Round 46 Toothy Takes Off His Robe And Wizard Hat
Alright mother hubbards, let's do this. No preamble. No frills. Just a straight-up here-it-is eat-your-cereal Roundfail mini because I slacked hard this round. You're lucky I even wrote anything down.
WEEK 1 - BLOPS GREMLIN
I landed with 5-pack jboy, exrio, matty, zooj and lamb. A two-pack, Winterr and Full Garous also joined us. They've apparently been playing for 20+ rounds and this was the first time I'd ever landed with them, and also the first time I'd ever heard of them. Why had the old realm assignment algorithm kept us apart for so long? What was it so afraid of? I guess we were going to find out!
We were also joined by Jaerock, vovin and M4nus007. It felt like a balanced realm - which of course was immensely disappointing. I also didn't see us winning, even though jboy is always a strong contender on his own, so my plans from the get-go shifted from "realm support" to "blops gremlin". My natural state of being.
I randomed this round with no plans beyond "try new Demon" to see if boy wonder Lud had fixed it, and to give him stick if he hadn't. We've got the passive bonus of converting captured spies on the elite dp unit where it belongs, and some extra wiz strength regen which is nice. I'll be keeping a weekly tally of how many spies I converted to see what value I got from this perk by the end of the round. I planned to join the chaos league the moment it became accessible as a non-spy, non-wiz race and would hopefully be getting relentlessly targeted by high-ratio noobs aplenty, putting that perk through its paces.
We survived day one without any red in the town crier, but by day two we were gushing, with Full Garous, Vovin and Zooj all bleeding out.
2025-09-07 18:59:57 🎃 SPICE (Bobbo) (#5) invaded fellow dominion Hammer of Wrath (Full Garous) (#12) and captured 34 land.
2025-09-08 12:00:10 Deep Shafts, Hard Crafts (Wurstmeyer) (#9) invaded fellow dominion Agfx: PyroCharm 🐍🔥master with a sexy💦 voice (Zooj) (#12) and captured 42 land.
2025-09-08 12:00:25 Texas Chainsaw Massacre 17: The Vegan Culling (Erix) (#3) invaded fellow dominion There and Back Again (Vovin) (#12) and captured 48 land.
2025-09-08 12:48:58 Open Bar-becue (Disco) (#4) invaded fellow dominion Agfx: PyroCharm 🐍🔥master with a sexy💦 voice (#12) and captured 39 land.
2025-09-08 12:54:58 Hiding in the leaves 🍂🍂 (DJSoegaard) (#5) invaded fellow dominion Agfx: PyroCharm 🐍🔥master with a sexy💦 voice (#12) and captured 38 land.
2025-09-08 13:27:28 Best man attacking from his phone (Larso) (#4) invaded fellow dominion Agfx: PyroCharm 🐍🔥master with a sexy💦 voice (#12) and captured 34 land.
2025-09-08 13:34:24 Urg wearing Uggs (InternetFett) (#5) invaded fellow dominion There and Back Again (#12) and captured 47 land.
2025-09-08 13:41:23 Shawshank redemption 2: back to jail (Craghack) (#3) invaded fellow dominion There and Back Again (#12) and captured 40 land.
2025-09-08 15:16:55 Irish Moiled (MikeyBlue) (#2) invaded fellow dominion There and Back Again (#12) and captured 38 land.
2025-09-08 15:16:56 Burny Madoff (Shining) (#10) invaded fellow dominion Hammer of Wrath (#12) and captured 35 land.
2025-09-08 17:38:51 The admin of the awkward silence 😬 (Kongb) (#7) invaded fellow dominion There and Back Again (#12) and captured 36 land.
Phew. That's a lot of invasions, folks. And some classic Zooj. And from what I'd heard from last round, classic Vovin too. But would it be classic Full Garous?*
(*Yes. Yes it would.)
It takes forever for the round to feel like it has started when you're a blopper. Can't do shit for four days. I don't know why blops are banned for the first three full days of the round - surely when you're out of protection, you're out of protection. Ah well, the giddy high of clearing bounties would have to do.
