[lokken]

I quite like the sentiments of Gary and Veedejem's posts and i think they need a bit more exploring:

I think Ascendancy lacked strategic vision too - their lack of strategy this round proved that you won't really win rounds by just galaxy raiding and that really if you want to win, you have to go after people. If we'd eliminated some BG's sooner, we'd have made our lives a damn sight easier and with the right discipline and motivation, perhaps reduced the universe to rubble. This lack of vision, fuelled by ill discipline and greed cost us what many of us would have considered a proper, convincing victory.

Instead what we got was a roid race with xVx, with us not really wanting to hit xVx as we were outroiding them quite comfortably and xVx not wanting to hit us in fear of the consequences. Once it became apparent we were getting bogged down, xVx made a good move to attack us in an attack that severely dented our growth.

Once Ascendancy realised we weren't going to get anywhere by letting the situation persist, we simply had to change the political situation; it's just textbook strategy. With the BG's being extremely hostile (with some appearing to have the sole aim of stopping us) from our point of view, working with them was pretty much a non starter which left us the xVx option. First of all, I think we need to look at why xVx would take a NAP of any shape or form. I can think of two reasons:

1) Fear Not of Ascendancy by any means but of the BG's going after them. I think if you look at it the BG's would certainly not tolerate the likes of LDK picking them off at the end of the round. On that basis, xVx may have viewed themselves as vulnerable to a prolonged conflict with planets that I think were reasonably competent in the way they went about their business.

2) Greed There are certainly individuals within xVx who fancied the now fat BG's for their own targeting, and maybe they wanted some targets which had a small defence pool with a good chance of them getting a big return from hitting them.

Obviously, Ascendancy offered this NAP while relinquishing the win. I find the logic of xVx quite bizarre in terms of refusing it. A chance to win planetarion doesn't come often for an alliance like xVx and I would have almost certainly snapped it up. Perhaps they felt that if we overtook them, it would be embarrassing and didn't want to defend the fallout.

The problem with the BG's were with issues that are almost contradictory. On the one hand appeared were very inflexible politically; on the other they had so many different interests it was difficult to ascertain what their true motives were and I guess that's what partly made them so inflexible. In the end the fact that they were hostile to Ascendancy from the off and you couldn't really see them holding one position cost them dearly. As that just gave Ascendancy the best advert as to who to target and who not to, particularly with their defensive vulnerability (as I've touched upon above).

If you're Ascendancy and you've played for a long time, you'll probably be disappointed as in the end our opponents probably contributed more than we did. Strategically we offered little and our discipline internally was not that great. The solace we can take from r31 is that we kept going until the end (in the end I think we were capping so relentlessly xvx just couldn't keep the pace) and that those that hate us for pretty much no other logical reason than that we exist wasted their time and got utterly utterly beaten. I've been reading the posts of some of them being utterly exasperated with xVx's decision with quite some contentment in the past couple of weeks. Nevertheless, I think if the same people unite and create a solid unit, I think they can beat us, particularly if we play like that again.

As for the universe, well I think it's shown that if you gear yourself up to win (which doesn't mean beating x, y or z at all costs) and play for what happens at the end of the round with your politics, then you have a chance of winning. This round was interesting in the sense that it was very much a 'what not to do'. If we're going to focus change, it should be around slightly smaller alliances, balancing stats (perhaps at the cost of a race), smaller galaxies and adding cluster geography to the mixer.

Finally this round's EORC was piss poor. There's no place for arguing about who landed on what and who cheated, when the results are in you just have to sit there and take it in the EORC. If you want to bitch and whine, we have a forum for those kinds of things. While the LDK galaxy stuff was amusing, I think you actually need people to describe how the galaxy actually won. I can't say the alliance section was that great either. This is no diss on Appocomaster, but really you need someone who is actively playing to ask some invasive questions to get details out of people about how they won to make the thing interesting and relevant to the existing playerbase.