Siege Of Winterfell (S13 Round 2) - HOH vs. BaN - How long we can stay alive?

The new season of SoW continues, and round two has arrived at lightning speed.

Our first match was a confident win against NBe. The problem with easy wins is that they raise your score so much that you're almost guaranteed to be playing a mega alliance in the next round. Well, that's exactly what happened with HOH. And we couldn't get a much bigger giant opponent than the newest “supergigamega” alliance, BaN. 

In case anyone has been living under a rock lately, I tell you that BaN is BDR and N30 merged. As if they weren't strong enough separately, now even more so… N30 has always won the SoW seasons easily, without any sweat, now BDR has joined to this powerhouse...can you imagine how “hard“ it will be for them to run over everyone this season?!

But I'm sure it takes a lot of determination on their part to stay awake in every game, after 10 minutes, when the opponents won't move anymore. 😅

That pretty much sums up the mood we were in for the clash. We had as much chance as a three-legged hedgehog on a six-lane motorway. I suppose that is true 99% of the alliances, so we don’t really feel bad about this.

Accordingly, the instructions were very simple: don't use personal speed ups!!! There was absolutely no point to heal more than twice (with the bought ally heals) and get slaughtered in 3 minutes again. We were sure we would need those speeds later on in the competition and hopefully in the play offs too.

Of course that doesn't mean we won’t be trying to do something...we have a secret goal: reach 3k what would be a giant accomplishment….

Let’s go and find out have we managed to reach our goal or not??!!

Part I – Blobbing

Even tho’ we had not much chance, we managed to gather 92 members to play, meanwhile BaN had 97 players. While we were getting ready for the bloodbath, we had a look over the other side of the battlefield and we saw all the super strong fighters: Baiz, b3nni, Meridianos, NM and the rest...I started to think if we survived for 10 minutes that would be amazing. I had no idea how our “small” but determined team could muster the enormous power what they represent…

Fortunately HOH has some great tacticians who can always cook up something. In this case, the plan was not to divide our forces, but to move in one group and to one building only.

"When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives!?”

Well hopefully survive a bit longer!

Our selected building for blobbing was the Hot Springs. But we tried to be smart a bit and didn’t move to the right side of the map straight away, we didn’t want to give away our tactic so easily. We lined up as usual, like we would make little groups for the whole map. We only started to move, when the countdown was over. 

As you can see it was a pretty good move from us, cause BaN divided their team, they sent quite a lot of armies to the Armory side of the map, so we had to fight with less (but not weaker) enemies at Hot Springs. When we arrived to Hot Springs we had more armies than BaN and we tried to use this advantage right away, jumped into the battle with great passion.

Well, this great passion very quickly turned into suffering.

Wherever I turned, I was completely surrounded and everyone had 4 star Jon, Dany, Vorian, Sennelle and the other unique commanders… you can imagine how fast I was dying. But I was not alone, pretty much every HOH member had the same fate. It didn’t really matter we had more banners, we were crumbling down so fast against these strong deployments, soon no one was left alive and BaN easily reversed the fate of the building. 

The healing costs have always been very high in SoW – truth to be told the new research tree didn’t help much of reducing it – so most of decided from now on we only use one deployment with our lord march, cause there’s no way we can heal that much.

I won't tell you a big secret, it didn't take more than 7-8 minutes and BaN was already adventuring near our base. Few of their banners were taking over the two Greyjoy Outposts – but only a few armies...I thought let’s go and try, while I was riding towards the building, my team mate, Rayana was galloping next to me, she was on her way too, she says: “We can at least try? Right?” I nodded and we were rushing to meat our fate. 

Our first try was an absolute disaster, we were death faster than you can blink twice. But the second time we had more reinforcements, more armies and teammates, what helped to somehow defeat the BaN armies what stationed there, and we managed to occupy the building, getting some nice points. 

HOH decided even before the start that we would make no effort at all to try to grab any of the resource bags, so the only way we could score is the passive points.

Smaller or bigger groups always tried to target those buildings where there’s only a few BaN marches standing we were doing it quite well for the first 15 minutes, but it was getting more and more difficult to get out alive from our base.

But some of the lucky ones managed to sneak out with a quite large group and they made a great stand at Base 4

Brave HOH warriors were keeping BaN busy there as long as they were able, but at the end we had to admit that we couldn't hold them off for a long time.

The heroic fight of the first twenty minutes resulted in us reaching our initial goal and getting the 3k points. 🙌

Part II – Base Camping and sneaking out

As I mentioned earlier, it was really hard to leave our base- we were completely surrounded by BaN. Of course we were running low on troops rapidly, but few of us still was brave enough to try venture out and have some fun. This fun could be just “Catch me if you can” or just yolo soloing some whales. Basically we didn’t want to just sit and wait for the next 30 minutes til the battle was over. (Although we have had already skribbl running in the background – for those who preferred that sort of fun instead of running away from BaN) 😂

Our last “great” outbreak was for the Greyjoy Outpost 1

With this action we pretty much killed our last remaining troops so we didn’t really left anything to do...other than being a little bit of annoying. Since we were completely encircled by BaN, we were pretending to going out over the “wall” then when all of them moved towards us, we recalled. That showed how much they were craving for elimination points...what we didn’t really want to give them, cause why would we?! We have lost enough for today. Obviously this little “childish prank” was getting really boring after a couple of minutes so we have stopped it, just like we stopped everything else. We knew we couldn’t except anything more, they won't just retreat and give us points or dropping the bag and let us to pick it and deliver it...so there was no point to stay any longer! 

BaN and Cheronkov delivered all the packages without any disturbance, getting huge amount of points, also BaN got all the extra points for occupying the whole map resulting a score over 120k for them...on the other side we got our 3k and with this we have left the battlefield completely happy! 

We can only hope for the next battle would be a bit more action packed than this! We will see…

Thank you for your attention!😊

‘Til the next time...😏