morning and night GIFs, Lud began to expect them by 9:45 PM each night, and the chat stayed alive with laughs, plans, and the occasional sleep-deprived meme.

Early on, there were very, very few fast attacking threats. I think we counted a total of less than 10 fast attackers throughout the whole game, and half of those would just be hitting 75% and never a real factor. Realm 5, however, looked competitive. I wouldn’t go as far as to say their individual numbers were in front of ours – but they had more horses in the fast race. We only had 2; Rury’s Kob and Crag’s FW, whereas they had a nomad, FW, Kob, and halfer. However, we’ve also learned our lesson from Day 4 annihilation – WGs and Archmages matter, yet #5 apparently didn’t know this (maybe a tactical awareness mistake?!) We had been watching #5 and their lack of concern – so our whole team prepared (attackers included). We were going to hit them, and hit them hard.

We waited about 45 minutes into the first tick of war being available, just to see if someone declared on us first – and when it didn’t happen, we were full steam ahead on “operation party crasher”. On the first wave we hit Spice #5 (Bobbo - Kob) and dropped him to essentially 50% population. Considering he had literally 0 spies or wizards, I even got in on the action and threw about 5 fireballs. Once our WS was depleted (and Bobbo’s peasants) we moved to the next target and sunk the Nomad before he could 9h (Getting manicures with your girls – Merf). We took almost half his boats away and severely limited his potential send.

The first wave of the war was a massive success, dramatically slowing down our top 2 competitors. But we weren’t done yet. For the next wave we decided to cook some of the FW’s (Urg wearing Uggs - Internetfett) peasants and sink him. Oops!

Realm 5 just rolled over and let us have our way with them and wouldn’t factor into the round again (aside from feeding us some hits too)

Goblins!!!!

After dismantling #5 and putting the rest of the game on notice, we settled into early runaway mode. Rury decided to take a different approach to Kob this time, and leaned into efficiency very early, Crag was able to stay fairly strong despite a bounce as our #2 attacker – though never fully able to “get on top”. I kept plodding along as spirit, just waiting for people to target me, and Lud quickly explored up to his number and started to convert.

There were a couple remaining fast attackers – primarily Irish Moiled #2 (Mikeyblue), but not really much else as an immediate attacking threat, however we noticed #9 with 3 QC Goblins, a dwarf sui potential, and a nomad who was doing very well. We had the firepower and no one else seemed primed to take us out, so we figured being proactive in war and slowing these guys down would be for the best. We warred #9 on day 15 and hit them with a wave of FBs.

This war wasn’t like the rousing success we had had vs #5, and honesty probably didn’t make a massive difference. They still had a crapload of goblins, a dwarf, a nomad, and a dumb troll that nobody thought would matter.

Big Black Gobs Vol.#3 (#9) had taken the hobgoblins approach and was making my life increasingly difficult, while also putting some pressure on Crag and Lud to train dp. Around this time it had become very clear that Crag’s relevance as attacker was just about over, so we started to scout out some potential options. War ended vs #9, and BBG still had the offense to cause problems, but Lud had come up with the plan that if we both mass-trained op specs, we could safely cover Crag vs BBG, if he were to send. We had a couple potential hits for Crag lined up, we just needed to wait for me and Lud’s offense to arrive.

The hour finally came, we found a hit, and pinged Crag to send. He got the message but had *just* taken his land bonus, so the target was now 74.9% his size. Really, it didn’t matter a whole lot (though slightly frustrating) as this would be his last non-BF anyway – so he dropped to RG and sent.

2025-09-24 23:26:47 Victorious on the battlefield, Shawshank redemption 2: back to jail (#3) conquered 102 land from Toothy takes off his robe and wizard hat (#12).

We were totally confident that this would be a safe send, since the only person who could hit him was BBG and they wouldn’t pull the trigger on a sui against a dying fast attacker.

We were wrong.

2025-09-25 01:59:57 Big Black Gobs Vol. #3 (#9) invaded fellow dominion Shawshank redemption 2: back to jail (#3) and captured 194 land.

I was online when the hit happened and we had ops within just a few seconds. I pinged Lud and we started salivating. This must be a trap, right? There was no way the gob was just gifting us hits, right? We did another scout of any potential threats, and came to the conclusion that if we dumped DP, we’d be able to cover any shenanigans:

2025-09-25 02:10:26 Victorious on the battlefield, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 17: The Vegan Culling (#3) conquered 145 land from Big Black Gobs Vol. #3 (#9).

