I really enjoyed this round, so I’ll bother telling the story of SB Round 16 from my side, leading ’98. The fam that went from last in week 1 to nr 2 at the EOR.

Pre-Round

I’m not a very experienced player, 7 years ago I completed 2 rounds and went inactive on the 3 others. This time I randomed in a fam before the beginning of the round. The necessary posts were already made on the family forum regarding roles, introduction, .. and even a 'I can lead' post by Scorpion. All things good, Scorpion would lead and I found 2 happy Belgians in the introduction thread which I added quite quickly on WhatsApp.

The 2 Happy Belgians appeared to be returning players as well. Big Up & High Spirits. So starting of plans round commenced. All resources would go to me and I would be the biggest banker of the galaxy soon enough! Even Scorpion noticed we were quite fanatic in organising things and asked if I was up for fam banking. Things looked great. We defined our core, and we were set for the round.

Start of the Round

The plan was executed, it didn’t take long before I was at 18 planets where the follow-up only had 9. Then I decided, here come’s the inexperienced part, I’ll let my pop grow and then be rich. The moment Scorp sent me ‘What’s going on’ I kinda realised I may have made a mistake. Our cash income was bad, and we we’re starting to trail behind. Learnt the hard way: Even when you plan to pop bank, start with Cash factories.

When executing our plan, including me killing of some troops for maximum income, I noticed 2 other players doing the same. They were in 01. So on the 3’rd of August I posted on our forum: Watch out for 01, they seem pretty serious as well. Guess I was right. It didn’t take long before they were at our ‘core’ and Bigup, great attacker as he is, attacked to clear. I believe it was Fish of ’01 that spoke the words: ‘Do you really want to ge that way already?'

Misery was great in ’98, our economy sucked (and basically it was my fault) and those active ’01’s were threatening to destroy us not even a week far into round 1. At a moment somebody suggested that I would take the lead.

I was voted leader and the first thing I did was sending a message to Random: ‘Hey, any chance you guys are willing to respect our core? Who knows, if you let us live now we’re able to help you secure that nr 1 spot with ops at the end of the round’. And I was quite amazed to get a positive response.
I didn’t get exactly why but Big Up, fleet admiral by that time, was quite strict in having 01 respect a certain part of our core. This seemed alot to ask regarding the position we were in but I agreed and asked ‘01 to respect our core.

We got ’01 to respect our core and sign a PNAP.

I understood afterwards the importance of this step. Even though you say you’ll be best friends in business, only agreements preventing you to take hostile actions are agreements that can protect you to stay friends.

As a bonus to the agreement we started talks to 00, neighbours on the other side as well and got a PNAP there as well.

Middle of the Round

Ok, so here I am leading a fam in complete misery. At least we were safe. Now what. As clearly the central fam banking wasn’t working I decided that we should organise in small teams. If group communication wasn’t working: Empower the people.

Teams were set up: Jelly / High, Big Up / Wolf, Sten / Boner. That last team had aided alot into fam bank but barely got anything back so we sent all incomes to them for 24 hours before splitting up in separate teams. An investment with great return, that team sky rocketed and were strong holders the rest of the round.

We continued dabbling around and some players joined, but non very active. We also decided to kick Scorpion because he was still around beginner NW and we didn’t hear anything anymore. So I assumed he was inactive. A few minutes after his kick I got a message: ‘Idiot, I was building expo’s. I had 60’. Well Scorp, if you read this: Once again, sorry. My logic was: Inactive guy that has alot of IC history, who knows he’s talking to other fams. Yes. That’s how paranoid I was in a chaos round on getting screwed over

There was a lot going on in the top charts at this time, 02 was clearly going for the win and 01, 97, 96, 03 were top 5. I think it was 99, 98 and 00 in the bottom charts. But I believe this is the moment 97 started to drop to my surprise.

Our economy was catching up. By now everybody was on WhatsApp, and because of the PNAP’s there wasn’t a direct threat either. I knew we only had 1 goal, and that was to at least fulfil to our commitment do something towards 01 because they .. didn’t kill us. So we came up with a plan to be near 96 and 02. Not because of the people in the fams, hell I didn’t even know there was so much history between all these players. The simple reason they we’re direct competitors for 01 in the nr 1 spot.

