Round 40 Ghetto Superstar

Hi, Rush here. I took notes for the first two weeks this round and then hit the 'roundfail abandon button' when I realised that, for me at least, this was going to be the least interesting round in OD history, so this one's another mini roundfail. You want to know what it's like to spend 47 days in a ghetto realm? Well you've come to the right place. Set your expectations to 'snooze' and lets get this over with.

I was Ghetto Superstar in (#5), Sylvan, and I finished 45th on 5,614 land.

I sailed solo this round, figuring I'd let the algorithmic winds of fate decide upon which shore I beached. And it just so happened to be realm #5, with the worst realm composition at assignment I've ever been included in. No beef to any of the players, we all got screwed on this one. I landed with Pos5 Only, Lou Dort is Benny Cheng (yes that's his lifetime name), TRoiT, spoonman, jahmes, Jocke, Martinuum, Guydoonster, Naweeb, and... Elf Woods. Elf Woods again! As a late signup before round start we'd pick up SlyD, who would never even make it out of protection, and xiang1121. Then as the round went on, we acquired Cosmo's Kingdom and Lacricel. I didn't know who most of these people were.

It turned out 50% of my realm were completely new players, and 10% was Elf Woods. I sent fett a message demanding an apology from the algorithm, but it turned out a lot of realms were experiencing the 'new player' phenomenon. Or maybe they were all farms. Either way, it was shaping up to be an unusual round.

I'd been planning to have the Elf Woods experience this round, so assignment didn't matter as much to me initially anyway. Before realm assignment I'd switched off my advisors and hidden my lifetime name, arriving completely incognito, so as far as these guys were all concerned I was a mute random. I planned to play the first few weeks in true Elf Woods fashion: avoid the realm discord and hopefully snipe a Wonder on my own. I set sniping a Wonder as my win/lose goal (either by my hand or Elf Woods' efforts), but I also wanted to see how well I fared without any group intel to support me, so I'd be trying to figure out who all the big nasties were myself and tracking the threats all on my own. A lot of my Roundfails are built with the intel and insights collected from realmies on the whole - who I usually try to credit - but inescapably my awareness of round dynamics is largely coloured by group analysis. Not so this time! Such was the Elf Woods Challenge. And I had some decisions to make. Namely, which Wonder was I going to try and solo snipe.

The mania-inducing Gnomish Mining Machine, the Ancient Library and the High Cleric's Tower were the options on the table right away. The GMM, though completely useless to me as a Sylvan, was probably the most likely to bring us war as a weaker-looking realm, so of course it was my natural preference. Plus the only Gnome in our realm was Elf Woods, and when you're cosplaying Elf Woods, you've gotta do a bro a solid. The HCT in a round of new undead races was probably going to be somewhat popular too, so it was a secondary option. The Library is a very popular Wonder which I'd often mistakenly assumed would bring lots of war, but in my experience, it doesn't turn out this way - probably because it's a popular Wonder primarily with explorers and sometimes converters. It's not a Wonder that sits on most attackers' radars, and they are usually the point of gravity in most realms that have cooperative and active realmies.

The Wayfarer's Outpost popped up after OOP, but while it would have been a lovely Wonder to have, it was probably going to be too popular for me to snipe.

WEEK 1 - THE ELF WOODS CHALLENGE

When the starter gun fired at oop, my realm had eight attackers straight into the frey, with only TRoiT bouncing on his first attack. Even Elf Woods was getting stuck into some attacking, making three attacks over 13 hours, before getting invaded by Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff (Ivetza) (#9) and then bouncing his fourth hit on a bot. This prompted Naweeb to post the "can we help ya buddy" thread in council that Elf Woods probably sees at some point in every round he plays, and which he duly ignored. But we were on good terms at least; I'd voted him for Monarch and by return, he'd voted for me. We had a bond. A mutual respect between mute and uncooperative realmies.

