Round 49 The Vegan Cannibal

Snare Attempt

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 was IMO 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.

Opinion

In my opinion, they represent a significant decrease in player agency, primarily through racial choices and strategy choices. The threat of a realm able and willing to snare is extraordinarily powerful. Adding a second or third or even fourth realm to watch will force people to take one of the three mentioned solutions. For explorers, growing out of range is also not a realistic option: it is only very late in the round that the largest explorers grow out of range of the smallest explorers.

As for the other options... Hussar was a comparatively weak strongest dominion, though we were heading deep into a stall and OP was elevated on a lower size than you would expect. Still, the Merfolk of the round were the only safe race, and Merfolk have significant turtle power per point of OP. Anything under them is in worse trouble. That's a lot of races.