Round 34
Dates and Times
Signups opened at 20:00 GMT on Saturday, 24th October
Ticks started at 20:00 GMT on Saturday, 7th Novemember
Ticks finished at 20:00 GMT on Friday, 18th December
Round Summary
Round 34 began with what was perceived as a very open playing field. The two alliances which had dominated the preceding rounds, Apprime and Ascendancy, were initially a little below the tag limit and took advantage of this by staying under the radar. The frontrunners at the start were NewDawn, Conspiracy Theory, and the re-emerging Subh. There were questions over the strength and resilience of these alliances and none of them wanted to engage in war early on, which led to galaxy raiding strategies being employed. As the ticks passed and it became clear that the galaxies with the highest concentrations of Ascendancy and Apprime were impossible to roid with such raids, and both alliances, especially Apprime, grew fat despite sitting outside the top5. A temporary co-operation of ND, CT, DLR, Euphoria and Subh attacked all Apprime core galaxies in one night as a solution to that issue. Apprime felt this was unfair, and a long-term conflict emerged between them and DLR/Euphoria, although they started by targeting the percieved weakest link of the attackers. Subh, concerned over the growth of Ascendancy and the fact that , who had remained roughly unaligned, chose to co-operate with DLR/Euphoria in exchange for help with Ascendancy later on. This led to a situation developing with blocks of ND/CT/DLR/Subh/Euphoria on one side and Ascendancy/Apprime and slightly later on VisioN on the other. These blocks remained in place until the end of the round.
The block containing Subh and others, were faced with very unfavourable shipstats as both Ascendancy and Apprime had gone mainly Etd and Zik, two races which were very strong against the main attack classes of the round, fi/co. This made defence easier for the two former round-winning alliances, and with a strong defence base they also started attracting big enemy planets into their fold, especially from the top galaxies. The superior activity and shared defence fleets of Apprime/Asc resulted in a large number of crashes, and they slowly gained ground on the rest of the universe. Initially Ascendancy rose to the #1 ranking ahead of ND and Apprime but Apprime were able to gain roids quickly as their attack fleets were cr/bs, and thus rarely needed for defense, while still holding their own with Ascendancy's help against incoming fi/co. Eventually these things, combined with a somewhat larger focus from the opposite block on attacking Ascendancy, allowed Apprime to take the lead. They only increased the lead from that point on and the round was effectively over with 2 weeks to spare.
The planet race was fairly close until the end, with Wishmaster stealing a large amount of xan ships on the last day for a big value gain to secure the win, on top of another big value gain steal earlier in the final week. His closest rival Pablitem benefitted from escorts from his galaxy to end with a much higher roid-count but was unable to keep up with the value gains from stealing. Galaxy wise 1:2 had remained largely secure during the war, partly due to being hard to hit with almost all zik, but also due to a number of planets shipjumping from subh to Apprime towards the end of the round. Eventually they finished #1 comfortably, with the other Ascendancy/Apprime galaxies filling up the ranks behind them.
