The Flint Jump starts back when I was with Mystical and Vale of Aldur. I was leader, known as B-52 back then. This was round 1 of Milkway I think.

I kinda took a hybrid race due to worries about the skills of our players. Turns out we needed bankers badly due to some sluffers. So I started banking. I razed a lot of excess infra once, made a lot of cf's, LQ's and TO's and spent way less than I thought I should.

This was the moment of thought initially.

Sadly for us we got to 5th ranked, had Spam decide (3rd ranked) not to nap us, showing his way bigger than our fam was going to farm us, so we struck first. It was a glorious war, which ended with us getting the first known woopass on a legend of a banker, and getting our hineys handed to us afterwards.

The next round I hit upon the Flint Jump. I was known as Blaster, and we had a power line up. No longer considered underdogs we were considered contenders, and I set out to prove it. Ara landed in our family, and his banking skills were a considerable addition to our family.

I started out using the market as a profit center. I set aside about 5% of our families starting cash for market play, and watched as it grew, and grew, and grew... amazingly near the end I had 3 billion gc in the market.

I and Ara kept 1st and 2nd in size, 1st and 2nd in nw, 1st and 2nd in income for the first 4 weeks. Ara dropped to 3rd then, but I kept 1st. The server crashed at something like week 8. I kept 1st to week 6, when I started planning a Flint Jump.

Now ara accidently confirmed my idea... he razed a lot of cf's in his attempt to go LQ/TO. We covered it by claiming he got nuked, repeatedly. I calculated the cost of his jump with his old infra intact, and then after the raze jump as well. It confirmed everything.

I was set to start razing when a skirmish began. I decided we were well set as the #1 fam with #3 and #4 allies to get through the skirmish intact. I was set to do the jump with the 3 billion myself, so had stopped growing for about a week and supported growth in the family.

Sadly then the server died... and all info was lost.

When the server came back several weeks later, I found myself with another well made situation. Top allies, we were damned near invinsible. That round Malorean, Spooky, and many other legends were in my alliance. We easily had the top talent short of Spams fam, but we had 3 times. This was leading to a grand war were spam and my fam fought, fought hard, and perm napped.. Then my tri-alliance fought Warsongs alliance, and we crushed them. Warsongs brother, I forget his name, had a baby and was missing from the war. In secret I had done a small flint jump, converting a lot of my infra to lasers for specifically that war. The laser trap with 5k lasers on it destroyed a record 10 fleets and did not fall in that war. I figured after the war there was no challenges so I could raise cash for a real jump, and astonish everyone then.

Then things got interesting. One of my allies started skirmishing with an ally of Spams. My family got involved, suddenly spam broke the perm nap, another ally broke their perm nap, and the famous perm nap war started.

Let me tell you I got fudged up. I had 1% of my infra at the end of that war. It was a glorious war however. As that awol brother of warsongs returned, and he broke his fams perm nap on us for attacking while he was away (honest we did not know!!!!). So we had a 4 versus 3, with not one, not two, but 3 perm naps broken and surprise attained per each.

Yet my family held firm, we fought hard... very hard. The war looked to last the length of the entire round.

So I published the Flint Jump.

At first it met a lot of skepticism. Ryan, a mod back then who was famous for banking, out right said it would not, could not work. I had to work hard to defend that it could work.

The next round my activity was doomed due to loosing my job. I could not do a full flint jump, and ended up lapsing into inactivity and got put down to 1 planet, and logged in just enough to stay in the family. But the Flint jump was proven to work by my Stalwart allies, and the following round saw Flint jumps as the only way to survive... after that it was banned forever.

Contrary to his opinion Nai had nothing to do with any of it's invention nor was he in any of my families or allies families til much later in the game, and then Flint jumps had been banned for a long long time.

Ryan claimed to have made the Flint jump first, seperately of me, but had 'kept it secret' to avoid letting others have it. His family is known to have done an amazing NW jump for the win of the round the round he is said to have invented it, which was the round I almost discovered it... therefore he has a real ability to try to make a claim, of course I never discussed anything with him about the game or in general.

Other claims have come and gone, but the jump has one name attached to it. The name is Flint, and it will remain thus.

The actual jump was simple. There was no building limit on planets back then.

If you saved enough cash and resources, you destroyed all your infra, your fleet, and waited a tick, you could build so much infra, so much cheaper than otherwise, as to be laughable and utterly pwn.