We have made it to the playoffs!

Here we are meeting once again on the arena of Alliance conquest (AC), yet this time on the playoffs stage, which is called Ultimate Conquest (UC). Our first enemy this time is supposed to be UTB, which definitely could make you feel a bit like 'did he not write about it couple of weeks ago?'... well yes i did, as what it seems, we were playing against UTB twice within couple of weeks!

Now is it a good thing for us? i think yes as there are a lot stronger alliances within those competitions such as BaN, WxC or HOH, yet, does this mean that the score was predictable to be the same as it was in the previous game? Hell no!

GoTWiC is such a strange game, that at the competitive level, each team can beat another, especially in UC when random players decide to join other teams and support them within the competitions, at the same time, supporting themselves by getting opportunity to get unique rewards.

Last match against NFI has been close, and the tricky move by other opponents made us drop to the 4th position, which made us fight first match against UTB instead of KUM, which i believe worked out better for us end of the day.

Without any further delay, let's move on to the match itself, and see, how did MiReLa and her beloved UTB do this time!

Bit of information before we continue

Ultimate conquest is the extension of AC, in other words the playoffs for the top16 teams to fight against each other for the top rewards. Many could say that whoever is the winner of AC is actual top alliance in Westeros, but that is down to the opinions of people. I honestly think that is the true as AC/UC and SoW (Siege of Winterfell) are the oldest events I can think of, and to be honest, in my opinion SoW is nowhere near AC in terms of competitive play, and even in terms of the way I enjoy it, AC is way better.

There are different rules during the UC, comparing to the normal AC season, as the amount of participating alliance members, it is being reduced from 100 to 70. This decision has good and bad remarks on the event in my opinion, and I will share now what I think is each one of them:

GOOD – more competitive play, people must be more reliable and the teamwork must be on the top level. More teams in the competition as some alliances have so many strong warriors, that if they don’t play lets say for BaN in the 70 player roster, they might play for let’s say PLQ which is slightly worse in my humble opinion.

BAD – Obviously everyone wants to play, and at the moment when you can’t some people might take it wrongly, maybe too personal, and decide to leave, to a different alliance, where they can have secured place.

As you can see it all depends of the person, and what are your expectations from the event and alliance itself, but end of the day, it is GoTWiC which keeps changing the playstyle, and we just need to adapt.

WTF and UTB  - Not so old rivarly

This clash is round 2, could also call it a second date between QUEENY and MiReLa if you wish, as we have meet in round 4 of qualifications to the UC, where we managed to win and you can read more about it over here - https://forum.gtarcade.com/topic/195685

This time somehow it felt like the enemy might be pushing more for the victory as it is UC and obviously can go all in, in terms of usage of speedups and heals, as if not now then when?

What should we expect from this competition, will QUEENY secure CR(Casterly Rock)? Will Maiae be the fastest racer on the battlefield? Or maybe UTB will surprise WTF and hijack every single castle, defending like 300 Spartans not letting anyone in, by the order of peaky blinders… I mean MiReLa.

Surely there are some strong competitive warriors on both sides, that we could focus our eyes on, and some of those are Josehf, Athena D GOD, and obviously QUEENY on the WTF side, while there is also MiReLa, Thor Storm, or very annoying for his opponents, Scooberman which will be very ‘present’ in this game.

Racers? Are they useful?

Have you ever thought, why is there such a huge pressure on a good racers within the competitive teams? Why can’t we just wait till enemy takes the castles, and then rally it, on the paper, it seems like we would save a lot of speedups this way.

Well let me talk about this for a bit.

As you can see in the rules it is written as you can collect points for ‘capturing one for the first time’. Well but if it is only like 200 points, then is it worth to lose your 75% speedups? Let’s see how many points can we get!

So overall if you capture all the buildings, excluding mines, as first, you can gain additional 4400 points!

Considering our last game against NFI, those 4400 points could change a lot! So make sure you do focus on getting your racing skills better, as this can make the difference in the match.

Let’s Rock and Roll

The night has come, and QUEENY has been messaging her beloved alliance members with final reminders to enter the battlefield before the doors will be shut. 70 People, considering that normal season allows to play with full 100 player roster, is a big decrease, and should be filled easily by any of the top alliances. This time we managed to succeed and fight with full 70 people roster.