After an eternity, blops went live and I set about swarming people. I had wanted to swarm The Revenant 2: Bear With Me (#3) who was this round's runaway-to-be, as he was pretty low on food - but intending to war as soon as blops went live, he'd brought in wizard guilds and archmages and actually had a pretty similar wpa to me. So instead I swarmed everyone else, including his competition. Take that losers!
And sure, swarm is annoying, but it's still missing its sting because food trading is so dirt cheap. I've been playing for what, 30+ rounds now, and I've managed to initiate troops starving from swarm on an active player precisely once in all that time. That was on Craghack by the way, an explorer who kept hitting the snooze button while his troops wasted away. Make Swarm Great For Once and increase the cost of food trading!
Anyway, some lame-o fast attacker on the same WPA as a blopper at blops live is UNACCEPTABLE so naturally I pumped spywiz, which also set me up for my application into the Chaos League, where I fully intended to be That Guy all round. Land can get fucked, I wanted chaos.
When I got into Chaos League, I had a quick look around at the competition. And that was a solo in #10, John Wayne Grassy (Noodle); a duet in #5, putting the milk in milquetoast (Squanchy) and Avocado Toast (Jamo); a trio in #4, Always a Bridesmaid (Downrightdave), Ringbearing Golden Retriever (Grapes of Math), and Mother of the Bride throwing Fireballs (Ottsca); a solo in #3 with Forest Gump 2: Let's Get Shrimpy (Karpatheo) and another solo in #2 with Guzerá (Chunk). Only one of these players would survive in the league long term, and that was milquetoast when his realm later picked up the Ivory Tower.
I'll be honest, I did not spend long scouting this bunch. John Wayne Grassy became my first target simply because clicking through the realms in descending order from my own brought me to him first. He looked like an ops bitch trying to chance his luck in the Chaos League for the cheap ops, so I killed 5,000 of his peasants and then assassinated 500 of his draftees. I would have killed more but jboy had me doing like 30 bounties earlier that day.
By the time the rankings updated, I was top swarmer, third for stabs and first place for fireballs - which was kinda funny to me since #3 was literally at war. Always my biggest complaint when I land in competitive realms, those fireball kills are quite puny when you have to go after attackers who typically have lower pops anyway.
Realm #4 was definitely going to be a problem. I suspected if I started taking too many ranks they'd dogpile me. The only way around that was to make sure my ratios always stomped theirs, and to give them a wide berth - unless they became the only targets available. Their bloppers also controlled the Monarchy, which was not good news for chasing fireball ranks. My realm, on the other hand, had a mix of pro-war players and some players that typically complained a lot when at war.
I had some schools come in and ignored the explore cost and econ improvement techs that I always prioritise, and instead set up a beeline for cheaper spells, cheaper archmages and assassins, spywiz assassination defence and spywiz strength refresh. Dark Artistry was still in an obnoxious place on the tech tree despite all my campaigning, but fett had at least yeeted anti-magic sigils off the board and there was a 20% cost reduction for archmages and assassins. The modifications to the tech path made it feel very much like the route for hardcore blackoppers. Or possibly teching icers. I quite like it as a "well this round's cooked, let's go nuclear for funsies" option.
The usual blopper limits held me back on fully ruining John Wayne Grassy's intended free ride to cheaper ops. My mana reserves despite being on war towers were not giving me enough juice to keep him round the clock toasty. One of the reasons I wanted Mana Pools early. I checked up on him after my initial volley, and he'd put 60/60 spy/wiz in his queue. Nowhere near enough to stop a second barrage, so it seemed fairly likely that he intended to duck out as soon as he could. He was stuck in CL with me until the middle of day six at the earliest whether he liked it or not though.
