Disclaimer This thread is a WC narration of the 2015 ASW wars. If you're not interested in this, move on to another thread and let those who are interested read in peace. Having two weeks ago dealt with my overall wc strategy for the ASW, I am now looking into each individual war and what happened in them. Now this will be a narrative report as opposed to a strategical thread. And please remember however that it was not like I had a pen and paper ready leave available for me while I was WCing. A lot of this is just my recall and therefore subject to misinterpretation. I apologize for any inaccuracies that will inevitably occur. Hopefully my clan members will be able to point them out and we can adjust the thread as needed. Also comments I have about opposing clans will just be my speculation of what they done which might vary wildly to what actually happened. I advise you look at this with liberal eyes. War One Pre-War With the mixup, war one ended up being 5 hours instead of 6. When I got to the Manticores there was a lot of confusion, but Slay was there and remembered me from last year. I think it was he who suggested I wc. It was an 8 am start for me, while we Japanese usually work on Saturday, I had arranged a somewhat lighter schedule and so the only pressing work I had was an 11:00 meeting. I saw my Warlor clannie D-A was in clan so I got her to help out, particularly to sub as WC during the absent time. Tinkerbelle provided a ss, And Vamperous stepped up to track. My job was to give general direction and call out xstals, while D-A posted targets to sko on. Everyone else was supposed to be quiet and take orders (in theory anyway, lol) I started my brief by giving the end game: I saw this as a game of chicken. The team that xstals last will win. Having come back from 200B last year, I knew that being behind was not a problem as long as we tanked and held our xstals. I broke us up into 4 teams. Tank team A was cr 1-30 attack builds; fewer in number but big in power. Tank team B were all the rest attack builds; a much larger group to mask their smaller size. Spy team 1 were spies/Hansels from 3-31, and spy team 2 were all the other spy builds. We had opening skim and sky targets for the tanks, but they were told to keep spies above 80% then regen and skims were one hit and regen. We were to sko when troops hit 20% and we sko on biggest build up, a target D-A was providing. The biggest argument came from a few Hansels, who didn't like the idea of dumping their troops on the opponent's cr1 and 2. "Shouldn't I hit their Hansels for plunder.?" " No. Who needs plunder? Dump your troops as ordered". The War So the war began. They got an early lead by taking early plunder while we,save for two plunder-happy noobs, tanked. Our sko on the bigs strategy was working well as some of them had already xstalled several times in the first hour. We had kept our xstals in our pockets for the first 90 min. However, their lead had finally crept up to the 200B mark. I had D-A give me an estimate of how many had xstalled, and asked Vamp how many on our side were ko. I called the first xstal at about 100 min into the game just to keep them from sitting on us and to keep them close to that 200B line I had in my head from last year. The xstal gained us about 40B and put the gap at about 180B behind. After the second hour I had my meeting, and so D-A the helm for about fifty minutes. She steered the ship true and I came back to about a 230B deficit. She did, however, use one more xstal. Her reasoning was that if we get too far behind some people would lose faith and give up (some ppl are idiots, lol). Now about an hour and a half was left in this five-hour war. I filled the cc telling everyone that we were in control and winning this war and that under gap means nothing. I had been there and done that the year before. Ten minutes before the last hour, I had us plunder dive and xstal up. This put us at exactly 200B behind with an hour to go, just like last year. Two noob trolls posted on my wall telling me I was gonna lose. Not today, mates. The Last Hour We had three xstals and an hour to use them. I called for a :45 xstal. Spy team 2 would xstal up first, dump troops, then weaken them up. This was followed a minute later by tank team B, who plunder dived and xstalled up. Two minutes after that, I had my big spies and big tanks to xstal up to clean up whatever mess the smalls made. This put a dent, but not a huge one, in the enemy. At :25 they still had a 180B lead but I'm sure the :45 xstal flushed out whatever xstals they had left. Now it was time to bring the pain. I had all my spies xstal at :25. At that time I ordered my bigs to plunder dive, xstal up at :24, then plunder dive again. My small tanks then did the same at :23. The results were awesome. Green lit up the wc. We went from 180B down to 30B down in under ten minutes. Last xstal call in a similar fashion between :15 and :12. With ten minutes left, we were losing by under 4 B. And the green just kept on coming as did repin after repin as Vamperous instructed. With five left, we were up by 80B and at the end we had a convincing win. We took a 180B deficit and turned it into a 200B lead in the space of 25min. My clan was ecstatic and showed a renewed faith in our leadership and system. Talking to a few Centaurs after the war, they said they didn't realize we had so many xstals left near the end. On to the next round then: the Gold Griffins.