I'd been tracking the early top ops myself, mainly just by sorting by highest networth and keeping an eye on the Town Crier. In my estimation, right out of the gate the biggest threats were Mortality Gives Meaning To Human Life, Captain. (Damdred) (#3), I can stop peeing mid-stream (Erix) (#2) and I can read braille without being blind (Warpig) (#2). As a Sylvan, I had a sluggish start baked into my build, so despite being on smaller land than some juicier targets I defended against the first two anyway. Not that they even looked. I couldn't benchmark my DP against players in my realm of a similar size, as they'd unshared advisors with me in retalliation for unsharing my own. I knew Braille could hit me, but took an educated guess that he wouldn't - expecting he'd hit someone bigger and with better landtypes.

The wheels came off the sims pretty early for a couple of these guys, with Mortality bouncing on a 'confusingly named' (but not really) target, having sent on the wrong guy, who was nonetheless found in breach of the rules and promptly renamed.

2024-06-15 16:02:16 Sadly, the forces of Mortality Gives Meaning To Human Life, Captain. (Damdred) (#3) were beaten back by Rule 2e: Thou Shalt Scan BarKodes Properly (Taldarin2020) (#12).

Mortality was awarded full land and prestige for his blunder and was back in the game, but ultimately squandered it on his next hit by getting eaten alive.

2024-06-16 14:59:38 Victorious on the battlefield, Mortality Gives Meaning To Human Life, Captain. (#3) conquered 56 land from Emu Export (TheThing) (#9).

2024-06-16 15:07:07 Alex & Sammy's Endless Summer (DavetheGoliath) (#13) invaded fellow dominion Mortality Gives Meaning To Human Life, Captain. (#3) and captured 50 land.

2024-06-16 15:48:31 Rule 2e: Thou Shalt Scan BarKodes Properly (Taldarin2020) (#12) invaded fellow dominion Mortality Gives Meaning To Human Life, Captain. (#3) and captured 45 land.

2024-06-16 16:59:46 Rule 2z: Thou Shalt Bar All Retiles in Code (Ares Titan) (#12) invaded fellow dominion Mortality Gives Meaning To Human Life, Captain. (#3) and captured 40 land.

Meanwhile, Braille had the scariest op that I'd seen, but I wasn't sure he could full send it, so I was sitting in range underdefended to him.

He not only full sent, but also sent a handful of chams on a Gnome who was slightly smaller than me. And also bounced. I am guessing an out of date land spy was the culprit. I'm not sure how I flew under the radar on that one, but I wasn't complaining.

2024-06-16 12:22:22 Sadly, the forces of I can read braille without being blind (Warpig) (#2) were beaten back by Gn¤me man is an ‡šland. (Espiritus) (#1).

And then he got hit.

2024-06-16 23:59:50 I'm not lovin' it (Disco) (#8) invaded fellow dominion I can read braille without being blind (#2) and captured 54 land.

That guy hadn't even been on my radar at all, so I quietly added I'm not lovin' it to my list of ops to track.

When blops went live this round I was fast asleep - unusual for me, but I had zero expectations my realm which were mainly attackers would be hankering for war against a rapidly developing runaway situation in realm #2. Pre-blops-live ops showed that some of the fast attackers were bringing in wizard guilds, anticipating war, but after hearing complaints about landing in similarly jank realm compositions from other prominent bloppers, I wasn't going to hold my breath. When I woke up the next day I was not surprised to see the the fast attackers waltzing through a blops-free paradise.

I did however do a quick scan for potential swarm targets. Although I could have just gone through the a dropdown list of the biggest players and swarmed everyone, I prefer to be more targeted, particularly early round when mana is a limited resource. I'd cast clear sight, and if their food was low, I'd compare it to an older clear sight in the archives to see if they were on and upwards or downwards trend. Then I'd cast revelation to see if they had Gaia's up. Depending on their circumstances, I'd then cast swarm. If someone is low on food, and losing food despite having Gaia's up then they are the ideal target, and I caught three players that fit this bill. I also discovered the second-place top explorer, Too kewl for skewl (Craghack) (#9), was on 0 food and already starving, with 4 hours left on his Fools Gold, so would be potentially starving for another few hours. He had no hostile spells on him so it seemed no one had noticed yet. There is no immediate benefit to throwing a swarm on someone already in that situation (can't starve him harder than 0 food after all), but I could make his recovery more irritating, so I swarmed him anyway. I wondered if anyone else would notice his predicament and if he'd become a massive hit for someone later.