WPA at the end of week 1: 0.644
SPA at the end of week 1: 0.615
Running total of spies charmed: 0
Value from perk (assuming 500p for a spy): 0 platinum
Those spywiz ratios are what I'd consider 'insane' for a non spywiz race by the end of the first week, by the way. The growth impact was significant - where I'd usually expect to be top 40 in the first week as a slow race balancing my econ, growth and ramping up spywiz for blops, I was instead at the bottom end of the top 60.
WEEK 2 - MY SOCIETY
John Wayne Gassy had legged it, which left me with suboptimal targets in CL. It was time to start amping up the ratios.
We set our sights on grabbing a Wonder - the Underground Society. And by 'we' I mean 'I'. I set my sights on that Wonder. It had utility for everyone, of course, but having held it for pretty much the entirety of the last two rounds, I had developed a sense of ownership of that Wonder. I do consider it mine now, exclusively, every round it appears and if anyone else takes it, I'll just have to come after them and set them on fire. And they'll only have themselves to blame.
Unfortunately for realm #10, Burny Madoff thought it would be a wise idea to throw 12k op at it after I'd spent 20k in cyclones on it, and managed to topple it.
2025-09-15 13:05:02 The Underground Society has been destroyed and rebuilt by The Smoke Blokes (#10).
We discussed briefly taking the Great Market, but lets be honest, only chumps take the Great Market.
2025-09-15 14:58:19 The Great Market has been destroyed and rebuilt by Saving the Great Market System (#1).
Oh. Well I mean I'm sure they guys in #1 know what they're doing.
My hero hit level 4 and instead of taking my usual upgrade, "Illusion (failed spy ops no longer reveal your identity)", I selected "Orb of Detection (+20% enemy spy losses on failed operations)" to further boost my spies charmed chances.
Anyway, jboy wanted a bunch of time for everyone to get ready for war. I was already ready of course. I was born ready. But everyone else needed two days to put their shoes on and tie their shoelaces, and so I waited patiently.
2025-09-17 21:59:17 In a Rush to the Underground 👁️⃤ (#12) has declared WAR on The Smoke Blokes (#10).
Jboy actually declared an hour earlier than I'd been expecting, and I was caught in the middle of recording a podcast and had to scramble to fireball Ted Blunty (Damdred). He had already fed top op a couple of times so a few burnt peasants on top of that probably wasn't going to ruin his round. And if it opened him up for a third hit, well, could anybody really say that wasn't gonna happen anyway?
Jboy asked us to avoid fireballing Burny Madoff (Shining) and H.H.C. Holmes (Scratch) as he was concerned they could become a suicide threat for him if they became aggrieved enough. I didn't want to fireball them anyway because they had garbage populations and I wanted the kills, so it was an easy concession to make. But I might still have to fireball them if they didn't give up the Society without a fight. It was a card we could keep up our sleeves, at least; while they weren't being targeted, while they didn't have Burning, they still had more to lose by extending the war fighting for the Wonder. It made sense tactically to leave them alone.
We took the Wonder down in time for war cancel and since they didn't give us any trouble, we war cancelled without dishing out any extra pain.
2025-09-19 21:01:35 In a Rush to the Underground 👁️⃤ (#12) has CANCELED war against The Smoke Blokes (#10).
With the Underground Society, my ratios starting to spike, my hero built for mischief, and still being in Chaos League, I had maximised every possible avenue I could charm spies. The problem was no one was trying to blop me before we took the Society, and anyone paying attention to the TC would have even less incentive now. The vast majority of the spies I had charmed so far were from desperate second-tier attackers looking for a hit and failing ops.
WPA at the end of week 2: 0.754
SPA at the end of week 2: 0.767
Running total of spies charmed: 40
Value from perk: 20,000 platinum
WEEK 3 - RAIDS
Although I had technically played a raid in the tester, I was so catatonically checked out that I barely remember any of it. However the realm seemed pretty hyped as the raid approached, with everyone looking forward to doing what they could to try and maximise our success against other realms. I did think the first phase (donate boats and/or lumber, and expend draftees/morale) was a little boring, but the second phase (hero combat vs the enemy miniboss and his raiders, and spywiz str / mana investment) was a lot of fun. The miniboss' blade fury was a great move and if you could counter it you could deal pretty high damage. I managed to get his health below 50% pretty comfortably and then he somehow managed to dance around me and get 60hp back from recovery without taking any damage, and then just blade furied my poor hero to death. RIP Dave Davington from Davestown.