I knew that ’96 and ’01 were so called allies, but the moment I heard they weren’t even napped I never really considered that to mean anything. In my opinion, if you call yourself allies and don’t nap, then both parties are considering it an option to fight each other at a certain stage. And I understood these IA to basically mean as much as ‘We don’t attack you for now’.

We were lucky with 2 randoms: RecruitmentAgency joined. I can tell you, that guy knows how to make money. We put some savings into him and it didn’t take long for his income to help the whole fam forward. He ended up to be nr1 in income. And Haydon, don’t ask me where he came from, but it’s quite nice to get an active camaar when your Economy is catching up.

Our plan was simple: We hit 03, to test if we’re able to actually coop with a serious fight and the goal of the fight was to create a safe zone from where we can attack 02 and 96. 03, sorry Euftalia, were just the means to get there. Nobody cared about us, economy is good and we send in Big Up and our active camaar Haydon.

A system was cleared and once of the sudden I have Random asking me if I’m preparing to war 03. He informs me that 03 is on our side and we shouldn’t fight them. In all honesty: We we’re in a good place back then. We just made it to top 5 and going a bit further on 03 could make us rise in the rankings. So I got questions from in the fam if they were not just making an excuse so we wouldn’t become to big. But I realised that a fight with 03 would be a fight for spot 4& 5. Maybe we could achieve more than that?

So my goal was clear: Create a safe zone so we can hit ’96 so it made sense to make amends with 03 and just get 1 system from where we could attack. I pissed off both my attackers Haydon & Big Up, for not asking at least 60 planets

At that moment the plan was to get ready to hit ’96 in 2-3 days.

End of the Round

We we’re not ready for war. Basically we didn’t have any savings and we were not creating any resources. Our swift switch from 03 to ’96 completely failed. It took us at least a week and a half to organise ourselves, including switching both High and Sten to resources instead of attacker. It was just painful how slow this was. If anybody would have hit us at that moment we would be dead. But In the meanwhile 96 started hitting 02 and other stuff happend which put us into this strange nr 4 spot were nobody cared about us and we were able to do our economy deep into the end of the round.

Once 01 started hitting 02 as well the strangest thing happend: 02 reached out for help. It’s really strange to have the previous nr 1 reach out to you when you have the feeling you’re the noob fam that was last a couple of weeks before. But I was flattered and kinda felt bad about them being so hardly hit by 01 & 96. So although I knew that probably we would go after them after we’ve had 96 I was ok to help out for now (Sorry Iron Bull, happy it never came to it ). Started talking to 97 as well, as they were also not great lovers of 96. 03, who we made friends with by now (PNAP), asked who we were targeting next.

I remember telling Random that we were preparing for 96 and he didn’t like it, should hit 02 so they we’re completely done for. Even heard that 01 was market aiding 96 to fight 02. (Heard it, don’t say it happened, but this was chaos and people talked)

So the chaos in my head was complete at this moment: Was Random actually serious about that ’96 was a threat for the number 1 spot and were we really his friends? Or were ’96 the real friends and was he aiding 96 to the nr 2 spot? Especially the moment he told me that he was considering to ask the mods to break the PNAP’s in the last 48 hours the chaos was complete in my head.

To Recap: 98 was ‘friends’ with 01 and 00, 02 and 97 were pissed at 96, 96 was allied to 01, 98 wanted to hit 96, 03 was with 01 against 02 and i thought 96 and 03 were friends as well, which could mean 03 and 96 were against 98 with the aid of 01… chaos.

At that moment I realised that we should go all out on 96 and somehow convince Random of watching out with ’96. So I sent out the argument: ‘Im concerned 96 will hit us after 02 and will become nr 1 in size’. This was about creating a reason, not depending on loyalty, why ’96 was the one to attack.

