DeletedUser920
Guest
Okay - from the start, this has not been a bad world. I stayed on and played another round because I was curious about the watchtowers and how it would affect game play. I've stayed playing much longer than I wanted to because there have been some good chats with people on all sides and because I didn't want to be the one that creates a hole in the front line. It's difficult when you want to run the white flag up the mast and say, 'Well done, you've won' because you're not sure other people aren't still enjoying the game and that could spoil it for them.
Now this conversation has been started I feel more comfortable saying that this is it. I've lost - we've lost and you have won. I've never enjoyed that long slog towards 80% dominance and see no reason why anyone else need do it. I think that is part of my message to Innogames. I get tired of playing because it can get so long and drawn out after the battle is lost. I appreciate that it means there is more time in which I might accidentally click on that button to start another world, but the reality is that I want a much longer break.
I wanted to share my perspective on this world though. As many will know, we started it with a group called GITS that planned on being around until the end. We pretty much achieved that, even if we did merge as a group into Hunter before the end. I'm not saying that it was a mistake, but fairly early on we came to an agreement with a couple of other tribes to bring them along with us, in some cases teaching them the ropes of the game. One or two of those stayed the course with us, but in most cases, players were I think surprised how much more time the game took as they became more successful. It all took much longer than we had hoped, though.
We had begun with a recruitment strategy that was to only take players that we were sure would be 100% committed, but with the smaller tribes around that isn't always easy to manage and we began accumulating some dead weight. That set the tone for a long while and we were always having to take out internals without losing the focus on ongoing wars. I don't think we ever had an op with more than 50% participation and that was the primary reason why we lost. Anyway, as time went on we consolidated the three tribes into one and I think we managed it without 'doing the dirty' on anybody, which was something I was quite proud of. Everyone had help, internals, freebie villages and support to make each next step and offers of merges and co-plays to carry on.
Then finally we had to choose between OLD and HUNTER. One we'd had a NAP with and a difficult front and the other made less sense geographically. We chose HUNTER and my personal expectation was that we would have more active players to maintain an active tribe with until the end game.
We started off quite well in that war, considering that we had hardly any front line and managed to move down and take a few villages. We didn't take many, though, as the combination of the watchtowers and prior warning of ops made achieving surprise impossible. There are people denying it now, but at the time I know I had gleeful messages from OLD members telling me about our own ops and was also sent screenshots from the Hunter forum. They might not have been particularly helpful in the short term, but they created arguments about what would be effective. Our earlier strategy of just attacking, regardless, which had won other worlds, fell by the wayside as we waited for ops that only half the tribe joined in with. We also had disasters such as when we allowed one inexperienced but enthusiastic player (I'll be mentioning no names) to organise an op. When we managed to kill a lot of troops without taking many villages he suddenly vanished, creating a hole in our front line and proximity to previously 'safe villages'.
That was only one player, but where we had been pushing into the OLD front line to make opportunities, we then stopped attacking and didn't take advantage, while OLD then got a lot of villages that were in areas we thought safe and so our support was split. Even then, we should have been able to win, but ops were still only 50% participation after waiting weeks to organise them. The last stage was merging the active GITS players with active HUNTER players, but we hadn't realised how much dead weight HUNTER were carrying. I suspect we all did that quite well as OLD players would happily chat about what so-and-so had said without realising accounts were being sat. We never cured the rot, though. If anything Hunter were even less good at using the sat accounts effectively and nukes were not sent and defence not used when it could have been.
Regardless of how we got here, the bottom line is that I'm saying well done to OLD and I reckon you've won this world. You know how many accounts you had to sit, but the impression from our side was that you had more of your accounts active most of the time and that people participated in ops when they were asked to. I didn't like the way you gained an advantage with spies - and neither did a lot of your own players - but at the end we lost because we stopped attacking and that was not just because some players left.
The biggest achievement for OLD was showing how you could still take villages on a watchtower server as at one stage we had begun to think it had made defence too easy.
