Round 14
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Dates and Times
Round XIV - An Empty Throne began Wednesday the 20th July, 2005, at 20:00 GMT, with approximately 1500 accounts. The players are mostly spread amongst twentyish participating alliances. The round ended at 20:00GMT on September 28th, 2005.
Round Details
- A list of changes to the game.
- Planetarion is running on three Linux/BSD -based servers . The game server is a dual 2.6Ghz Xeon, 2 Gb RAM, 36Gb SCSI HDD beast with an unmetered line. The others servers are 1GHz PIII's with 1Gb RAM.
External links to R14 a general startup and race guide(s) by Sovereign:
- Effects of Engineering priorities on construction and production times.
Round Summary
After their strenuous efforts in Round 13 eXilition announced that they would not play Round 14. With the absence of the much-vaunted eX from the playing field 1up were again the alliance to beat. Angels, lacking numbers for this round, merged into LCH and hydra announced they would be playing as a separate alliance, and added much of SiN to their pre-existing core. Insomnia, who had played the previous round as a wing of Howling Rain also made the step up to full alliance. The eX playerbase split up and spread around the universe, with a concentration in the dS BG in Insomnia. Finally Wolfpack, after being the #1 alliance for so much of the previous round, were expected to be involved in the fight at the top.
1up quickly leapt out to an early lead. Hydra and Insomnia both lagged behind 1up in membercount, and were hindered by this in terms of competing on overall score. The two alliances closest behind 1up in the initial stages of the round were LCH and Wolfpack. LCH, having witnessed the strength of 1up first hand in previous rounds, joined forces with Insomnia, and occasionally hydra, in order to co-operate together on attacks against 1up, a move which Sid informed 1up about. Despite the apparent strength of this group they lacked the organisation and dedication required to defeat 1up. Although 1up's growth was slowed down significantly and LCH were able to take a roid lead for a few days LCH could not displace them as the #1 alliance. Responding to the pressure on them 1up agreed on a NAP with Reunion, a new, primarily ex-Vision alliance. In the meantime Wolfpack, having lost the Subh BG which had joined them pre-round to Reunion, disbanded.
After some 2 weeks of this back and forth internal problems within these alliances began to add up. The SiN members in hydra, disgruntled with what they perceived as a lack of organisation within hydra, left to join ND, who also recruited a number of ex-WP players and had been having a quiet round so far, while still had managing to put together very respectable average score and size ranks. Insomnia also lost members at the same time. The dS BG, run by Skyhead, left Insomnia to join Reunion. Following this the remains of hydra were merged by PAteam, improperly, into Reunion as well, boosting Reunion into the #1 alliance rank. In a very short space of time the opposition to 1up had largely either gone inactive or joined the only alliance in the game actually NAPed to them.
1up began to pull away from the chasing pack, which by this time consisted of the NAPed Reunion in second, and ND/LCH in 3rd and 4th. As 1up and LCH continued to target each other conflict broke out between ND and Reunion. Even this situation was not to last for long though. First of all the ND Reunion war tapered off and then, with less than 2 weeks gone since the previous events the Angels BG left LCH to form their own tag for the remainder of the round. With LCH's challenge effectively over the remaining big 3 alliances were the already distant 1up and a rather closer ND and Reunion. ND had pulled ahead of Reunion at this point but they now had a battle-hardened 1up to contend with. An attempt was made by ND to target 1up but this was too little, too late. With no active allies to work with and still receiving some incoming from Reunion ND lost ~25% of their roids over a 4 day stretch. 1up's position as the #1 alliance was now completely secure and with nearly 3 weeks left in the round 1up had achieved a third round win out of four rounds played.
Along with 1up's eventual runaway victory this round also saw the largest margin of victory ever for a galaxy. With well over twice the score of the #2 gal, 6.10 was by far the biggest galaxy of the round. The #1 planet, somewhat unsurprisingly, also came from this galaxy, where elviz, who had held the top spot from the early parts of the round won the first of his four planetary victories. ND finished in second, comfortably ahead of Reunion in the end, but the dominating victors of this round were, yet again, 1up.
Alliance Graphs
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Events
Lokken, comfortably set in an armchair smoking the pipe and adding to his personal logbook once again on the pirate forums.
cheerios kept a small R14 news/soapbox on the pawiki itself with commentary from start to finish.
Final Rankings
Ranks
See also
- This round's ship stats were made by Appocomaster.
