Round 38 Read 10 books Stab 10000 draftees

The Gameplan

I started this round playing lyc explorer aiming to be focused on ops. I like to sim, so I started off at 851 acres along with 40 spies, 40 wiz, and 26 towers so that I could help with ops immediately. I explored quickly, but kept my ratios increasing and converted most of my temples to towers within the first 12 hours to get to the point where I had enough mana to spend all my wiz strength. My realm had 3 typical fast attackers (Liz - Allegorical, Halfer - DavetheGoliath, Kobbo - B) and one gobbo attacker played quite fast (Disco), so we needed a lot of ops early round.

The Birth and Sudden Death of our Fast Attacking Dreams

Unfortunately, our round had a rocky start with realm 11 coming out of the gates at 850 acres with 3 delayed attack FAs (Halfer- Bobbo, FW - InternetFett, Kobbo - Merf) that quickly gained a lead and put everyone else on the back foot. Dave's Halfer sim had an issue that made him unable to make his second hit when he needed it which put him behind early, and Allegorical's liz ended up getting hit by Bobbo's halfer at the end of day 2, which put us even more behind when the round had barely started. B's kobbo did manage to keep growing well for a while and had a very strong economy, but ended up getting hit by Merf's kobbo near the end of day 4, soundly putting the nail in the coffin of our fast attacking dreams. Allegorical did have a wonderful SUI on Merf's kobbo before his troops returned from hitting B, which did take Merf down a peg from the triple runaway status that had been forming. Realm 11 warred us soon after that because DavetheGoliath was pumping mods to threaten SUI OP with his halfer, but had terrible docks and was promptly sunk. Realm 7 did take advantage of the situation and warred 11 while they couldn't mutual, and together we managed to Fireball Bobbo's halfer and keep his peons down until rejuvination, which did manage to take him down a notch and left InternetFett's Firewalker as the clear frontrunner of their fast attackers (though all 3 of them were still very much alive). We tried to do some damage elsewhere, but we did not have enough mana to spread around. 11 was all pretty much unsinkable, so we mostly assassinated wizards with our spy strength, and managed to get quite a few off of Fett's firewalker. After the war we really had no fast attacking power left. Disco's gobbo was starting to get a bit stronger, and would be able to put a little pressure for a while, but eventually got choked as 11 just solidified their dominance over all other attackers.

Boring Exploring Stuff

I managed to create a good land gap between myself and the second place explorer, Mcgeeal's gobbo, of about 200 acres in the early round (probably around day 15). My strategy was working out well, but I was behind Mcgeeal on investment buildings by about 100 as I had been building significantly more homes to house the extra defense I needed since he had Top OP in realm for most of the round at that point. This is where things started to slowly turn against me. First off, 11 got the super op exploring wonder, Wayfarer's Outpost, apparently by Agfx sending two cyclones at it from his phone on the top of a ski slope. I had a slight research advantage having gotten my schools up faster and going slightly higher on count, but Mcgeeal had about 150 more DMs and had the gobbo investment bonus. He also started masonries very early while I was adding GTs instead to keep up with defense, giving him a decent improvements edge along with the wonder, which started his climb towards my size. At this point I think Mcgeeal was keeping about twice my SPA and I think I was keeping about twice Mcgeeal's WPA. I was using a low spy strategy since I only really needed to check attackers for ops since I had range issues for any target hunting and we had plenty of explorers. Because I had low spies I was generally keeping enough DP to defend against InternetFett's full send without ares. Mcgeeal passed me in acres on day 25, and pretty quickly established about a 200 -250 land lead that would last through most of the rest of the round.

To Be Continued...