Round 37
Dates and Times
Signups opened at 20:00 GMT on Friday 21st May 2010
Ticks started at 20:00 GMT on Friday 28th May 2010.
Ticks finished at 20:00 GMT on Friday 16th July 2010.
Pre-Round Announcement
Galaxy Setup
- Buddy packs of up to 8 will be shuffled to create "private" galaxies with 8 players in them
- Random galaxies will be created from all non-buddy packed planets. They will all have at least 13 planets in them. All self exiles, galaxy exiles and signups land here.
- Random galaxies have 1 late signup member each after tick 336.
- Private galaxies are allowed late signups whenever they have fewer than 8 players in their galaxy after tick 336.
Alliances
- The maximum amount of members allowed in an alliance will be kept at 100 members.
- The amount of members that count towards an alliance score will be dropped to 50.
- The combined total amount of members that two merging alliances have to have whilst merging is 60.
Other Changes finalised
- Added new 'Feed' list - highlights huge battles and interesting rank changes during the round, accessible through the universe page
- Planet log available in the journal page - accurate log of all planet activities from during the round
- Optimised alliance scans in the alliance defence / attack pages to reduce load issues experienced last round
Round Summary
The sign up period was delayed by a week due to server issues.
After Round 36 and their round win VisioN had disbanded, with many of their members following main HC SantaCruz to new alliance Osiris. Following the events of the previous round Osiris and Apprime entered the new one extremely hostile towards each other. Evolution also returned, with mostly previous players and a number of ex-DLR ones as DLR significantly decreased in size for this round. The other perceived main contenders for victory this round were Ascendancy and NewDawn.
The early stages of the round saw Osiris target Apprime, who had concentrated a third of their memberbase in three core galaxies very effectively. Helped out in this by Evolution to some extent Apprime looked to be losing this conflict. At this point Ascendancy and ND, who had held friendly relations from the beginning of the round, stepped in. With Evolution holding a clear score and roid lead over the chasing pack the three alliances concentrated on them primarily. Evolution and Osiris rapidly formalised their relations, agreeing on a NAP, and bringing in Conspiracy on their side of the war. Evolution were slowly brought back towards the others but despite this initial success, the war stagnated with neither side losing or gaining much. Apprime came out on top with the most roids and focused on defence for several days to stave off incomings. While this made them very hard to hit, it caused tensions between them and the other members of the block.
The relationship between NewDawn and Apprime was on a knife's edge already, because a number of Apprime planets defended Evolution planets against block incomings. Apprime gaining on the other alliances was the final straw, and NewDawn broke the NAP with Apprime (but not the one with Ascendancy, who would remain their allies for the remainder of the round) and joined the other block in attacking them.
With the numbers significantly stacked against them, Apprime grounded fleets altogether in an attempt to hold onto as many roids as possible. Despite crashing quite a lot of fleets, the block stubbornly continued hitting Apprime until they were 6th on size and had lost their number 1 position.
Ascendancy, meanwhile, having kept their NAP with ND, had kept on the sidelines of this war and were getting fat by random roiding. Activity varied wildly between members though and at some point the majority of the roids in the alliance were in the hands of only 15 planets. Osiris and Evolution were both hurting for roids after hitting a fleet grounding alliance for the better part of a week and even with the numbers on their side, their roid count was only average, while activity was going down.
Apprime had expressed their displeasure with Ascendancy keeping their NAP with NewDawn and, looking to regain lost roids easily once the incoming slowed down, Apprime decided to drop the NAP with Ascecndancy. After the round was over, some controversy on AD broke out over this move, with Golan of Ascendancy claiming Apprime ignored a previously agreed to 48 hour grace period, while HaNzI of Apprime stated none such agreement existed. No proof from either side was brought up.
By this point, Ascendancy had a strong hold on the #1 ranking along with 7 of the top 10 planets. However, solid incomings over the four days by four alliances resulted in a 30% drop in roids, reflecting the mediocre activity level the majority of the lower ranked members were playing at.
