Round 33
Dates and Times
Signups opened at 20:00 GMT on Friday, 21st August
Ticks started at 20:00 GMT on Friday, 28th August
Ticks finished at 20:00 GMT on Friday, 16th October
Round Summary
Round 33 opened with two alliances viewed as the main contenders for the round, Apprime, the victors of last round, and Ascendancy, the winners of the four rounds prior to that. This round also saw the return of one of Planetarion's older alliances in VisioN and Evolution emerge from a brief one round hiatus. The remaining significant alliances to start the round were p3nguins and Conspiracy Theory, who both lost a number of players to Evo, NewDawn and DLR. EC also began the round with a higher number of members than they had in the previous two rounds but were unable to run the alliance as effectively as they did in the past and soon disbanded.
This round was dominated by the race and ship class strategies picked by the various alliances. The majority of alliances went for cr/bs, the exception being Evo who went for fi/co fleets. Ascendancy went for perhaps the strongest individual fleet of the round, Xan cr, also building peacekeepers and ghosts for anti-fi/co, with a small number of planets going for other races. As part of this strategy they used the exile system to place nearly all of their planets in six core galaxies, a virtual necessity if using fr versus fi/co incoming. Apprime went for a slightly more diverse strategy with Zik and Etd cr/bs as well as Xan and a lesser emphasis on core galaxies.
As the round got under way p3nguins initially held a small lead but they were quickly overtaken by Apprime as they tagged up fully. Ascendancy sat slightly further back behind Evo in fourth before overtaking them a little over a week into the round. Initially, despite the widespread belief that the only two realistic challengers for the #1 spot were Ascendancy and Apprime, the two avoided each other, perhaps partly due to the friendly relations between sections of the various memberbases. This informal NAP held for a considerable length of time, despite Apprime targeting an Ascendancy galaxy on one night
The early part of the round saw Apprime, with a slightly bigger tag than Ascendancy, run the #1 position, but at this point both Ascendancy and Apprime were avoiding each other. Ascendancy concentrated the vast majority of their members in a small number of galaxies and racially wise were almost entirely Xandathrii. This made many alliances unwilling to target these galaxies and led to Ascendancy becoming very roid heavy and closing the gap on Apprime until a war for the #1 spot was inevitable. Despite some early successes for Apprime the gap continued to close. Vision entered the war on Apprime's side and p3nguins and occasionally Evolution co-operated with Ascendancy to hit Apprime. As Ascendancy moved into the lead 10 days or so after the war had begun Apprime launched a massive attack on Ascendancy's then #1 planet, benneh, leading to a number of crashes by Apprime members and a further number being removed from the tag, dropping Apprime significantly behind Ascendancy and effectively ending the round as a contest for #1 alliance. Ascendancy napped evolution at this point, leading to a loose coalition of Apprime, p3nguins and VsN co-operating versus Evolution and later on Ascendancy heavy galaxies. This resulted in a non-Ascendancy galaxy winning the round, 5:1. However, an attempt to take down the biggest Ascendancy planet on the last night failed and resulted in the gap between #1 and #2 planet growing bigger from salvage gains. When the last tick was complete, the winning planet of the round was Reese of Ascendancy.