I didn't have to wait too long. Six or seven ticks later:

2024-06-18 14:59:18 Engage! (jboy) (#3) invaded Too kewl for skewl (#9) and captured 107 land.

The hit knocked him straight out of second place and when I checked on him two days later, he'd sunk to 16th.

I had saved some wiz and spy strength for ops since I had to take all these myself now. I knew I was definitely in danger territory dp-wise, hittable by I can stop peeing mid-stream, but Engage had just made himself a much better target.

2024-06-18 15:59:03 I can stop peeing mid-stream (Erix) (#2) invaded Engage! (#3) and captured 65 land.

There was also now a Nox in my realm that hadn't unshared his advisors and sitting a little larger than I was on about 3k less dp than me (although this was due to not casting Ares), and that was before taking into account his 2k draftees. Even with Ares up he was still the better target. I had a second meat shield.

Since this was shaping up to be a very quiet round, at this point I also applied to join the Shadow League. Last round the SL was a breeze, and I found that now more than ever I needed the cheaper ops if I was going to survive being a blopper and a solo opper.

Just like last round, Elf Woods had started cycloning a Wonder and had already dealt 23k to something. If I could guess which one he was targeting I had a better chance of sniping. At that damage already it had to be a tier 1 wonder, and since he was a Gnome, I had to assume he'd caught the Gnomish Mining Machine mania. I razed and rezoned some alchemies to bring in some more towers and started cycloning it.

By the end of the first week, the kobold and the lyc in #2 were slightly out of range, but still in the zone where I could easily explore into it - but would risk getting hit. Despite feeling underdefended on several occasions in the first week I never caught a single op. My meat shield, who was still relying on 3k of squishy dp had somehow evaded interest too, with better targets reliably presenting themselves gift wrapped to the fast attackers whenever they needed a hit.

At least my realm was doing its bit to keep some of the other fast attackers in the race:

2024-06-19 23:48:35 Victorious on the battlefield, Contains 3 consecutive alphanumeric characters (Pos5 Only) (#5) conquered 48 land from Etchi no Kamigami (#0).

2024-06-20 07:59:31 I'm not lovin' it (Disco) (#8) invaded fellow dominion Contains 3 consecutive alphanumeric characters (#5) and captured 65 land.

At the start of the round I was barely in the top 100 doms, but by the end of the first week I'd managed to crawl into the top 40, which is usually where I live for most of the round when playing slow races. Steady as she goes.

2024-06-21 02:59:27 OnlyMoms: 3 mana for a limited time offer 🍆 (hepizoj) (#11) fended off an attack from I can stop peeing mid-stream (Erix) (#2).

This hit doesn't have anything to do with my narrative here, I only noted it down because it was funny.

2024-06-21 04:56:29 I can cook using an Air Fryer! (Rury) (#2) invaded OnlyMoms: 3 mana for a limited time offer 🍆 (#11) and captured 70 land.

Shortly after, Rury showed Erix how it's done!

WEEK 2 - SINKING FEELING

Unfortunately for my meat shield at the start of the second week, the runaway lyc had already started to bottomfeed.

2024-06-24 02:07:34 I can stop peeing mid-stream (#2) invaded fellow dominion Cant Afford Daniel Gafford (Lou Dort is Benny Cheng) (#5) and captured 89 land.

He was able to hit him despite about 4k draftees, which he didn't even bother to assassinate, which didn't bode well for other explorers being able to stay ahead of the curve, given that he looked pretty well defended to me. But I didn't have eyes on the lyc. The kobold was in an even stronger position, on 2,900 land (compared to his lyc support on 2,383 acres), and the memes about the round being over were already well underway.