2025-09-25 03:57:16 Victorious on the battlefield, Barbie 2: Gnome Ann (#3) conquered 142 land from Big Black Gobs Vol. #3 (#9).

A few hours later, possibly in protest or a fit of rage, the #9 dwarf who had been just outside of Rury’s range, decided to land bonus into it:

2025-09-25 15:13:22 Victorious on the battlefield, The Revenant 2: Bear With Me (#3) conquered 137 land from Deep Shafts, Hard Crafts (#9).

This sequence of events was one of the most impactful times in our round. It gave Rury a nice chunk of mountains while knocking down a potential sui threat, it ended Crag’s round (he shortly thereafter de-converted into ops), it gave Lud and I both massive hits and firmly established us the dual threat below Rury, and it removed BBG from the equation – the first of the goblins to fall (the others followed over the next week or so, but never made a huge impact on us).

After this, we were really off to the races. Like clockwork we alternated hits. Rury slapping explorers who would occasionally pop into range, Karp finding me AC drops (while I didn’t sleep and stressed about covering everyone’s 5:4 op), and Lud made nice gains. Meanwhile we were keeping eyes on the looming nomad threats.

WTF? Nomad is OP!

By day 20ish Rury was playing his own game, so for attackers it really was just myself and Lud holding down the fort. We had agreed that we wanted to minimize the number of bottom-feeding sends that Rury would do (I think he maybe only did like 1 or 2?), to try and intentionally stay smaller. The previous round had shown what can happen when the runaway is too large, without someone containing midspeed growth, so we weren’t going to let that happen – however, this also led to a wild dp crunch. Explorers were 20%+ more dp than would normally be needed, and attackers never sending out in my range. Which stagnated the whole game and had me perpetually concerned about a particular obstacle…… the nomad.

I’ll just come out and say it. I hate nomad. At least when I’m on the wrong side of them, without turtle, and trying to perpetually cover what-if scenarios. They can train for 150 hours straight, then just for fun, can dump an extra 15% offense mods and facemelt you.

At least that’s what I told myself and was trying to defend… as a spirit, with stupidly expensive dp. Day after after day after day, training dp, with very little op incoming.

I had been super cautious watching all 3 of them: The strongest - Genghis Bang #9 (Weaser), followed by Sweet Rack O’ Mine #11 (Playt0i), and lastly Cosula: Beware of your castle #12 (lamb). One night, however, we hadn’t updated lamb and didn’t see the platinum he had stocked. Of course, I woke up at 6am with 10,000 discord pings telling me to train dp because #12 had dumped stupid amounts of mods. I didn’t get the dp trained in time and now had about a 3-4 hour window where I was hittable. I dumped troops, as did Lud, and just planned to retal if the nomad took a shot at me.

Luckily, the training we both did was enough to sway the nomad from taking the hit, which was his only real moment. That also highlighted why I was so concerned – if the 3rd strongest nomad could mod dump me pretty easily, what would happen if Genghis or Sweet Rack did?

Around this time was Karp’s “by far, favorite hit of the round” – an Ares drop on an attacker that HAD SENT. Like I previously have mentioned (either in this story or in discord) – Karp essentially cast revs constantly on people. He’d send me lists almost every day of “potential” AC drops – namely on explorers who maybe would go a few hours between log ins, ones that had all their spells aligned, or others. Sometimes the hits happened, but more often than not, people recast in time. This time though, he messaged me before bed and said “Kind of a long shot but Poenari Castle (#2) ac does not match his troops return.”

Then he went to bed. This troll had sent out, but hadn’t recast AC when he did, and it was slated to end in 3-4 hours – like 1-2 AM my time. I talked to our ops guys, the Americans were about to go to sleep, but the Europeans would likely be up at that tick – so I set an alarm and just hoped someone would be online. The hours passed super quickly while I was sleeping and next thing I knew my phone alarm was buzzing - Show Time. I jump into Disc, my eyes still blurry from sleep and pinged the ops team to see if anyone was awake. I think it was Zedi and Sommar both saying they were alive and getting breakfast. 3 mins later we got the rev:

2025-09-29 05:00:44 Victorious on the battlefield, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 17: The Vegan Culling (#3) conquered 135 land from Poenari Castle (#2).