NewDawn took advantage of this lull and were mostly getting fat by hitting randoms, much like Ascendancy had done previously.
Apprime managed to pick up most of the roids Ascendancy lost and once again emerged as a contender for victory. Unfortunately, NewDawn and Conspiracy saw this coming and attacked Apprime with Ascendancy for a few nights. This was surprisingly effective and subsequently Apprime dropped out of the picture for #1 alliance for the remainder of the round.
Evolution and Osiris had been enjoying an easy ride for over a week now and with both Apprime and Ascendancy now definitively out of the picture, they slowly gained ambition again. Ascendancy was still top heavy and held most of the top planets, so Evolution and Osiris decided to start waving these in hopes of gaining a lot of XP. Apprime also joined in a couple of nights and after four nights most Ascendancy top planets were left with few roids.
The main beneficiary of these actions was NewDawn, as they were still napped to 4 alliances in the top 5, were now 30k roids ahead of the #2 alliance, while Apprime were never really given an opportunity to effectively give them the incomings they expected.
With a week to go, Evolution, who by now had taken the #2 position both on size and score, started to realise that NewDawn would need to be taken down quickly if they were to win the round. They dropped the NAP, got Osiris and Apprime to join them and started a war against NewDawn, who were 11m score ahead of them.
Also during the last week, knowing they were out of the running for alliance victory, Ascendancy had been working hard to secure planet rankings, still holding half the top 10 planets, including the top planet, played by BlueArmy. His main concern was Coolkat of Osiris, who had overtaken him in roids during the final week and was now gaining score twice as fast as he was. Both sides attempted to keep the other down, with Ascendancy landing two alliance-wide fi/co waves on Coolkat on two subsequent nights and Osiris consistently hitting Ascendancy top planets.
When Coolkat gained a over 300k value in salvage when Osiris crashed a lot of defence at his planet, concern over more potential salvage donations kept Ascendancy from further attacking Coolkat, instead focusing on defending against his attacks, made possible because Ascendancy had several planets in his galaxy to keep an eye on his outgoing status and as a Terran, Coolkat did not have a fi/co roiding fleet.
On the last day of the round, the rankings were closer than they had ever been before. Initially it looked like the gap was closing too slowly for Evolution to come out on top, but by now they were less than a million score behind NewDawn and had managed to close the roid gap. Simultaneously, BlueArmy was still #1 planet, but a heavily escorted landing by Coolkat on HaSu, one of NewDawn's top planets, had given him a boost in roids and XP. If he were to manage to do that twice more on the last day, he could overtake BlueArmy an inch before the finish line.
Fortunately for BlueArmy, Coolkat made a bad decision when he launched his battleships on Rgat of NewDawn, who only had a mediocre planet, which was easily covered by a single Ascendancy fleet, due to the fact that he only had two escorts. After BlueArmy gained some salvage due to an Osiris crash on him, Coolkat gave up and refrained from launching his destroyers.
On the alliance front, things were equally close, if not more so. Four ticks before the end of the round, due to several crashes by and fleetcatches on NewDawn, Evolution overtook them. However, realising that their top planet was secured, Ascendancy had launched a mass fi/co wave on Bee of Evolution, in an attempt to swing the balance in favour of their round-long allies. Even though Evolution prevented crashes by managing to get all of the defence to recall, it looked like this attack would allow NewDawn (who were only 390k score behind them) to come out on top at the last moment.
Unfortunately for them, Evolution found an unexpected trump card in DunkelGraf of Ascendancy, who, as per his habit, had been out of tag all round. They convinced him to join the Evolution tag, thereby preventing a last tick NewDawn victory, which, it turned out, Ascendancy's landing on Bee would otherwise indeed have granted them.
Final Rankings
See Also
- Alliances in R37
- The Ship Stats for this round saw a switch back to single-targeting.
- R37 End of Round Ceremony