By day 10, between myself and Elf Woods we'd done around 100k in cyclone damage, but since I didn't know what he was cycloning, I had no idea if we were close to taking the Gnomish Mining Machine or if we'd been targeting different wonders. I could have just asked him, of course, but it went against spirit of the Elf Woods Challenge to communicate.

Then, the worst case scenario happened: my realm was actually able to coordinate a Wonder take-down.

2024-06-24 11:30:45 Budots (#5) has attacked a neutral wonder!

2024-06-24 11:31:31 Provocative Hobo Gobbo Dancer (#5) has attacked a neutral wonder!

2024-06-24 11:31:59 Provocative Hobo Gobbo Dancer (#5) has attacked a neutral wonder!

2024-06-24 11:32:05 FishTea Nya Wah (#5) has attacked a neutral wonder!

2024-06-24 11:32:33 Provocative Hobo Gobbo Dancer (#5) has attacked a neutral wonder!

2024-06-24 11:41:04 Big Guy in the Backyard (#5) has attacked a neutral wonder!

2024-06-24 11:41:05 The Imperial Armada has been destroyed and rebuilt by returnees (#5).

Okay it involved one guy hitting it three times and a bit of a gap for the last guy to get stuck in, but the chain hits were a success and the Wonder fell.

It seemed an odd choice of Wonder for our realm: the Armada is typically a top realm Wonder, where you're concerned you might be targeted in war for sinking. Unless my realm was preparing for war, I couldn't see the likelihood in anyone warring us to sink any of them - until, of course, they took the Wonder, which a top realm might actually want. In which case they'd only bring war on themselves, lose the Wonder, and get blopped anyway.

In any case, regardless of their reasoning, their Wonder take-down had ended my Elf Woods Challenge in failure. Neither I nor Elf Woods had managed to snipe a Wonder. I was top ranked in cyclones at this point, and it was all for naught. Still, it had been a fun little challenge and kept me occupied in the early game. And with the Elf Woods Challenge over, I had no reason to continue playing the role of a mute realmie, so I shared my advisors with everyone. Everyone except Elf Woods, naturally. Then I joined the realm discord to try and figure the realm's rationale behind taking the Armada. I scrolled up for the recent chat logs:

jahmes: "what wonder should we get do you think?"

xiang1121: "maybe try our luck on armada?"

jahmes: "ok"

And there you have it folks. I lost my Elf Woods Challenge to an apparently random spur-of-the-moment decision to take a random Wonder. At the end of the round, some of the pinoys were pleased that we'd managed to keep it all round. But it was such a pointless Wonder that offered zero benefit to us except for a puny -1% royal guard tax, I was just confused by their glee. I was also surprised nobody just knocked it down for the prestige. A 200k wonder was just begging to be one-shot.

At least with cyclones off the menu I could turn my attention to some proper blopping. And so that's what I did.

WEEK 3 AND BEYOND - THAT GUY

My realm was under pinoy control this round, with a 5-pack of "returnees" (which remained our realm name the entire round) coming back to the game having never played since Classic. Jahmes, the King, was I think the only regular player, and the rest of his pack seemed alright with just doing their thing. Only one of the pinoys (who never joined the discord) got locked for cheating. He'd been running three accounts, which his packmate said was so he could learn the game faster. The innocent cherub, I can't believe the Rules Committee would punish such an earnest display of wanting to get better at the game.

I didn't agitate for war at all this round, until right at the very end - I could see plain as day that our realm wasn't equipped to deal with it. There was some attempt to track top op in the first few weeks, but after that, nobody seemed to keep track - or if they did, they weren't sharing the info and were just doing it personally. That was fine; I did exactly the same thing until the last week or two, where I played pretty fast and loose with my dp and narrowly avoided getting chomped by Syl's Rainbow Sorbet (lamb) #7 in his ascendancy to near-greatness. But the lack of war, combined with the low social element in the realm discord, really hurt my enjoyment of the round. I think this round was probably the most disengaged I've been in any round I've played and it was pretty much entirely down to landing in a very quiet and basically rudderless realm, under the control of a pack that mostly seemed content to just dawdle along.

