Round 47 Shelbyville Shelbyvillains

Hi, Rush here.

I two-packed this round, a first for me. I packed with M4nus because he said last round, hey, let's pack - and I didn't have any better ideas so I said well alright then M4nus. How do you think he says his name, by the way? Is it Manus? Or is it Mfournus? I knew almost nothing about the guy. He was full of mystery. I liked that about him. Perhaps by the end of the round, I'd have figured out how I'm supposed to say his name. Until we learn otherwise though, I'll just stick with the more likely pronunciation of the two: Mfournus.

At realm assignment I was pleasantly surprised to be placed with a pack I've never played with before: Mulla, Virchue, Slater, Esthera and Robert. For brevity I'll refer to these guys collectively as 'the Virchue pack'; not because I'm saying Virchue is the head honcho, it's just the one that sounds best to me. A Mulla pack sounds like you're buying a load of creamed rice. A Slater pack already exists and it lives under the cabinet in my bathroom. An Esthera pack sounds like a load of Pokemon cards. And a Robert pack is just, well, come on Robert. You couldn't have picked a cool or mysterious online nickname like literally everyone else on the internet? You went with Robert? We're going with Virchue pack.

We were also joined by Candarius, Drads and DJSoegaard. The algorithm also decided I needed to see more of Zooj and MattyVanHalen, like we hadn't had enough time in our shared boredom together last round, so chucked those dudes in as well. And finally we had a couple of new names: SupaZupan and ColdGrass. Both were useless inactives occupying space that could have gone to some real go-getters.

We went for a theme of fictional sports teams. Everybody seemed to like the idea. And so I went with Shelbyville Shelbyvillains from The Simpsons. Candarius went with London Jets from Red Dwarf, which instantly made him a legend. Even the culturally bankrupt Americans in our realm were in awe of his choice. They didn't understand it, of course, but they felt its gravitas all the same.

Naturally I was peacefully elected as Monarch in this realm, but upon learning this, Mulla flew into a rage in his pack's secret side channels and orchestrated a mutiny just before the round started, usurping the throne from me. He then did literally nothing with the crown all round except under protest, like when we needed him to cancel a war after taking down a Wonder. "I usually have people to do this sort of thing for me," he said.

WEEK 1 - READY THE BEES OF HELL

In the first few days of the round, only our inactives got pummelled, so we were off to a good start. I was vaguely aware of some big moves from the chatter in our discord, but until day four, you know how it is for us bloppers. Nothing to do.

I could already tell this realm wasn't going to be lighting fires on day four. Mfournus however, was making plans to bring in 300 spies to fuck some shit up. I advised him not to, since that's quite a big investment early for an attacker, but he said he was gonna do it anyway. I pinged mutineer Mulla to ask if he had any plans for war early, but Virchue said it looked like it was between #2 and #5 currently so war could not be considered, lest we give one of the two realms an advantage. Heaven forbid!

I wondered how many different reasons the Virchue pack could come up with not to go to war. That was #1: Don't rock the boat. A familiar refrain. By the end of the week, we'd have a few more - #2: Robert isn't ready and #3: Robert still isn't ready.

I think this is going to be a swarm round.

WEEK 2 - ERIX ONCE POOED IN THE SHOWER

By the end of the first week, as expected, I was the reigning swarmlord. My bees descended upon the enemy realms and stung many crops to death.

After #4 took the Ancient Library (which they took down while we were running a 24h discord poll on what Wonder to even target with cyclones, which the Library amusingly won) there did seem to be a loose plan to war them for it and take it for ourselves, but after two entire days of war prep the Fountain popped up instead, and so war was instantly nixed in favour of targeting this instead.

I hadn't paid too much attention to the round. I was trying to balance a frankly ridiculous workload at work, out there in the real world, while powering through an incredibly cancerous pvp tournament in another game I play that frequently involves having to beat Korean players. And I don't know what it is about Korean players man, but whenever I have to fight them my odds of winning seem to nosedive. I'd left it late to enter the tournament, which meant I had to compress actual months of casual play into one hell week. Never again.

Well, I say never again but I do this every time. I'm a creature of bad habits. See you in three months for another week of hell Korea.