“Dude that hit was awesome. I remember going to bed thinking slim chance this happens, And waking up to see you hit him at like 2am or something. We had soo many great hits, but that was my favorite. Also I think my first time finding Ac drop on attacker while troops were out. Amazing.” - Karpatheo

Round-the-Clock Ops

One of the realm’s biggest advantages was its global coverage. With Volv, Lud, and Erix holding down the European hours and Rury and Manno anchoring the US time zone, the realm ran 24/7 — no downtime, no missed ops. As Volv put it:

“We had so many Euros awake for ops, I didn’t even need to pull late nights.”

It was, truly, round-the-clock ops.

Suis and scaries

For the last approx. 14 days of the round, it was full-blown “defend the sui” mode. It was pretty clear to us that we had a very good shot at a win, as long as we were proactive in defending the sui. “We” realistically meaning myself and the explorers needed to over-defend. With Rury on top, Lud and I putting pressure on the slow guys, and then a wall of efficient explorers who were on pace to 7700+ acres, it was mostly just a matter of “who” and less on “if”.

DON’T GET HIT – that was the mantra. Now, don’t get me wrong, there were some very strong slow threats:

• Realm #7 was loaded with an Icekin (Almezo), Orc (Kongb), Gnome (MDK), and WE (Mris)
  
• Realm #8 had an Orc (swampfox), Gnome (Faith), DE (Mithrandir), and Troll (Tidnab)
  
• Realm #9 still had their nomad (though he was losing relevance by the day) and a surprise Troll (Rio) who came on like a freight train
  
• Realm #11’s nomad was still alive and they had an icekin
  
• And Realm #12 had kind of a dark horse DE (jboy) backed up by their nomad who had slipped off.
  

I had grown out of range of most of the slow guys, with only the nomads, 8 orc, and maybe one other in range – so Lud had to be careful. He hit our old nemesis – the liz in #2, opening the door to the rest of the field to grow. Little did we know this would lead to one of the wildest hit sequences in the round – and we were just spectators:

• #7 gnome hit the same liz Lud had hit in #2
  
• which lead #8 orc to hit #7 gnome
  
• then #7 orc hit #8 orc
  
• then #8 DE hit #7 orc
  
• then #12 DE hit #7 orc
  
• then #11 nomad hit #8 orc
  

In total, realm 7 and 8 both got blasted quite a bit, but 7 and 8 both had plenty of others that got hits. We thought it might be a situation of fighting over “best of the rest”, but not really sure the thought process. Despite this onslaught of competitors, it seemed highly unlikely that one of them could get through our trifecta of attackers cleanly, let alone cross the benchmark of approx. 8k, which was where we projected our explorers to hit – in such a short period of time…unless we started farming out.

I'm the dude playin' the dude (#8) (Swampfox - Orc) had been hit twice a few days before and had since trained insane 5:4 – presumably going after me. Karp had fed me another hit, so I was able to grow out of range, which meant that the weapon was likely pointed at one of our explorers.

Manno was our top explorer, with a huge economy and growing 200 per acres day. He should have been able to easily pass 8000, likely 8250+, however in his lust for size, he got greedy. The 100,000 peasant advantage he had over Swampfox clearly wasn’t enough to pay for a little extra defense:

2025-10-17 00:54:24 I'm the dude playin' the dude (#8) invaded fellow dominion Lord of the Rings 4: Return of the Jewelry (#3) and captured 498 land.

I pinged Lud and he was quick to act:

2025-10-17 00:56:32 Victorious on the battlefield, Barbie 2: Gnome Ann (#3) conquered 253 land from I'm the dude playin' the dude (#8).

The entire rest of the game then proceeded to feast on Swampfox’s carcass (aside from realm #9, because they were sleepy boys). By about day 42 it was no longer feasible for myself to effectively cover the full 5:4 from #9 troll (Rio), as it was a massive number, so I just made sure that *if* he decided to hit me, he’d get hit multiple times in return. I had to just trust that since he had played a clean round up until that point, it made no sense to throw it away to just make a splash.

Final Day

It’s over – no possible way we lose. So how do we want to finish? There were 7 of us over 7,000; Lud was hoping to be the 8th – so he found a nice hit (AC drop!) on one of the largest other explorers – which was a fitting last send for us.

Gnome in 8 (Faith) had trained an obscene amount of 5:4 in the final 2 days (after I had hit him – one of the only times an attacker sent out in my range the entire round) and we assumed it was either for me or Lud. I only had his max send covered by a few thousand DP, so I was sweating, since I thought he might be able to forge-dump me. He had a ton of SS incoming in the last hour that attacking would net acres, and he easily had Lud, so that’s what we expected would happen. We got all the ops beforehand and calculated out what his DP would be vs my temples, if he sent enough to break Lud.

