Round 38 To not starve from swarms

Another round of random realmies. Lucked out, found myself with Sharkey et al on the one hand, and Unfather et al on the other, and Bazz randomed in, similar to myself. More than a few I'd played with; all a pretty sociable bunch. Made a few Elf sims for people - Mithrandir got a DE, Unfather got a WE, and Margoose got a copy of my sim - and we were off to the races.

Or rather, to the Mountain Race Watch. Seriously, #11, did you have to hit what felt like every single Icer under the sun and then a few Gnomes for good measure? Sheesh. I was banking on a lower powered early round with my strategy, especially because I'd already nuked all my Smithies on like day 1 or 2. For Alchs, because that's what Alch FWs do, but the downside of that is, as always, very expensive DP for the cost. (4.5pt for 925p on elites.) I have no regrets, though: it's a fun strategy, but one that requires a lot of attention to what the top is doing. Planned on topping out at 6-7k specs before end-round shenanigans, eventually could pull the plug at 6200 of them. Never did get to the point where I could release them, though: 11's OP was too nasty to ever really try that.

But after week 2, I don't think there ever was a point where 11 could really try and do something to me regularly, it had to be mass dumps of something. Timely GT increases, first from Factories to GT, then much later from my handful of Barracks to GT, kept me safe by enough. Never safe without Ares, but as Gothia's fond of reminding me: I see Snare ghosts everywhere and plan accordingly most of the time. This round, that was 12hring amped ACs - essentially making me cast two Racials and Midas in a 12h period, and between that and running a lot of top OP checks, my mana was all spoken for. As a result, I think my blop stats are the lowest they're ever going to be, only 3h of Plague somewhere - I think that was a refresh on #13 Nomad at some point. Also no stealing - and I'm pretty sure I had sub-200k plat stolen from me all round as well, most of that coming from #6 who got me when I derped and didn't train for 3h despite being around on like day 40.

Not bad considering I had 305 million plat produced all round. Income maxed out somewhere around 450k per tick. Honestly surprised people didn't try and steal from me on 1h income...

End round came with the nastiness of #13 Cheshire threatening to suicide everywhere. I didn't want to be the cheapest on the block if he did decide to do that, so that probably cost me a couple of acres. Not sure if I could've gotten 4th or 5th without that, but I'll take an 8k, nearly beating my own record to boot, with a staggering pace of exploration near the end when top OPs imploded between days ~35 and 40: I hit 6k in the latter half of Feb 18th / day 36, and I was still hitting 9a per hour comfortably at that time.

Who needs peasants when you have Alchemies, amirite.

I will confess to being slightly disappointed. Only 91h of Swarms on me, with my name as it was? For shame. It was right there!