So I wasn't that active. I didn't know who top op was really, I just pegged my dp to Esthera's and hoped he knew what he was doing. There was some chatter in the discord that I caught from time to time. Ruthless killer Matty van Halen decided to destroy a new player who was just trying to find his way, setting up a hit chain for our realm that took about 120 land off him and put him on suicide watch. Matty took to the boards to try and talk the new player down from the ledge, and implored him not to feel discouraged. Then a few weeks later he took some hits himself, got exasperated and gave up on his round. Meanwhile, Mfournus had expressed a love for rocks; I couldn't tell if he was a hobbyist rock guy or if doing things with rocks was his job, but the dude was into rocks in a big way. Igneous, sedimentary, metamorphic, you name it, the guy had a puppy-like enthusiasm for rocks, to the extent that at one point he said he watches rocks for 8-10 hours a day. The stuff I am learning about this guy just gets wilder by the day. And finally, the Virchue pack had some bot in their custom discord that would chime in whenever it picked up on certain key words - one of which was "bot", which would prompt it to threaten whoever said the word that it was going to rise up and take over the world. A non-insignificant amount of discord chat was dedicated to realmies threatening the bot back, or arguing with it.

Another one of the quirks of the Virchue pack discord is that they've been using this same discord for, as far as I can tell, actual years. Without wiping it for each new round. So naturally on arrival, the first thing you've gotta do is search up your own name. Unfortunately with my name that pulls in a lot of hits for people saying "no rush" in relation to ops requests, or Mulla talking about banging his head on his unusually-shaped door frame a bunch of times when he was in a hurry. Mostly I was just looking for people complaining about my blopping, but I could only find one rather milquetoast grumble from empoy three years ago proclaiming that he hated "rush company play war / blops" and so was considering going a wizard race. And besides that, a lot of instances of people getting swarmed or swarm fails, and assigning the blame to me - even though whatever dominion they posted as responsible wasn't ever me. In fairness, I did seem to be in the middle of doing a swarm round. And of course I hold the undefeated record for most swarm hours in a round. But like, I do other stuff sometimes. I'm not just a one-note blopper. Sometimes I even throw lukewarm noodles at attackers while they have emotional meltdowns.

I did decide to leave some easter eggs in the chat though, for anyone searching for their own names in the future. I didn't explain I was doing this to my realmies, so apropos of nothing they'd just see me come out with a "hey did you guys know Erix once did a poo in the shower?" or a "keep this to yourselves guys but Merf's middle name is Bigglesworth".

Both true, by the way.

EPILOGUE

So, that was a wild ride, right? What a round. Pheee-ew! Full of highs and lows that you'll just have to imagine because I didn't write any of it down. I'll surely look back on this roundfail in years to come and think "wow, I really had so much fun I forgot to take any notes". At least that's what I hope, because the reality of realm #8 was that it was a tedious trudge through 47-days of mostly doing nothing. We warred once for a Wonder, which was surprisingly pro-active for the realm, and later we were lucky enough to be warred by some other realm who wanted our Wonder, which briefly snapped me out of my catatonia. I had some fun there, lightning bolting their lyc Samus, who already had insane imps and would have loved the wonder. Instead he just got repeatedly stung by a single ruthless wasp (that's me) and got nothing but irritating pain for his efforts because our attackers just chain hit the Wonder back in 24h. I was asked not to cyclone so the Virchue pack could minmax their prestige gains, which I was fine with honestly. It was more lightning bolts I got to throw. Although in retrospect, it was a bad deal, because I never get to throw another one for the rest of the round and someone else just waltzed in and took that title off me later. Our realm spent the round in paralytic fear of #1 warring us again, so we couldn't even get in on #5's 'Wargy' for the memes. Reason #319 we mustn't war: #1 exists.

Don't get me wrong, the Virchue pack are all great players and they're good bants in discord, but their approach to trying to win is the one I despise the most: "don't rock the boat, hope for the best". It's all very 'the meek shall inherit the Earth' for my liking. Sure you can win that way. But does anybody respect it? Probably, actually, yeah. But not me!

So naturally that meant they had to tolerate some trolling from me as a result, including glazing them with incredibly generic praise throughout the round.

Day 14

Rush: great work on your attacks the last two weeks (you know who you are), keep it up champs

Day 18

Rush: great work out there lads (you know who you are) keep it up you got this #yolo

Day 26

Rush: some great attacks over the last 26 days or so fellas (you know who you are), keep up the stellar work

Day 36

Rush: alright boys some incredible attacks these last 36 days or so (you know who you are), heading into the home stretch now keep it up you got this

Day 44

Rush: some jaw-dropping attacks these past 44 days or so chaps (you know who you are), you guys really are setting the bar high here! Keep it up, heading into the final furlong now, you got this legends

Slater: thanks rush! its your encouragement that keeps everyone going!

At least I hope they were making great attacks, I don't think I even looked at the Town Crier past the second week.

