Zstylzhemghi R29
MY ROUNDFAIL STORY
Hey folks, Rush here.
I have a few things to say about this round and generally so this one is a bit of a jumble. Did you ever have pick 'n' mix sweets as a kid? I always used to throw away the white chocolate mice (too chalky) and go straight for the fizzy cola bottles. Well, this is the OD equivalent. Like memes? We've got you covered. Like rants? Check out the Shadow League segment. Want to watch quality shitposting video content? That's a fizzy cola bottle right there. Dig in.
#4 FW FTW
Congratulations to Nate and the rest of #4 for the win. I've been in a few realms with dominant fast attackers now and it's fair to say it takes an immense amount of time, effort, strategy and teamwork to win with fast attacking. Great work, we love you, etc. And what a phoenix from the ashes of last round too.
For most people though, this seemed to be a pretty boring round. I suppose that's really the core issue with virtually unopposed fast-attack dominance all-round; it really locks down the game for everyone else. This was the first round I've ever felt forced into the Elite Guard as an explorer, and let me tell you, that did not feel good! Exploring is expensive, and EG is heavily designed to discourage explorers from joining it. But this round, you either guarded up and got slowed the fuck down - or you got eaten. It was no choice at all.
In the end I finished on 5,688 acres (27th), which I'm pretty happy with, though with a 25% penalty to the cost of exploring for a bunch of weeks I do wonder if I'd have hit 6k without being stuck in EG for so long.
THIS ROUND IN MEMES
I present you this small album of memes of our realm:
This was quite fun to make. I wish I'd started making it earlier, rather than in the last few days. Maybe next round I'll just try and tell my roundfail story exclusively through the medium of memes.
PACKDRAFT: A GOOD IDEA THAT PROBABLY SHOULDN'T RETURN FOR MANY ROUNDS
This round was the first 'draft' the game has seen, and I think it was great for the more social elements of the game - playing with people you wouldn't usually play with, exposure to new ways of thinking and sharing ideas. We had a great realm and it was fun playing with the guys we landed with. The pack draft also seemed to give an advantage to some players that chose not to participate, eh #4! Lame-os! But this is a war game, so if that genuinely upsets you... I dunno, maybe go back to your safe space and hug your knees for a bit until you calm down.
That all said, this round was great fun - for us at least. One of the appeals of blackops is that it is rarely dull, and we were a blackops-heavy realm (myself, Saccora, Cronel and new player Damdred all geared up for permanent war), with draft captain Wurstmeyer also pulling in BigBell, Cerbrus, Empoy and Pakdee). Sly D randomed in, and so did Bobbo, starting a week or so late, which was cool. We really lucked out with Damdred, who picked up a lot of the mechanics very quickly, and (almost) balanced our team numbers for the Shadow League against the hydra in #12. I'm not sure we would have been able to weather the storm without him. I really pity anyone soloing trying to survive in that league.
And one of the great things about playing with some of the other top blackoppers in the game was learning some of their tricks. I think it's a bit like when you put criminals together in prison. They just come out better criminals.
I don't think I'd join the pack draft if it were available every round, or even every other round, but it was definitely a fun way to mix up the dynamics without really touching the gameplay. Kudos to Wurst and Rio for coming up with the idea and for organising it.
TEENAGERS IN FERRARIS
So, our realm's strategy.
I've seen the strength of blackops / fast attacker combos, but the approach we went for was a blackops / converter model, and it has a couple of inherent weaknesses: blackops-focused teams are great for limiting early threats (but are often unreliable to keep up economically into the late game and prone to getting hit, due to choosing spies and wiz over pure defence), so a lot of the early damage we did created opportunities that, personally, I would have much preferred to see my realm directly benefiting from, but instead all we were able to do was play 'puppetmaster' and essentially try to keep fast attackers at each other's throats.
This was a complete failure.
Our first foray into puppetmastery was snaring a threat for one of the fast attackers to hit. #4 were paying attention and quite obligingly took the land on offer. However, when we replicated the strategy, right afterwards on #4's prime chunk of beef icekin, fast attackers in other realms were simply not paying attention and sleepwalked by the open goal we created for them. Realm #4 was the only realm to notice and capitalise on our setups. Other fast attacker realms just were not on the ball, and so we fed the ultimate winners a free meal. It wasn't just teenagers in ferraris, it was teenagers in ferraris driving with their eyes closed.