The spywiz investment stuff was valued highly in points which I appreciated, since it completely disabled me as a blopper for the entire duration of the raid. I did wonder if future savvy realms would be able to capitalise on events like this - perhaps targeting an explorer in a leading realm raid for a snare, in the hope their wiz str might be tapped. Or going to war with a blops-heavy realm expecting them all to be tapped out. I did notice realm #3 was at war with #9 during the raid. Realm #3 with Rury and co was able to hold second place on the raid scoreboard despite this, while Rio's crew in #9 floundered around in third-last place.
The raid's text seemed to be autogenerated by AI so I doubt anyone besides me actually read any of it (or maybe you enjoy reading AI slop, who knows?), but it didn't really feel to me like it was rooted in OD lore - random place names (Shattered Isles), factions we've never heard of (Imperials, Empire) and even made-up units (spectral knights, skeletal legions - for what was presumably Undead). Fett did make the point when I brought this up mid-round that we do have an Imperial Armada, and an Emperor (which is etymologically rooted in Empire), and said he had thrown out a lot of stories before running the ones he chose, so there was some quality control that I hadn't appreciated. But I'm a writer, I hold these things to higher, snootier standard and to me, this was all very sub-par. It could be cool as shit, and AI can still support it, but you have to modify / edit the output to fasten it securely to OD lore.
So I think there's a lot of unexplored potential in these raids. It could be a fantastic opportunity to start injecting cool tidbits about the races, wonders etc on the lore we have. Raid 1 and Raid 2 could be Part 1 and Part 2 of a more epic story. You could also make the flavour text a lot more interesting by dynamically updating it as the raid progresses, pulling in data from the realms contributing. Naming high performing players or realms specifically, weaving their hero actions into the story, that sort of thing could be really cool. Fett is already doing something along these lines for the hero tournament, announcing the winners and losers in real time with some flavour text.
Meanwhile, we had some in-realm drama when jboy realised that Winter, our top explorer, had blindly explored into range of the kobold. His packmate, Full Garous, had spent the entire round acting as an open house for invaders to take his land whenever he sent, but Winter had until now seemed to at least know what he was doing. As it happened, it was more like he knew the mechanics, understood exploring and efficiency, but didn't have an interest in keeping an eye on top op. In discord it caused some alarm when jboy realised the trainwreck that was in our immediate future.
jboy: you just explored into the Kobold's range!!!!???
Winter: I don't think so, but haven't been keeping an eye, so it's possible soon haha
ExRio: in 7 hrs you'll be in range, just pump walls
Winter: yupyup
lamb: lols you explore and didn't know that you jump into range
As an efficiency explorer, you only really have one guy to track - whether it's his op or your land size. If you can't track his op because you're slightly out of range, then you still only have one guy to track - and that's the dp of the biggest explorer in range. So I could understand the realm's frustration that Winter apparently hadn't even managed to do the bare minimum there. But it is these guys that keep runaways fed and make that strategy so viable, so I suppose they are useful in the OD ecosystem, in the same way a chicken is useful to a fox.
2025-09-23 11:03:43 The Revenant 2: Bear With Me (Rury) (#3) invaded fellow dominion My Kingdom Cold (Winter) (#12) and captured 130 land.
We asked Winter to grab Rury's ops, and he seemed bored / irritated at the request, but he did at least get them. And that would be the last time we heard from him all round.
