Round 19
Round 19 ends with eXilition winning yet again, Ascendancy springing a galaxy win with 9 in-tag members in the galaxy.
Round 19 was probably one of the more exciting rounds of Planetarion thus far, with a great many happenings that threw a lot of players for a loop, destroying some plans while creating better opportunites for others.
eXilition played at 75% member count strength and managed to pull ahead, using a clever mix of NAP'ing and general staying out of the spotlight until it was much too late to defeat their great combination of activity and value-heavy planets.
It was clear early on that Angels, Tides of Fire, and Vision were all working together, while NewDawn was well known to be working closely with LCH, and also had been known to nap eXilition fairly early on.
NewDawn and Angels had a fairly hostile attitude towards one-another early on, and had a fair number of clashes resulting in some heavy green and red nights for both alliances. Not entirely due to the barraige they were receiving at the hands of ND and LCH, something amiss went on inside Angels, and this forced them to eventually merge with Omen to form the alliance Furious Omen. This new super power took first place for a fair bit of time, later to be de-throned by NewDawn, who were then de-throned by eXilition who had just added their out of tag members in Nihilum. The merge drew a lot of unwanted attention to them in the form of hostiles, even though the merge was claimed to have been done out of necessity for survival of the angels community.
Another interesting note was the fate of Vision and the newly formed Post|Mortum. Post|Mortum unfortunately had similar problems as angels, and ended up merging with Vision under the Vision tag in order to save their community. The good news about this was that many of Post|Mortum knew a bunch of the vision members, so by the sounds of it they have hopefully integrated nicely.
NewDawn also had their chance in the spotlight, but sadly flubbed it due to a combination of not hitting eXilition early enough, and being part of the reason (the NAP) that they could grow so quickly. Another fault of theirs was carelessness with fleets, in which a number of them suicided whole attack fleets on the enemy without anything to show for it. To their credit however, they held first for a while, and created some comedy on the AD forums in the form of a "deal" for angels. This deal basically amounted to a choice between losing, and losing. They did however prove once again that they are a force to be reckoned with, dealing a large amount of damage to Angels, Vision, TidesOfFire and others that were targeted. Too little too late done wrongly in the case of exilition though.
eXilition played well, and managed to convince many of the community that they were simply playing the game for fun, and not to win. They unfortunately have decided not to play the coming round 20, but hopefully we'll see most of their players still frequenting the game. They managed to fight off, and come out even stronger during the bunch of days that they were under attack from most of the top alliances almost exclusively. This I think had more to do with the fact that the competition decided unwisely to switch back to galaxy raids as opposed to continuing to batter eXilition.
I am unfortunately not familiar with what was going on in the lower end of the top 10, so until I manage to contact some of the HC, I'm afraid it'll remain a bit blank for now.
