Final leaderboard and known identities
TdT (CRISPR) - 165 Stars
Baskerville (Necria) - 147 Stars
Ragnar Lothbrok (Lanian) - 129 Stars
Hello There (Maul) - 103 Stars
UY Scuti (Royluc) - 87 Stars
Beez (Melkor) - 83 Stars
GrumpyReaper - 56 Stars
Dieste (Battery) - 49 Stars
Aogami (Falken) - 48 Stars
Mar - 46 Stars
Tube-Pipe (LeDazz) - 40 Stars
Tzeentach (Zachsmack) - 37 Stars
Holy Roman Empire (SteveFree) - 15 Stars
Sea Serpent (Rakec) - 14 Stars
Still Vahnee - 13 Stars
Major Tom (Zorg) - 3 Stars
TheBorg (Kip) - 3 Stars
Athos (LimitingFactor) - 1 Star
DEFEATED Amogus😮😮 - 65 Stars
DEFEATED Coobykins - 14 Stars
Meowrion - 0 Stars
Corn (Bappo) - 0 Stars
🦀👺🦀 - 0 Stars
Ikit Claw - 0 Stars
General Kenobi (Noot) - 0 Stars
🥸🥸🥸 - 0 Stars
taktwienixe - 0 Stars
Dr.Bronya - 0 Stars
Imperio Helghast -0 Stars
Leroy - 0 Stars
C++ - 0 Stars
Szeth - 0 Stars
If I've got your ID wrong or I didn't know it and you're happy to reveal message me on Discord and Ill update the post.
What went down between the last post and this one?
The last war of the game coincided with a very busy period at work and waning interest as we moved closer to the victory.
In the south we pushed further but eventually came to an agreement to not wipe TheBorg, Major Tom or Tube-Pipe. The latter retained a significant deterrent (though interestingly post-game, a smaller one than he claimed some time earlier. A little misdirection there...) We took some more stars but then collectively came to a 'lets not push our luck' understanding and froze the front lines, freeing ships to move north. I did still have to kill several thousand Tube-Pipe ships on legacy waypoints.
Final front lines in the south.
In the north, the war against Holy Roman Empire was ferocious. Here are the key beats.
- I had to call off my war-opening attack on his Cryo wormhole as he moved ships onto the wormhole. I adjusted plans and hit him at multiple points across the front line, flipping a total of 8 stars the turn the war began. HRE and Ragnar seen this attack the turn prior.
- HRE responded as expected by pulling back fleets from the southern fight against Sea Serpent (Rakec) and throwing some big attacks at me. These I was able to defeat using a combination of warp gates, generals, smugglers running ships to the generals.
- I initially made big gains against HRE with the benefit of the attack and initiative, but as he pulled back more and more fleets from the SW I started to find the situation challenging. For a couple of days he and Ragnar had ~30K ships operating near the front lines (within my scan) versus my own 20K ships (I had 40K+ total but mostly moving in)
- I played the fight against HRE very well, jumping between stars and taking favourable fights. All the fighting was done in his space so I had the freedom to do the fight on my turns. My strategy was just to keep them on the run/chasing their tails and moving backwards in their own space whilst my industry did the heavy lifting of giving me another 750+ ships per tick. Here is how it looked at a couple of points.
Approx tick 806?
Approx tick 824?
- In the west I know TdT and HelloThere were making big gains against Cooby, so big that he quit and that Uy Scuti (Royluc) was making grinding attritional gains against his long term nemesis Aogami (Falken) and others. I was happy with the progress on both of these fronts. Dieste (Battery) was having some more peace, geography cutting him off from these theatres of war.
- I eventually did manage to snipe the Wormhole Cryo Chamber, which I used to build 20 generals, sending them out to all of my front lines. I knew I couldn't hold it so the same turn I turned it into an Orbital Array, the general stealing complete.
- I warp gated every star south of the front lines to race reinforcements north and with every turn that passed the ratio of enemy ships to my total ships began to improve slightly. My starcount rose quickly to around 148 before dropping back to 142 as Ragnars fleets started to push me back, but my Industry caught back up and I was able to start climbing again. Closer to the front lines I spent a tonne on warp gates, flicking them on and off as I wanted. As a general rule no predictable gate stayed open for more than 2 turns and I never once ran afoul of an enemy anticipating a gate.
- I offered HRE to stand down and stop fighting alongside Ragnar and I'd keep him alive, but he nobly refused and kept fighting, albeit jadedly.
- TdT and HelloThere broke through Coobykins and were able to start directly threatening Ragnars east which brought the game to a close. He knew he was done.
- As the game ended heres how the front line situations looked. Although RTQ you can see the fighting was ongoing with both sides bringing more ships in. At game end Ragnar had 66K ships and HRE had 12K to my 50K.
Final thoughts
Game settings - I really enjoyed the game and thought the settings worked well. I would have changed the starting hyperspace and removed Cryo Chambers but I thought it was a fun long game. I loved the pacing and the large galaxy and with almost no AFKs and everyone actively engaged it was a good battle with some of the best players in the game.