As small as I was from all the Chaos League rankwhoring, I had different issues. I didn't know for sure who top op in my range was, because there were so many contenders and I needed my spywiz strength for blops and raiding. I was semi-defending Shawshank (Craghack) in #10, guessing it was probably him, but he was sitting and pumping op for days while I needed to spike my wiz ratios to stay ahead of the other chumps in Chaos League. Jboy didn't think he could full send, and while that was true I was safe. But I also just had to hope he found a better target. I wasn't that big, and with the Winters of the world out there just clicking buttons on autopilot, I was pretty sure it would be someone else that ate the hit. Famous last words.
Karmiva Kalman Käsi (Cosula) (#8), apparently shocked in my severe spike in wpa (I went from around 1.0 before the raids started to 2.0 by the time they finished), tried assassinating my wizards, evidently oblivious to our Society, but I was banking on the others being to focused on raiding to notice. Once the raid was over my plan was to target the biggest guy, the goblin Fribourgeoise (Slater) in #2. He weathered two volleys before he noped out of the Chaos League, and I claimed another scalp.
It was starting to look like slim pickings with so many players realising that Chaos League was too difficult to coast in this round. I can't claim all the credit, a few people disappeared from it that I hadn't even targeted - including one guy in #5, where they held the Ivory Tower. I have no idea what madlad pressured them to tuck tail and run but it sure wasn't me. In hindsight, it could well have been Cosula, who by his own post-round admission paid zero attention to where the anti-blops Wonders were even as he racked up insane losses. By the midpoint of the round, there were three CLers in #4 (including one tiny troll for some reason), just one in #5 (Avocado Toast had ducked out despite having the Ivory Tower, possibly due to Cosula) and one DE in #9.
The lack of targets finally started to work in my favour on the defensive side, as Always the Bridesmaid in #4 (Downrightdave), upon seeing my low spy ratio and evidently not clocking that we had the Society, started targeting me for wizard snares and had a spectacular fail rate until he gave up. But before that happened, he doubled my spies charmed count. It was an exceptional instance of someone blopping me in Chaos League and instead of doing any harm whatsoever, every time he failed he was essentially donating resources to me in the form of spies. I had so much regen on my spywiz str that I didn't even notice the slight drain from his few successes.
This round I also had the ignominy of feeding the dying Firewalker in #3, and sparking this round's controversial hit chain, after #3's bloppers on much weaker ratios rather impressively managed to catch me on an Ares drop.
2025-09-24 23:26:47 Shawshank redemption 2: back to jail (Craghack) (#3) invaded fellow dominion Toothy takes off his robe and wizard hat (#12) and captured 102 land.
It's the first time in my OD career I've ever been caught out on an Ares drop. I knew they'd been keeping tabs on me, and I am usually pretty vigilant on recasts even when I know I'm not being watched, but I got caught up playing Hades II and lost track of the time. Hades II is really good, what can you do? This hit unfortunately became the staging ground for what was widely considered one of the biggest misplays of the round, as #9 would then use the hit to smack the Firewalker:
2025-09-25 01:59:57 Big Black Gobs Vol. #3 (Kenshiro) (#9) invaded Shawshank redemption 2: back to jail (#3) and captured 194 land.
Which then fed their Spirit, which nobody outside of #3 was happy about:
2025-09-25 02:10:26 Texas Chainsaw Massacre 17: The Vegan Culling (Erix) (#3) invaded Big Black Gobs Vol. #3 (#9) and captured 145 land.
The chatter in our discord was that the FW was finished anyway, so there wasn't much benefit to putting him down, especially at a cost that fed their spirit.
I wanted to war #3 and roast the spirit, partly as revenge for the hit but also partly because I was bored. Jboy wanted the numbers, so I gave him the numbers. He was well protected with a ton of WGs, well above the trifling meta 30 at around 63 when we checked, with all but one of them stuffed full of wizards and AMs in his queue, making it likely he was running them efficiently and a lot of his wizards if not all were probably unstabbable. Of his 26k peasants we could expect to roast about 5k assuming no stabs. I was at the biggest risk of being hit by the spirit in a mutual war, so we guesstimated his ghost flex vs my dp and I was coming out about 2k ahead with with war bonus. I was just out of his range but could hop in and have enough acres / dp in the queue to manage the risk of a hit or him moving out of range. In my estimation we could war him and deal damage and I'd just be vigilant against Ares drops or potential snares.