The one time I did start banging the war drums was when #2 declared on #13 towards the end of the round. It removed the possibility of a mutual war, it meant that #2's bloppers would have had targets lined up and already blown their loads, we didn't have any noobs in range to feed them, and all of the non-packed and even some of the packed players were up for it. We were all dead in the water with nothing to lose. But our King just ignored it all. I briefly considered pulling a Cronel and staging a mutiny, but jahmes' position as Monarch was pretty entrenched. Some of the late, mute and mostly inactive players had also voted for him, and I didnt fancy my chances competing with his 7 votes to my 1 (shout out to Elf Woods for his unwavering support all round). I figured I could definitely bleed one of his votes, as it was from an active non-packed player, and I could always vote for myself, taking it to 6-3, but it was too much of a long shot to be worth the effort.

With 'inconsequential' being the defining characteristic of our realm, I had only one recourse left to keep me engaged in the round: the Shadow League. And I never thought I'd find myself typing that sentence!

I usually hate That Guy in the Shadow League that just trains stupid ratios at the expense of their finish, but this round, with nothing better to do, I was That Guy. Unfortunately it just so happened that I'd picked the worst round to be That Guy, because SL is not working at all as intended. I've moaned about SL plenty in the past being a "noob trap" that just bogs players down in a never-ending ratio race to the bottom, hurts their growth and diverts their blops away from attacker threats and onto each other. It doesn't really work like that at the moment though: it is now a mostly-peaceful safe haven for ops bitches to enjoy half price ops. With the recent changes, particularly to wiz blops and defences, wizard races are paradoxically at a massive disadvantage in the SL if they're trying to deal damage. The first fireball I threw at a non-wizard race in SL killed 60 peasants, and so after that I didn't throw any fireballs. From the perspective of a wizard race just looking to coast as an ops bitch in the SL, however, you're in a great position: only your spies are vulnerable if you don't turn them into assassins. And while assassins are a lot bettter than they were, they're still very expensive and no one wants to train them. I capitalised on this.

Spy races, on the other hand, are playing on god mode in SL right now. Spy blops are still effective (except for sabotage, since it's an attacker-only countermeasure and everyone in SL is exploring), snare works great and does decent damage, and assassination is pretty strong. As long as you maintain an okay wizard ratio - which naturally you'll convert to AMs because they're worth it - nobody can touch you. You're effectively immune to wiz blops from your AMs and nobody can assassinate them. Meanwhile, you have a naturally strong spy ratio and can farm almost any non-spy race SLer you want.

I had two main problems with SL. Problem number one was that most of the players in SL were virtually immune to damage, and in particular most war blops damage sucked ass. Problem number two was that as a Sylvan, I'd lose dp every time I failed a blop - which in SL is a pretty common occurrence. Anyone over a 0.5 ratio massively spikes your fail rate, almost regardless of your own ratio. For example, targeting one SLer that maintained a 0.5 wiz ratio all round, I'd fail around the same number of blops on him on a 2.0 ratio as I did on my end-round crazy ratio of 4.0. And the higher the target's ratio goes, the higher your casualties. I could easily lose 30-80 dryads on a fail. You get 75% of them requeued, but it's a sharp drop in immediate dp when you have a bunch of fails that could mean the difference between getting hit and skating by.

Despite this, I was determined to be That Guy, and after probing for weaknesses I found a few goldmines. The first was Theme? We Don't Need no Stinkin Theme! (Grapes of Math) (#9), who had experimented with throwing fireballs at me once too often, and so when after a long flight to Japan he was finally able to check his phone, he had a few thousand dead wizard corpses waiting to greet him. He quickly converted his remaining wizards to AMs.