Next time we play we'll have to focus again on a small group of players and not worry about filling a tribe up. We'll follow the same strategy of avoiding conflict until we have a core area sorted and multiple villages each and then we'll attack. Relentlessly - except when consolidating. We won't get spies in other tribes, because that spoils the game for us, but hopefully if we're tight knit enough no-one else will spy on us.
Greg
Now this conversation has been started I feel more comfortable saying that this is it. I've lost - we've lost and you have won. I've never enjoyed that long slog towards 80% dominance and see no reason why anyone else need do it. I think that is part of my message to Innogames. I get tired of playing because it can get so long and drawn out after the battle is lost. I appreciate that it means there is more time in which I might accidentally click on that button to start another world, but the reality is that I want a much longer break.
I wanted to share my perspective on this world though. As many will know, we started it with a group called GITS that planned on being around until the end. We pretty much achieved that, even if we did merge as a group into Hunter before the end. I'm not saying that it was a mistake, but fairly early on we came to an agreement with a couple of other tribes to bring them along with us, in some cases teaching them the ropes of the game. One or two of those stayed the course with us, but in most cases, players were I think surprised how much more time the game took as they became more successful. It all took much longer than we had hoped, though.
We had begun with a recruitment strategy that was to only take players that we were sure would be 100% committed, but with the smaller tribes around that isn't always easy to manage and we began accumulating some dead weight. That set the tone for a long while and we were always having to take out internals without losing the focus on ongoing wars. I don't think we ever had an op with more than 50% participation and that was the primary reason why we lost. Anyway, as time went on we consolidated the three tribes into one and I think we managed it without 'doing the dirty' on anybody, which was something I was quite proud of. Everyone had help, internals, freebie villages and support to make each next step and offers of merges and co-plays to carry on.
Then finally we had to choose between OLD and HUNTER. One we'd had a NAP with and a difficult front and the other made less sense geographically. We chose HUNTER and my personal expectation was that we would have more active players to maintain an active tribe with until the end game.
We started off quite well in that war, considering that we had hardly any front line and managed to move down and take a few villages. We didn't take many, though, as the combination of the watchtowers and prior warning of ops made achieving surprise impossible. There are people denying it now, but at the time I know I had gleeful messages from OLD members telling me about our own ops and was also sent screenshots from the Hunter forum. They might not have been particularly helpful in the short term, but they created arguments about what would be effective. Our earlier strategy of just attacking, regardless, which had won other worlds, fell by the wayside as we waited for ops that only half the tribe joined in with. We also had disasters such as when we allowed one inexperienced but enthusiastic player (I'll be mentioning no names) to organise an op. When we managed to kill a lot of troops without taking many villages he suddenly vanished, creating a hole in our front line and proximity to previously 'safe villages'.
That was only one player, but where we had been pushing into the OLD front line to make opportunities, we then stopped attacking and didn't take advantage, while OLD then got a lot of villages that were in areas we thought safe and so our support was split. Even then, we should have been able to win, but ops were still only 50% participation after waiting weeks to organise them. The last stage was merging the active GITS players with active HUNTER players, but we hadn't realised how much dead weight HUNTER were carrying. I suspect we all did that quite well as OLD players would happily chat about what so-and-so had said without realising accounts were being sat. We never cured the rot, though. If anything Hunter were even less good at using the sat accounts effectively and nukes were not sent and defence not used when it could have been.
Regardless of how we got here, the bottom line is that I'm saying well done to OLD and I reckon you've won this world. You know how many accounts you had to sit, but the impression from our side was that you had more of your accounts active most of the time and that people participated in ops when they were asked to. I didn't like the way you gained an advantage with spies - and neither did a lot of your own players - but at the end we lost because we stopped attacking and that was not just because some players left.
The biggest achievement for OLD was showing how you could still take villages on a watchtower server as at one stage we had begun to think it had made defence too easy.
Next time we play we'll have to focus again on a small group of players and not worry about filling a tribe up. We'll follow the same strategy of avoiding conflict until we have a core area sorted and multiple villages each and then we'll attack. Relentlessly - except when consolidating. We won't get spies in other tribes, because that spoils the game for us, but hopefully if we're tight knit enough no-one else will spy on us.
Greg