War Two Pre-War Our next opponent was the Griffins. Some were apprehensive because the Griffins had the biggest margin of victory of any clan. I saw this as an advantage. Looking closely at the war, it seemed their victory had just as much to do with their opponents being disorganized as it had to do with their war savvy. This might seem a bit disrespectful to the Griffins, but their top plunderer, Key_, was knocked out only once in 5 hours. That would not happen with me as WC. In short, I was expecting a bit of over confidence from the Griffins, something I could exploit during the war. One difference between the first war was we had a lot of time to plan. D-A made meticulous notes on our opponents, and had targets ready for all our players. Unfortunately while detailed, individual instructions go over well in Primal clans with 15 people, they cause confusion in a 110-man indie. We scrapped the initial brief (sorry D-A) and I gave a four-line brief, one line for each team. It was like this: Team A Tanks (cr1-30) sb 3,7,21 skim 33 Spy Team One (Cr3-31) dump on 1,2, assassin 26, 27 Etc In reality, opening targets mean very little in a six-hour war; it is the end game that counts. The War The Griffins as I predicted came out very aggressively, even more aggressively than the Centaurs. It was near impossible to maintain a 200 B gap, and we settled on trying to keep a gap between 280-300B. This made some people nervous (OMG! The gap is bigger this time!), but I felt it was by no means out of reach. We had shown we could easily overcome a gap of 200B, a 250B gap would mean we would just win by 100B instead of 200B. Last Hour We entered the last hour with 3 xstals left and a 255B gap to overcome. Once again I did staggered xstals at the :45 mark. This time, however, the Griffins did a counter xstall and actually pinned us down, increasing their lead to about 280B with 30 min left. This caused a few to panic. Once again noobs posted on my wall about how we were going to lose. (Note: At this point I performed a 60B strip on a Griffin ps who had foolishly not casted the one day hide allies spell. I stripped cause it’s ASW tradition, dammit. Actually while taking a bit of plunder off of him might have been nice, I more wanted to create a ruckus in their CC, distract them if you will. Anyway, he wasn’t open for long and didn’t factor in the war.) I told everyone in CC to shut up and listen. We still had two xstals. To pin us down some of those Griffins had double xstalled. That meant that lots of them had nothing in the tank, and were low, and would still have to sko 3 times before the war was over. We could still win this thing. I told them we would xstal a bit earlier than the last war, but we will save that final xstal for the last ten minutes again. At :28 we xstalled and BOOM! went the dynamite. A river of green flowed throughout CC. We had caught them low and thrusted their faces into KO mud. Between :20 and :18 they all came up again and we shoved them back down again. 375B. That was the plunder swing between :28 and :15 of the war. We were winning and we still had an xstal on top of it. I told all those low to xstal up and follow the tracker repins. (I think my exact words were more like “kill them! Slam them hard! Make them eat their own crap!) The green just kept on coming and we ended up with a comfortable 180B victory. As I had hoped, the Griffins were a little over-confident and thus not as disciplined as they should have been. I heard later that apparently, the WC there told people to “xstal at will and take plunder” at the :40 mark, which was a overkill that cost them, since some members xstalled twice in less than 10 min. The gap had been bigger, but result was the same. Now on to the Violet Vipers.