Then I sat there in my truck, before going into work, with multiple tabs open on my phone, refreshing the GTC and waiting for the red to pop up. With my heart racing, I was refreshing every .5 seconds and at :59:57 the server lagged. I was convinced once the lag resolved I’d see the red notification that Lud had been hit – but nope. Lud jumped over me to become #2 attacker. All that stress for nothing. Kind of the story of the round for me – way more stressful than it needed to be.

We would finish with the entire top 5,8 of the top 10, and 9 of the top 11.

Other Items

I don’t remember the exact timeline of all the hits and moves we made. I know that #4 had a hard-on for our explorers and kept warring us, farming fireball kills. I think they warred us 3 times. Pretty sure we got hits on them in 2 of the wars. Also, we picked on Ted Blunty #10 (Damdred). Between the 3 of us I think we must have hit him like 5-6 times. Poor guy!

Looking Back

By the end of Round 46, what began as a mid-speed experiment became a model of coordination and trust. Everyone played their part — from Erix’s leadership and precision hits, to Volv’s consistency, Lud’s tactical mid play, Manno’s coordination, Rury’s aggression, Karp’s intel mastery, Sommar’s ratios, and Crag’s perfect timing (both in-game and baby naps). Realm 3 didn’t just win through numbers — they won through teamwork, timing, and good vibes.

It’s hard to only pinpoint a couple people as MVPs for the round, because in all honesty, dang near everyone came in at a clutch time to save the day. However, for my round specifically, it would probably be Karp. I think he fed me something like 6 consecutive AC drops + another 1 or 2 throughout the round. I made one sitting in my truck on the side of the road, twice at football games, another at 2am, etc. It went on and on. He’d find them hours in advance, DM me about who / when, and then get on voicechat to help confirm. But Zed, Manno, Lud, Sommar, Volv, pretty much everyone pitched in. It was a fantastic team effort.

Realm MVPs, thanks to ChatGPT

Every cog in the Realm 3 machine mattered:

* Crag, balancing newborn life and Open Dominion life like a pro, provided crucial early momentum. (Turns out, babies have perfect sleep cycles for tick play.)

* Sommar, dubbed the Ratio God, landed the tough ops when others couldn’t.

* Karp earned his crown as the Ares Drop King — finding hits day after day. As Erix said in chat: “If you’re not in Karp’s realm, cast your Ares early — you’ll be found out.”

⚔️ Final Words

Round 46 will be remembered as The Round of Round-the-Clock Ops — a round of balance, humor, and pure coordination across continents. Until next round — good morning, good night, and cast your Ares early.

This was an enjoyable round for me, not just because we were successful, but because we seemed to get along very well as a group. There was a lot of camaraderie, humor, insomnia, shared stress, and a shared goal. No one played selfishly and virtually everything we did was for the realm.

We finished with only having 4 attacks into our realm the entire round. Manno got hit with a sui (and we got the first hit/retal), Crag got hit with a sui (and we got the first hit/retal), and Syscero got hit twice in about a 2 day period (around day 30). That was it. Super clutch play by the entire team.

Rury – congratulations again. For a long time you were the “best player to never win” – and now you have, twice. I’ve got to be there both times. Very nicely done.

Zedijar – it’s always a pleasure playing with you. Very solid, level-headed, and consistent player. A great calming presence with a touch a goofiness. I love it!

Scuzy – The best player that no one has heard of. I had the privilege of playing with in both your first sprint round (2nd largest attacker) and now your first full round (2nd largest player). Absolutely unheard of success.

Manno – all you had to do was train a little more DP and you might have won!!!

Meesax – when the American ops team would run out of steam, you’d consistently step in and save the day. Clutch.

Lud – I really enjoyed our strategy conversations. You’re a fantastic numbers guy and there was no way we would have had this success without you. Now you need a win (but wait til we pack again!)

Karpatheo – What a guy. Legendary performance.

Volv – I know you were frustrated about your build and round – but you stuck it out and came up huge in situations. Team player. It’s insane that you finished 11th overall but all the way down in 9th in the realm.

Craghack – First time playing fast attacker. Co-pilot to a runaway, then deconvert into a 6k ops finish. Well done.

Sommarhydda – crazy guy, with crazy ratios, and I wouldn’t want you any other way. A rowdy good time!

Syscero – it sucks you got so busy with work, but glad you got to be part of the ride!

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