Later, some of the community would give us stick for not warring #4 sooner than we did. Though, as usual, it transpired that most the people throwing the shade were sat on their hands the entire time! And if there's one thing worse than a teenager in a ferrari... it's a back-seat driver.
THE HECKIN' HYDRA
I'll just come right out and say it: the hydra were a formidable foe. Having played with them last round I expected nothing less; hats off to the tenacious wee bastards. All About the Pentiums (Grapes of Math) in particular was a major thorn in our side when it came to rank chasing this round.
We did out-manoeuvre them and left them swinging in the wind on a few occasions, particularly right at the end of the round when they were full-on gunning for some of our titles by relentlessly targeting our new player Damdred. They massively, massively pumped ratios in the final few days and... we just left SL.
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I had hoped we'd leave them with no SL targets at all, but a foolhardy Craghack decided to join just as we were planning to drop it. Sorry Craghack. That's two rounds in a row I've somehow fucked that guy over. He then (unsurprisingly) high-tailed out of there as soon as he could, and the SL were forced to persuade their realmies to declare war to continue the feast, but couldn't seem to get anywhere near the same returns from Yami's lot as they did from our Damdred.
NEXT-LEVEL SHITPOSTING
Apart from poor Zedijar getting really angry about blops, Realm 1 supplied the best community content this round, no question about it. Here it is archived for posterity.
How realm #1 chooses its war targets:
Wurstmeyer: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_2alAfDl7Whtr9WOsq-J0oUStjNlvgHz/view?usp=drivesdk
Rush: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3j9KTe8Qk0
BigBell: https://youtu.be/d_C7oa8BNqM
Saccora: https://youtu.be/RBthpwiH4A0
For anyone wondering, Cronel chooses his war targets by counting the number of roadkill he sees on his drive to work. I don't think we really need a video of that though.
THE SHADOW LEAGUE
Let's talk about it for a sec.
The brainchild of an attacker that historically despises dedicated blackoppers, the Shadow League (SL) was naturally conceived with ill-intentions. In its original vision, SL was designed to focus blackoppers against each other, thus turning the majority of blops into an irrelevance that could be comfortably ignored by attackers. No bogeyman in the back of your mind, just smooth sailing all round onto victory.
When it launched, the small number of blackoppers that were leeroy jenkins enough to give the idea a fair punt found that targeting each other on high ratios resulted in a lot of failed ops, a lot of dead spies / wizards and a metric fuckton of wasted mana. And the question that naturally followed was: 'who in their right mind thought this was a good idea?' When the master of chaos Cronel himself was noping out of it, I'd say that was probably a pretty big red flag.
It then became beholden to the GPC to try and make this faulty premise work, and incentivise bloppers to actually want to hurt themselves and waste their resources all round, and so infamy benefits in SL were doubled. Risk, reward. Credit to the GPC, they solved the core issue in front of them. Bloppers were now sufficiently economically incentivised to do their thing to the tune of a 20% platinum bonus, as well as an 8% lumber/ore/gems/mana bonus. (Provided you could actually survive in SL, which isn't even viable outside of blops packs.)
But the Shadow League was now transformed from a bad idea into a griefer engine, with constant war and 'soft targets' the best way to keep your infamy topped up to its maximum. Low-ratio players became infamy farms, fed into the machine with war after war and spat out wondering why a maelstrom of pain just fell on their heads out of nowhere.
I've seen one solution proposed to just limit the infamy gains to SL targeting SL only, but this is the equivalent of taking the shine off a polished turd. In my view the best solution is to just scrap SL, rather than keep trying to make a fundamentally flawed premise work. Blackops have their place in this game, and we should work to integrate them better, rather than trying to cut them out like leprotic tissue. Some players might not always agree with how blackops are used, particularly if the very idea of blops has them hyperventhilating into a paper bag, but the vitriol directed at bloppers this round - for using a system they warned was a bad idea in the first place - has toxified a lot of the discussion in the community.
Revisions to blackops are necessary. Systems to trivialise them are folly. Let's take it from there.