War Three Pre War War Three was a slightly different war than the previous two. I got pms from two people saying “You’re strategy is out! It won’t work against the Vipers. They are gonna hold their xstals until the end, too.” I was a bit skeptical on this. Saying and doing are two different things, and I was doubtful they would execute as well as us. I kind of felt like Bruce Lee in the movie when his enemy says “I’ve read your book. I know all your tricks.” To which Lee replies: “Okay student, let’s see how well you have learned.” Of course there were other challenges in this war. A ten pm Japan start meant a 4 am start in America, and I figured there were going to be some inactive sleepyheads this time round. One of those sleepy heads turned out to be D-A, my assistant WC, lol. House, who had wanted to help since war one, took over her role of calling sko targets. A bigger problem was a ps who didn’t convert to ps1 as instructed nor bothered to cast any spells as she was in sleepytime, La-La land. We had a bit of a debate what to do in cc, but I told everyone to leave her be. My hunch was that, if she was to be stripped, it wouldn’t be until the end of the war when it mattered, which gave her 4,5 hours to wake up and get in the game. Viper’s makeup was also a little different. They had a top-ten LB on their side, followed by three huge spies. I broke my Tank teams into A,B, C, one for each spy, and had all my hansels ko on their LB. Since our biggest spy couldn’t assassin him even if she wanted to, I had the spies focus on other targets and let the small tanks zero his spies. War Despite all the forebodings people told me about the Vipers being on to our strategy, I knew in the first five minutes, save for a massive meltdown by our clanmates, that we were going to win. Sure they were waiting to xstal, but their tanking was nowhere near ours. As soon as the war started, one guy hit me five times, while we kept to the one and regen policy. Sure they took more plunder, but they gave us control without having to xstal. Our skoing on their biggest up worked it’s magic and by two hours into the war, their 1-30 were all koed, and were were skoing now on their cr 30 up. Two hours had passed with no xstals on either side. Both D-A and the ps who didn’t listen to pre war instruction were up, and things were going smoothly. The Vipers had taken an early lead because they forgot to tank, but us having control meant we were cutting into that lead with each update. With about 3 and a half hours left, we had caught up to the Vipers and taken the lead, despite the fact of having done over 550 fewer attack actions than they did. That is when the Vipers lost the game of chicken. Seeing their lead gone, they xstalled en masse. Their LB cr1, tired of being pinned by small builds, xstalled plunder dived. They took an 80B lead. I had my side xstal up and tank. Low and behold, that 80B lead once again vanished in an hour, so they once again xstaled to maintain it, while we xstalled and tanked. Still, they were doing a much better job controlling their xstals compared to our other opponents, and with 90 min left we were left with 4 xstals aside, although we maintained overall control. At the hour mark they decided to press their lead by xstalling up and plunder diving. I think their LB cr1 plunder dived every time he xstalled. I countered and xstalled up at the hour mark. About 50 mins left, 3 xstals a side. They were leading by about 80 B now but we had more up. I told my team we might have to save 3 xstals for the last 30 min, and I will save a group to xstal in the last 10 min. There was no way I was losing this game of chicken. I told our group that instead of waiting, if there was any signs of them xstalling we would send two tank groups to counter immediately, with spies and bigs to follow a minute later. At about 40 we had signs they used their third xstal, so we unleashed ours, caught them, and tanked. This caused them to counter xstal soon to keep their lead. Sure they had the lead going into the last thirty minutes, but with only one xstal. We still had 2, with some of our sleepyheads having 3. Now for the final blow. They still had the lead, so I needed to coax that last xstal out of them. At :23 I told all my clannies to plunder dive but then xstal right back up and tank. When they Vipers counter xstalled to this, they hit a wall of maxed out builds. They plundered terribly off of us, and by :15 the lead was down to a mere 15B. We plundered dived at :10 and by :5 we had a lead of 3B. It was funny how people in Wc were commenting about how close the war seemed. Seeing the river of green in the last 5 minutes, I knew we were on top of this. With three min left and no incoming to speak of, I told my clannies that they were the 2015 ASW champions. In the end, the 148B we beat them by was the lowest margin of victory we had. It was largely due to the Viper’s ability to hold on to their xstals. However, since they were not at disciplined in their tanking, they got koed far too often and we ended up winning despite having 1500 fewer successful attack actions than they did. Thus concludes my three stories of the Magenta Manticore’s road to victory. This is all my memory and point of view, so don’t expect 100% accuracy. Also keep in mind I am open to revisions. I hope our tale inspires many more to take up the All Star Wars and try to be champions next year. _____Frog____o_0 3 Time ASW Champion