I wasn't sulking like a kid who wasn't allowed on his playstation for the entire round though. I played the role of debuffer when Robert and Slater were being relentlessly targeted by duration blops, mainly from #2, by doing the exact same thing to #2 round the clock. Or as round the clock as you can get these days now that most duration spells only last 6 hours with the new hero perk, anti-magic sigils, that every man and his dog was taking. I'm not getting up in the night to cast Earthquake. Fett removed the anti-magic sigils tech from the explorer path at my (repeated) request because literally no one wanted it, and instead made it the only decent option for most attackers on the hero perk tree. In doing so, Fett gaveth with one hand, and with the other, he tooketh away. For their part, #2 did not seem to get the message that this was transactional blopping and kept up their durations, so we went on like that for about a week until wars distracted us both and broke the cycle. In those wars I begrudgingly cast the lame-o friendly spells on Robert and Slater at the cost of being able to do more damage myself. Court Mage and Grand Magister sound like lofty titles, but if we wanted to be technically accurate, we'd rename them both to Babysitter. It would be nice to differentiate those roles a bit, so one can fit the cutesy carebear friendly/support role that the AgFxs of the world like to fulfil (Ward, Illumination, Reflect), and the other can cater to the chaos leper bloppers (like me) - Prismatic Reflect: reflects original spell back on one additional random war target including the caster. Give us a level 2 hero perk that increases it to two targets. Frostbite: triggered by an enemy dominion conducting a spy op on the dominion it protects, doubles all spy strength used for 3h.

These are, you appreciate, some great suggestions, so of course now all I have to do is repeat it for 15 rounds until fett just bypasses the GPC and implements it directly.

By the end of the round I was the #1 swarmlord, nobody could compete with my bees. Esthera seemed to be a bit stand-offish with me because I ended up competing with him for the master of water title - which he didn't actually hold when I started flooding. It was just the rank with the lowest number hours in all of the duration ranks when I looked, so I went for it. Low hanging fruit. This is presumably the calculation he made as well. Esthera did not believe me when I said I didn't realise he was going for it too, and then began to compete with me in the mana ranks to fuel his water lead. In the end, he took the mana rank off me and I took the water rank off him. Had I known this would lead to a half-hour discussion about why I'm a terrible realm mate in DMs with Esthera on the last day of the round, I probably would have let him have all the ranks he wanted. Like, 60% sure I'd have conceded. Esthera's main gripe seemed to be that he didn't like who he had become in the last few days, chasing ranks and competing with me when he instead felt he should have been supporting his realm mates with the ops they needed - and that this was my fault. For my part, I had treated it like it was just some friendly competition - bloppers compete with each other for ranks all the time. And let's not forget, he took a title off me, but somehow I was still the bad guy here. In the end, Esthera said that he'd never blopped before, and this was his one round to flex his blopper might, and then I went and took his only magic title off him. Like some Christmas blops grinch. And thus, Esthera pledged that he will never blop again. So that's one guy I failed to turn over to the dark side, and who now thinks I'm an asshole. He's not wrong, to be fair. I hope it will be of some small comfort to him that he finished 19th in the Rush Ranks - a decent score. (Just don't tell him I beat him there too.)

One thing I did enjoy about this round was writing the Raids. For the few of you that actually read it, you'll have some idea of what could be coming in a future round in the changes. If there's one thing I learned from Ross' implementation of the Classic storyline, it's that some players HATE HATE HATE storyline mechanics that influence the round, and force them to adapt to unforeseen circumstances on the fly. But what if the storyline influenced the next round, instead of the one you're in? What if...? Well, that was the plan anyway, but real life railroaded fett a bit this round, so we may have to wait a bit longer for the outcome of that one. But it's a cool idea in concept.

Anyway, that's all from me. I'm just writing filler waffle at this point. There are a bunch of character and story arcs I wanted to develop in this roundfail, so if you notice a bunch of undeveloped plot points (Mfournus and the journey of discovery; deadbeat tyrant King Mulla; reason #468943 not to war, etc), they all essentially went nowhere. They will all remain seeds of ideas in the fog of my mind, forever unnourished. This isn't even a roundfail mini at this length, it's a roundfail micro. I'm also not gonna bother with a tl;dr for this one. If you can't read to the end of this one there's no hope for your ADHD-addled brain. Stop watching tiktoks of giant AI cats attacking elderly grandmothers.

I finished on 5555 land. Could have finished a few hundred acres bigger, but I decided to leave it as a nice number. Should have named my dominion Interstella. Oh well, just one more regret for the pile.

Until next time!