It was difficult to stay ahead of some of the SLers that were able to go to war, and so I was constantly competing with other war-blessed SLers for coveted ranks, particularly around the disband/assassination ranks. My competitors were able to find soft targets in war and farm thousands of kills at a time in very short windows. Fortunately, one SLer brought himself to my attention (DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince (Skubasteve) (#13)) when he tried to feed me to his realmie (Summertime Thadness (Chunk) (#13)) and was constantly opping me and revving me for a 24 hour period. I let him be until I knew I was in the clear, not wanting to further incentivise a hit, but after I was safe I went after Jazzy Jeff with a vengeance. He was a Nox: no racial spy immunity. I disbanded thousands of his spies. He queued thousands more, but at the same time he'd also put in his 12-hour surrender notice to the Shadow League emperor. I was waiting for those spies to come in to disband them, but he left SL the same tick they arrived. I was annoyed that I'd waited, but the bait of thousands of spies incoming to be disbanded again was too strong.

Without Stinkin Theme or Jazzy Jeff as viable targets, I was forced to resort to picking on Ross' offspring: Soybins the Handsome Troll (Soybins the son of Ross) (#1). This guy spent all round in SL as a troll with a 0.5 wizard ratio and an estimated 0.3 spy ratio. He would train wizards and spies, and I would assassinate them in pretty small numbers, and he'd train more wizards and spies, and I'd assassinate those too. Round and round we went. He never seemed to convert them to AMs or Asses, and he never left SL. The kills were peanuts compared to what I'd been farming from Jazzy, but it shored up my numbers enough to keep a lead. But I had a problem: another SLer in #2 was soaring up the disband ranks to contend with - How Does This Work Again? (MumbleNGrumble). #2 had a bunch of wars in the endgame and this guy had an all you can eat buffet of targets to choose from. He nearly eclipsed my kills overnight from one war, but thankfully his target must have dried up and converted spies to assassins, because his kills dropped off pretty quickly. Still, I needed another juicy target.

Fortunately for me, Jazzy Jeff couldn't resist the allure of SL, and after some time spent recovering outside of the SL, he decided to sneak back in. He kept a low profile though, and I might not have noticed if it weren't for the #2 spy disbander forcing me to redouble my efforts to find a target. I nuked thousands of his spies. In total I dished out over 3.3million plat in spy disband damage this round, and Jazzy Jeff bore the overwhelming brunt of it. Jazzy hadn't learned from his mistake last time, but I had learned from mine. I saw that Jazzy queued thousands more spies... and so this time I waited until the tick before they arrived, then disbanded another thousand spies. The next tick he was no longer in the SL, and would remain out for the rest of the round.

EPILOGUE

My laser focus on assassination ranks for both spies and wizards meant I secured first place in the Rush Ranks for assassination (worth a not-too-shabby 15 points). It's more effort than the fireball rank, which is by far the most bang for your buck than any other category at 10 points, but it still meant I had a fighting chance of being top blopper. In the dead zones where I had no targets, I switched up my blopping to bring my score up in the theft and duration ranks. I had number #1 in plague and #2 and #3 ranks in a bunch of others. The lumber rank as a Sylvan was a cinch. The more war-dependant a rank was, the harder it was to score highly in it, so fireball, lightning and sabotage were all beyond my reach to compete for in any capacity.

Top fireball naturally went to mutineer and warmonger Cronel, but I beat him in enough of the other categories that I was able to at least take the title of top blopper in the Rush Ranks this round. It felt like I was playing for top blopper on hard mode with such a small pool of targets, but some luck and the generosity of Jazzy Jeff helped me get by.

Congratulations to realm #2 and to Rury for the win.

Next round I'll be throwing at least two fireballs to make sure I beat my Rush Ranks fireball score of 0.003 this round. 120 dead and crispy peasants here I come!

TL;DR

This round in a nutshell: https://imgur.com/a/kkFmJQJ