Jboy in spite of the numbers was still not happy to war them as their own bloppers were acting as bogeymen, even though we had the Underground Society and he was a Dark Elf. Amazing the psychological effect of just demonstrating you have blops support. He wasn't wrong either, they could hurt us back. But that's just war. Jboy also pointed out that #9 were doing their part to choke him out by pushing Wolf Riders to force him to train dp, and that since he was pretty much already maxed out on GTs, he could start to struggle later as everyone else began to push mods. I guess time would tell. Ultimately, war was off the cards, which meant I had to go back to bullying the few remaining Chaos Leaguers that were left.
One thing that did strike me as a contrast with my realm this round randoming, versus last round where I packed and landed with another solid pack, was the lack of strategic cohesion in our realm. It's possible jboy's pack were talking a lot in side channels, but I couldn't see any real plan besides ride it out and see what happens. There was a lot of speculation on what others were doing, just no real coordination on what we wanted to do. It felt very much like we were all floating along, and in spite of my deliberate setting us up to be somewhat blops-resilient, war was still very much a trepidatious concept for our realm. Jboy said if we wanted to war, the no discord realm #6 would be an option. I didn't really want to pick on the no discord realm just because we knew they'd probably be an uncoordinated mess and therefore 'safer' to risk our Wonder with - and I also expect that every round from now on where you see a realm with the name 'Elf Woods' in it, people are going to view that as easy pickings. They seem like people that just want to be left alone, I figured leave them alone.
Although if I ran out of targets in Chaos League, Elf Woods was absolutely getting fireballed. I can only tame the demons inside myself up to a point. I'm not fucking Mother Theresa over here.
WPA at the end of week 3: 2.638
SPA at the end of week 3: 0.642
Running total of spies charmed: 184
Value from perk: 92,000 platinum
WEEK 4 - ARE YA WINNING SON
I was fireballing Cosula, who was rapidly becoming my stalwart rival in the chaos league. Together we'd driven almost everyone out of the league, except for one guy in #5 that was protected from any meaningful damage by the Ivory Tower. Which meant now we only had each other to target, and of the two of us, I had the superior wizard ratios. Cosula spent pretty much the entire week getting steamrolled but refused to leave the chaos league, giving me a permanent target. But he also started doing what he does best: going full insane-o mode on ratios. He did not grow at all, as far as I can tell, from around this point to the end of the round, except for land bonuses. I tried to keep some growth going, because a superior population was always going to ensure I could keep Cosula under my boot, but I also seemed to be in a bad spot for some slow attackers who were starting to pick up momentum, and ate two more hits as a result.
2025-10-05 17:55:53 Sweet Rack O’ Mine (Playt0i) (#11) invaded fellow dominion Toothy takes off his robe and wizard hat (#12) and captured 141 land.
2025-10-08 00:57:06 👀The Eyes of the Void 🌌 (mris) (#7) invaded fellow dominion Toothy takes off his robe and wizard hat (#12) and captured 138 land.
You know you're having a bad round when you wake up to a discord ping from Zooj asking you to please stop feeding.
