Quote:
Originally Posted by Zh|l
Apologies, that was not my intention. I'm just going by what brief stuff I've seen and history from at least several rounds ago.
I know you probably can't answer till after the round is over but if you knew Ultores was going to get blocked, what did you do about it? Why do you accept the status quo or did your mitigation attempts hit problems?
I'm genuinely intrigued to why this still seems to happen to Ultores despite progress in your politics from when I played.
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I guess i'll awnser this now. We knew that Ultores would get blocked, but we didnt want 1000 ticks of mass blocks where the universe was divided into two blocks since that's usually where things ends up anyway. To delay the big blocks we set out to make a few defencive agreeements early on, most notably the nap with CT. I talked to gm last round, and we were both pretty fed up with warring for the entire round so we decided to make a deal to stop things from escalating too early. We both knew p3ng and FL would be full tags and in the fight and that it wouldn't stagnate things too badly.
FL had clearly stated that they were coming for Ultores, so tieing up an early nap with CT and later a fort avoidance with p3ng and bows ment we would be able to test FL on our own without a big block forming against us. We did well vs. FL and gained big, and probably should have kept hitting them after they waved the white flag. Around this time the CT deal was expiring, so we made a longer fort agreement with FL and a short one with CT and sat back for a bit. During these ticks ND kept hitting our forts, since they had napped almost everyone else(Rap's words), so we put a couple hundred fleets on them.
When bows got tangled up with CT and recieved rather big incs from mainly them, but also ND and Norse we decided to help them. agar3s helped bows with def, and we put some 150'ish hostile fleets on CT within our agreement(except 1 solowave from a couple brazils). This burned the bridges to CT, and i suspect this was what CT actually wanted at this point since we were starting to get a rather decent lead. We now had deals with CT/p3ng/FL all expiring around pt450.
I figured i'd try to renew the p3ng deal, but when munkee dodged me i realised that the expected big block play were coming. A short talk with Demort confirmed my suspicions. We've been having a fair bir of ND incs all round aswell, so we knew they'd be on the bandwagon. After the first few nights with incs from the block(over 300 incs at some point) we secured a very lose deal with Norse, along the lines of "don't hit us with that block and we'll leave you be so you can go for your own chances", a deal that got solidified once FL hit them for a night. We also didn't want to ask HR for help till we really needed it, besides it wouldn't be effective as long as bows had deals with the opposing block made. So we decided to try to face the block on our own.
Incs were quite high, but the defence team did a stellar job keeping us up. It became clear that we wouldn't be able to stay in the mix while fully grounded so we asked HR and bows for help from pt800 when bows deals with the opposing block were expiring. Meanwhile bows started sending us oot def. Sadly bows still made avoidances and limitted targetting deals, so once we started attacking the claims on the other block were 12-13 planets for HR and bows combined, and 12-13 for Ultores(yet we were 1-2 fleet attacking). Still p3ng dropped like a stone and we backed off them for one night to let them pop bonuses or whatever before hitting them again to make sure they wouldnt be able to come back. We then moved onto FL. The roid difference were huge in their favour, so we decided to unground everything and go for it.
It became clear that it was too little too late and we weren't landing enough so we went hitting ND with HR for cheap XP to keep us up, fully aware that ND didn't def. We knew that FL would go XP hunting on bows/hr/norse at some point, and that if they landed big XP on Norse we'd be fcked. ND bled out too quickly, and we moved onto CT since their def was horrible this round. We kept up there but needed FL to ground the last day, so we tried getting our friends onto FL while we went for XP on CT the last night. CT deffed well for the first time of the round and we knew we wouldn't land enough.
I asked Advantix about his oot players a couple days prior in case we wouldn't be able to win, and he said they didn't have enough for it to make a difference and asked if we had any to spare. I thought Stojke was in another tag so i told him no, but agar3s spotted my mistake and asked Stojke to apply to Norse. agar3s also pointed out to Norse that they should declare war before their last day lands to get 20% XP bonus and 5% cap bonus. We would rather see a friend win over the block, which they did.
I would like to say that i'm extremely proud of all the Ultorians. This round was one hell of a ride, and in the end everyone stepped up in a massive team effort. Cudos to bows, hr and norse for sticking to their word. Shame it wasn't enough. Would like to add that i expected the opposing block to fall apart the last week, but p3ng/nd/ct played dedicated support beyond my expectations, gg! Roll on next round.