Cryo Chambers - I never bought one myself because I hate slow specialists in offense and I was broadly fighting an offensive war at all times. There was a window where they were essential for a lot of people (whilst I was finishing up Ikit Claw and preparing for war with Major Tom) but I personally didn't need generals in that window. I do think they took a lot of the tactical nuance out of some front lines though and next time I'd make specialist tokens harder to come by and also ban cryos.
My allies - The coordination and focus between me, Maul and CRISPR in particular was perfect. It's not easy to sustain focus in a game over a month and our communication was super tight. Royluc and Battery also proved great and essential allies, but geographically I never seen them (didn't see one of their stars all game) and their battles raged outside of my core focus. I hadn't played with Maul much before this match but he was a top tier ally too.
The winner, CRISPR is the most dangerous player in the game now in my opinion. His sixth win puts him on a par with LeDazz total and while LeDazz is the best tactician and the person I'd want to face the least in a 1v1, CRISPRs read of diplomacy and desire to win is second to none. He doesn't pull punches and he isn't here for a fair fight. if it will take an alliance of seven to win he will have an alliance of 7. For anyone facing CRISPR in future matches you need to have a game long plan to manage him because he will be pulling strings in the background and doing so very effectively. So will I by the way.
My enemies in the south - I have the benefit post-match of knowing more about what was going on behind the curtain in the southern alliance. I can imagine how frustrating it was for LeDazz/Tube-Pipe trying to rally a coalition across the galaxy to counter us and hearing crickets or negative responses. This was active counter-diplomacy from both me and CRISPR to be fair, we dialled up messaging and interactions with HRE, Ragnar, Sea Serpent, Tzeentach, Beez, Amogus any time we felt any of these were at risk of being swayed into an enemy coalition. In the end the deciding point was that Tube-Pipe didn't really want Ragnar to win so didn't want to continue a losing war for his benefit, but objectively and emotions aside the play was for them to continue to fight resiliently and play for time. The way you handle any situation where your alliance is losing slowly to another (in my opinion) is to choose moments to fight, keep fleets alive and wait for the situation to change. If the southern alliance had kept fighting us at 100% effort I believe Ragnar would have won the game as we wouldn't have been in time to pivot north - even without anyone else flipping to their side.
My northern friends/enemies - Me and HRE had a 450+ tick peace and he was my earliest ally. I didn't feel guilty in the end attacking him because the situation demanded it and I know a war with the north was inevitable. I waited until I had a casus belli before making the move but it was him or me. The intercepted communication below shared by Sea Serpent was way too risky to not respond to. It indicated active planning/readiness for war with me and the prospect of a truce here created the prospect of Sea Serpent joining HRE and all their MANY, MANY fleets down there coming my way. Instead, I worked with Sea Serpent with the promise of helping keep them alive and getting revenge.
Ragnar played a good game, with the exception of his diplo missteps against the south. He built up a lot of strength through some early wars and executed some nice surprise attacks, I hear.
On the margins between victory and defeat -
Excerpt of a message from me to Maul and CRISPR. 30 June, about tick 500, 12 days before game end.
What strikes me sometimes is how transient even positions are and how almost always one side will start to come out on top and it then looks inevitable. The margins between winning and losing are super small, a couple of key battles. For example, if Corn and Beez are smarter in their attacks on your west - just handle a couple of the attacks better (avoiding fighting each other, not using generals to attack from far distances early on at outset of the fighting...) or you both are more tentative with your fixing attacks on LeDazz, allowing him to stabilise and take initiative. If any of the three of us have shitty logi, or if Battery stays neutral, or they have ships garrisoned on the warp gate nebula I hit killing my 3.5k fleet and meaning my other 2k on a pathfinder is going to its doom. If some/all of these things go differently suddenly it looks like we had no hope all along. If Aogami doesn't make all these mistakes hes talking about and they manage to just about overpower Royluc, you both would have had a western alliance gunning for you whilst we were still stalemated with LD etc. It's all super marginal. It's never as inevitable as it seems afterwards.
I maintain that 2-3 days ago we were arguably losing, a few things happened simultaneously then that changed the picture (1. Royluc got on top in the west, 2. You guys started to win in your western war and started to win quicker than youd originally anticipated 3. I got a breakthrough on Borg)
CRISPR response
Yeah I agree we were losing 3 days ago. From my point of view there are three major inflection points.
1) Dieste agrees to join in east fight, if he doesn’t ledazz and borg blow me open with an excess margin of about 3-4k ships
2) We get beez to gift us 1,500 ships and agree to game long NAP with them in exchange for five systems. Royluc almost doesn’t agree, and it hurts me to give up systems for someone who might just stab us, but we do it anyway. These ships stabilize Royluc, and ledazz directs major Tom and corn to pull back and attack hello there instead (unknown possibily weaker tactical player who may crack) - a crucial error.
3) Necria decides to roll the dice with a +3 scan spec, then makes a very risky attack that pays off big.
4 Other things that could have sunk the game- amogus attacks me instead of going where Royluc tells him, especially if partnered with sea snake. HRE and Ragnar hit you two instead of wormhole