WPA at the end of week 4: 6.012
(I forgot to keep recording SPA from this point on, but I started to spike it around this time)
Running total of spies charmed: 1,723
Value from perk: 861,500 platinum
WEEK 5 - CHAOS RIVALRY
I wanted war, and the best option that wouldn't put the realm in danger, and which wasn't #6, was realm #2 with Chunk and co. So we warred them, and spent a few days harassing them with blops, jboy got a war hit in, then we cancelled. It propelled me forward in the fireball ranks and put me comfortably ahead of Karmiva Kalman Käsi (Cosula), which kept me from nagging jboy for war for the next few weeks. I had also left the chaos league to try and deprive Cosula of a target entirely, but realised a few hours after I'd put in my application, that my realmie Jaerock was still in the league. Despite Jaerock being larger and with a higher pop, Cosula had become laser focused on fireballing me, and was absolutely relentless. He had spiked his ratios to the point where, although he couldn't defend my assaults, his 25% DE racial bonus along with his Spires investments was giving him a surprising amount of success against my defences. At one point he hit me with 11 consecutive fireballs with no fails. And I know none failed because you are notified when you bounce an attempted spell. Do you know what the odds are of someone pulling that off on his ratios vs mine? Well I sure as hell didn't, so I plugged the numbers into AI and it told me that it's 0.34%. Not impossible over the course of a round where someone is doing this 15-30 times a day, but still pretty unlikely.
I still had the upper hand, but this RNG would occasionally bless him with insane luck while fucking me over completely. My hero perk (at around 25% as well by this point) and my Spires was demolishing his much-lower-than-mine wizard defensive ratio though.
Anyway. I sent Jaerock three messages over the course of sixteen hours but the man sleeps like he's Cronel. By the time he saw the warning, we both agreed it wasn't even worth him leaving chaos league to avoid the wrath of Cosula. By the time the war was over in a day or so I'd be back in the league anyway. As a result, Jaerock got cooked for about a day or two before I was back in the league and Cosula was immediately kicking down my door to throw fire at me some more. He was like a rabid dog with a bone.
I mostly targeted him back, but I would occasionally switch to better targets to farm kills whenever they (briefly, foolishly) appeared in the chaos league. He on the other hand had spent five weeks farming me exclusively for wizard mastery, and since I had started off with the highest mastery of anyone by a country mile, he made rapid gains on that front while I got comparatively less off of him, and would also lose mastery whenever he fireballed me. He would eventually take that title off me, but I was more interested in being top fireballer, and was trying to stay ahead of realm #4 (home of the Hydra), who I'd mentioned earlier had control of the Monarchy and were using it liberally towards the end of the round to farm kills off the top explorer. I had an immense lead on them but they were quickly closing the gap. Caught between a rock and a hard place (or rather, between a crazy Finn and a Hydra), it looked like I was fated to lose both titles.
I pressured jboy for war again, but this time I wanted to go after #4 and snare down their bloppers, while also farming them for fireball kills. It would have been pretty satisfying. But lamb took fright at the idea and so it was a no-go. I didn't push it, because I only wanted the war for selfish reasons anyway. There were no real viable targets that our realm would approve either, except for Elf Woods' crew in #6, but I didn't even care enough about them at this point. Their top pop dominion had already abandoned the rest were about as tiny as I was. Dave would snatch top fireballer from my hands in the final week of the round. And Cosula had a bunch of titles that it seemed impossible to catch him on.
Fortunately, in the last week, for just a day or so, a unicorn would wander into the chaos league.
WPA at the end of week 5: 7.892
Spies Charmed: 1,855
Value from perk: 927,500 platinum
WEEK 6 - RANKINGS
We must stop the terror (Cerbrus) (#1) entered the chaos league on respectable ratios, over a 5.0 in both spies and wiz.
It wasn't even close to enough.
He also hadn't converted those units to assassins and archmages. With almost no fails on spy disband, I was taking out about 200 spies per cast. I was a lot less successful with assassinating his wizards, but at 150 per shot it was worth the 50-50 chance at success, losing 30 assassins per attempt. I had a score of 0 for both spy disbands and wizard assassinations before the rankings updated, whereas Cosula had spent all round disbanding small amounts off various targets and had a few thousand in both. And he was so focused on blasting me every time he logged in that he didn't spot Cerbrus. I overtook him in both rankings after just one update. Cerbrus didn't last long in the chaos league, perhaps 18 hours after I clocked him. But it was enough to remove two ranks from my rival and take them for myself. Your sacrifice is appreciated, Cerby.