Because I was concerned about the strength of 96 I did what I could to turn the tides into our favour. I talked to 97, 00, 01, 02, 03 (all but the 99’s, don’t ask me why) to make it clear we were going after them and they should do the same. Again, not because I knew the people in the fam, but because they were an immediate threat to our survival and out of fear for their strength.

At this moment I was still not sure if ’96 had any idea of what was going on or if we were running into a huge trap set up by Random to get 96 the nr 2 spot.

By that moment we saved about 250m cash, 4m iron and 2m end into our Warfund. We wanted to start the war sooner, but somebody forgot to build transports, so we postponed another 12 hours. I can tell you, we’ve really noobed out several times (but made up afterwards ) into starting this war against ’96. We we’re again lucky as another random attacker joined: Winners domain. There we were: 3 active attackers, savings and a good economy.

And then the moment we finally declared war on ‘96

Day 1: We declare war and 02 goes into nap with ’96. What happend? I thought they couldn’t stand each other? Is this the trap I was afraid for? Not long after 03 starts attacking 02. Complete Chaos, they were supposed to hit ’96 as well. Are we starting a war that we’re doomed to lose?

Day 2: I wake up and see 01 attacked 96; Was I happy to see that. Random wasn’t screwing us over or he listened to my argument of ’96 being a threat for the nr 1 size spot. Don’t care: Happy to see we still stand a chance. The bad news: We basically burnt our complete war fund at the end of Day 2. I remember telling to the attackers: If you are going to be active, today is the day you’re supposed to be active, we have to give ’96 the feeling that this is a war they cannot win. And so they did, Haydon, Winners and Big Up attacked in a way that I thought: So that’s how the coordinated attacks back in the days must’ve felt.

Day 3: I was surprised to see both Europe and Australia at 2.5m New (jumped about 700k) so I thought we were done for. But no, barely any retakes from ’96, our portals got up and we started clearing system per system. It seems we succeeded in a serious piece of Poker. Because of our bad op defense and sucky economy (Apparently when you have a war fleet you need to pay alot of upkeep) we barely had money to support it. We had like 10m left or something.

The rest of the story you know: The forum was full of spam of betrayal and stuff, which confirmed that there wasn’t alot of morale left in ’96. But we were happy because we succeeded in arriving at the nr 2 spot.

To complete our noobing we thought the round was ending on the 28’th while it was ending at 27. So we completely noobed on our end of round jump. It was chaos till the last ticks because once of a sudden 99 and 03 started growing in size and we had to spend any savings we had left into exploring and attacking some more ’96 to safeguard the nr 2 spot. We even stole 10 planets from ’99 to stop them from the nr 2. By then we were even thinking, wouldn’t it be funny to take the nr 1 size spot? But ’01 jumped another 100 planets and they were far gone, well done

Final words

I have no idea if I influenced or what Random’s plan was. If there ever was a plan. I always had the feeling I could trust him and he seems to be a genuine good guy. I was especially happy we were protected by a PNAP and clean core to fall back on. I’m a strong defender that in a war game you shouldn’t go to hard on trust, if the goal is to win, expect people to make moves to win. And when you want to team up, make sure you’re teammate is not in a situation where the logical win is to attack you. And when he does, laugh about it. He played the game.

I can tell you that I’ve always heard about crazy diplomatics in IC and I was really happy to be part of it this round. So I’m sorry to those who feel betrayed, but I must congratulate Random with what he did this round. Because till the last tick I wasn’t sure If I was actually on his side, or he was just playing the chaos to it’s best.

Sincerely, If the naps broke in the last 48-hours and we would’ve been attacked by ’01 I would’ve laughed and applauded because It would’ve been the cherry on the cake of a diplomatically chaotic round.

Thanks for playing, hope to have as much fun in one of the future chaos rounds.

Regards,

Big Bad Wolf, Leader of fam ’98, Starburst Round 16.

Special thanks to the tons of people I talked to and Fam ’98: Big Boner, Big Sten, Big Jelly, Big Up (fleet admiral), Recruitment Agency, Winners Domain, Haydon, Big High Spirits.