Round 4
Information
Round4 had a bulgin' hot community portal in the works providing Alliance Hosting and a Planetarion News Network (PNN).
- Alliance Classifieds from PNN
- Spy Reports
- Humor by Drano.
Approximate Planets: 160,000
The massive amount of players posed a lot of problems to the performance of the game hosted on 6 web and 2 DB servers.
Round Summary
Round 4 marked the replacement of the cluster travel time bonus with a parallel travel time bonus. This played a large part in the effective division of the universe into 25 parallels and their associated internal parallel alliances. This was to have a huge impact on the way in which the round progressed. Another major change to the game involved the introduction of salvage which made certain battles extremely profitable for some planets. This round was also characterised by massive amounts of in-galaxy farming, particularly to start the round, in order for planets to gain roids.
Events toward the end of Round 3 led directly into the formation of opposing sides for Round 4. Wolfpack and Fury's attacks on Legion towards the end of the round had led to Legion looking for assistance elsewhere. This led to Sastul, a member of Legion and HC of Xanadu (which had just split from Virus, bringing Xanadu onto Legion's side, alongside NoS, which had developed as a cluster alliance in c18 during Round 3. Going into Round 4 this block continued the previous round's Legion vs WP/Fury war. During the break between rounds WP and Fury stuck together, and with BlueTuba joining in the early stages of the round (and to a lesser extent the smaller alliances hirr and Quha, with ViruS joining much later on) to form WTF.
During the early stages of the war the sides appeared somewhat balanced with WTF getting the upper hand to begin with. However following disagreements between Legion and NoS NoS left the block and they were replaced by Elysium, BT joining in with Pack/Fury around the same time, leading to the formation of the VeX block. With anti-Fury sentiment running at a high after their perceived stagnation of the previous rounds other alliances joined in the attempt to take out WTF. NoS allied with CELL, but kept a NAP with VeX and remained hostile towards WTF. Xanadu brought in further firepower in the shape of LDK and DDS as Xanadu Jr. Over an extended period of time the outnumbered WTF block was slowly pounded down. Salvage meant that it was extremely difficult to destroy planets in this round but roid losses began to mount up. WP's original HC went inactive and Fury also suffered from the inactivity of their leader, Synthetic Sid. Huge assaults were launched on notable WTF stronghold such as WP's Moridin's galaxy and Fury's Singularity's gal. Moridin's galaxy came under heavy fire as the VeX block attempted to break the power of WTF's parallel 11 para-alliance, x11x, but the attack on 253.1, some 6 weeks into the round was one of the key points in the war, demonstrating the ability of Xanadu to severely damage the victor of the previous 2 rounds, Fury.
Eventually VeX emerged victorious from their conflict with WTF. The WTF block split, with Wolfpack changing HCs and merging with Out of Order to form Wolfpack Order (WPO). WPO then NAPed NoS/CELL. At this point the unfriendly relations that had existed between Legion and NoS escalated into outright war with Legion and Elysium on one side and NoS/CELL on the other. Xanadu, in part due to agreements going forwards into Round 5 decided to remain neutral in this conflict. Fury and BT joined with Legion/Ely in hitting NoS et al and Fury mounted a strong comeback to end the round. However the dominant alliance of Round 4 had unquestionably been Xanadu. Displaying a new found military power that elevated them alongside Fury and Legion for the following rounds of PA, they finished the round with the #1 player and #1 galaxy as well as controlling large numbers of the t100 gals.