For whatever reason the hero tournament battle system kept putting me against my own realm mates. I'd already destroyed Jaerock in a previous fight, and now it had me up against jboy. While Jaerock had been relatively simple to dispatch, jboy's tactics were completely at odds with my own quite aggressive playstyle, because he was a turtling bastard that made few attacks and spent most of his actions on focus, recover and defend moves, with occasional (successful) strikes and counters. Whereas every move I seemed to make against him would whiff. I'd attack, he'd defend or counter. I'd recover, he'd attack. I'd focus, he'd recover. I also always started off with a time disadvantage; most of the hero battles started just as I was going to bed so I'd lose about 8 hours off the clock immediately, then even more if I was busy at work. When it became clear I was going to lose against jboy, and with just 11 minutes left on my clock, I queued six straight attacks and assumed that would be the end of it. But jboy apparently didn't expect complete and unrelenting aggression and it caught him off-guard enough that this crazy assault was somehow successful, and instead of losing, I knocked him out of the tournament instead.
Then I fought Jota who swiftly eliminated me with no fuss at all. RIP Dave Davington from Davestown.
WPA at the end of week 6: 9.890
SPA at the end of week 6: 5.602
Spies Charmed: 2,903
Value from perk: 1,451,500 platinum
This perk was a lot of fun for this pure blops gremlin round and obviously can deliver pretty big value if you gear your whole playstyle towards it. For a more realistic expectation, Forest Gump 2: Let's Get Shrimpy (Karpatheo) (#3), in second place for the spies charmed rank, had 909 spies charmed (value 454k plat), while third place, Morbius 2: It’s Morbin Time! (Scuzy) (#3), collected 501 spies (value, 250k plat). They both finished over 7k, while I finished on 3k. So I wouldn't set yourself on fire to get triple the gains if you want to have decent acres. To beat Cosula in the chaos league, you have to make a choice. Pick two: Explore, build dp, build ratios. The only way to not get hit was to remove exploration from the list of things I could afford to do. By the end of the round, all of my ratio insanity coupled with my lack of growth left me with just 13k peasants. But I finished bigger than Cosula, and I beat him in the Rush Rankings. He was a worthy opponent, but what can I say, I'm just the better blops gremlin.
Cosula had won the previous Rush Rankings doing this, and would have won them again this round too - had I not gotten in his way, and had we not made some changes to the scoring system, which weannounced earlier in the round. It's not the kind of playstyle I wanted the Rush Rankings to reward, since our blops had absolutely no effect on anyone of importance, and caused us both major damage; to say either of us was "top blopper" felt a bit ridiculous. Top goofballs maybe. So I spoke to AgFx and we went back and forth a bit on what the solution should be, but ultimately scoring had to be tied to performance (land). If you finish tiny, you probably didn't have a big impact. That's not to say finishing big automatically means you did, of course - dave, who won top blopper after the changes, secured top fireball in the game by blasting explorers - but he also did more beneficial-to-his-realmies blops generally too and I can say confidently that I did nothing of the sort. Cosula was even worse than I was, continuing to assault me through Raids while I poured my resources into helping the realm finish first place in both (along with a lot of support from Jaerock and others). We were likely a net drag on the realm overall. So going forwards, if you finish under 5k acres, a penalty is applied to your score that gets more severe the smaller you are, up to a maximum of 70% reduced points for the Rush Ranks. And we'll revise this if it doesn't seem like it's working to recognise the 'right' kind of blopping.
That said, even with the extreme penalty in place, I still finished fourth. Not even my own scoring system when designed specifically against me can keep me down, I'm just that awesome. Cosula was eighth. What a loser, not even top five!
EPILOGUE
A boring round overall, but I'm pretty good at setting my own goals and making my own entertainment in this game in these circumstances. I had fun pushing the Demon charm perk to its limits, and it was ultimately quite satisfying to beat Cosula in both versions of the Rush Ranks.
Thanks to my realmies for indulging me that one totally frivolous war. Congrats to #3 for the win.
TL;DR
This round in a nutshell https://ibb.co/JjMdgq7T