The teams have been gathering on both sides, preparing for a long draining battle. We have meet previously so pretty much both teams knew what could be expected from each other. I definitely knew that UTB has a racer called scooberman which likes to steal great castles for us, and is very successful in this. On our side we had stronger rally leads, which end of the day, should’ve done the work, as we can always lose the race, yet then beat enemies in the castle to take it back.

As you can see on attached picture, things did not go well for us at the beginning, the races were lost, and others, which were won, have been re-captured by enemy while changing the occupier.

It was kind of a disaster of a start, and we knew we need to focus on taking those castles back as soon as possible. QUEENY has ordered rallies towards Mother and then Outpost and Warrior. Some have been also soloed, successfully, which eventually lead us to take the ownership of all the castles.

As far as it seemed the game was not looking challenging and I knew I will have to join every rally, even the ones that are not designed for my main troop type, to get any elimination / healing points.

Ports have opened and here was no surprise, we managed to win the races for those capturing all castles so far.

Enemy somehow did not plan to give up, and kept rallying our Mother at the start, where KORGEI kept defending the gates of the castle

Mother did not really work out, so they decided to focus on the Outpost where was our Athena D GOD. Person hitting was MiReLa herself, which was very exciting to see that clash.

This example shows beautifully the power of countering in GoTWiC, where spears ideally should smash cavalry. It happened this time even Athena’s troop squad was overpowering MiReLa in terms of amount of t5 towards the amount of t4s.

Next attack was performed on the other outpost, where Neo was the temporary resident. His strong spears have proven many times in countless battles that are not the easiest to be beaten.

Once again enemy force even winning a battle, did not win the whole fight for the castle. We kept winning and full of hopes for a fast and smooth victory.

CR was upon opening and obviously as being the most important castle to capture, we had to take it to put that last bit of our efforts in to the ultimate victory.

Unfortunately, scooberman has shown once again, what is he worth, and stole the CR before our racers managed to arrive.

It was a good effort and would be a very good move if then we wouldn’t follow up on it with rallies towards CR. Once the rallies were about to hit, enemy has disbanded and run back to the personal castles. This way they avoided the fight.

Personal castles protection – OFF

I believe when enemy kept their soldiers alive from the potential massacre in the CR, the intentions were to send them and attack our personal castles once the protection drops to get some additional point, and maybe reach the 40k breaking point. Sometimes this is a good idea, but was it in this situation, where a lot of our castles were stronger than the enemy ones? Let’s see.

As you can see, we did not hesitate to attack the enemy once the bubbles have dropped to eliminate remaining troops and finish the battle. Each one of us was counting for some elimination and healing points as there are additional rewards such as valor points for them. It is also the matter of pride to not be on the bottom of the scoresheet by the end of the match.

I did not plan to sit and watch myself, so I started to hit enemy castles

The times when I would just focus on reinforcing and not put too much of my own effort are long gone.

By about the same time, enemy decided to rally our Warrior, which originally could’ve looked like a troop saving rally, yet it actually has hit, and lets see the results.

Tony Montana hiding behind the avatar which originally could’ve been known and attached to strong player of BaN called El Sicario, tried to reach our gates with his rally made fully of cavalry. The dragons were not too impressive as two of them were just young blue dragons, so could not do too much of a damage, weird move by enemy to be honest. This was still a strong hit due to counter of cav vs inf, and another Stark had to feel big casualties during the battle.

While our enemies hit the Warrior, I kept pestering their personal castles, not allowing them to fill another rally, because they kept losing troops.

As you can see even in a clash of my t4’s against enemy t5’s I was victorious, even while enemy used two dragons. It is very weird but I wont complain, my troops must have been more experienced, and a bit of armor or sharper weapon, wouldn’t help here.

The game was coming to the end when Mines unlocked, so last chance for enemy to grab some points, and by some, I mean a lot as mines allow to gather overall of 18k points.

Enemy was also attacking our personal castles, which can be seen below.

But as you can see the attacks were not too impressive, and we usually were victorious.

At this point Enemy decided to make 30 rallies and hide remainng of troops, to wait till mines will open, so they can fight for the last remaining points on the map, which was understandable.

We managed to secure one mine, which was taken by QUEENY, while other mine was won by UTB. Did UTB give up yet? Seems they didn’t, but we were not meant to stay passive aggressive, and soon after QUEENY called for rallies. Multiple rallies were formed, and reinforced, after which they rushed towards the mine.

As you can see the rallies were successful and soon after we have captured second mine. This game was over. At this point only individuals were active, that kept fighting for a bigger personal score, such as MiReLa herself.

Result

Following our second clash, the score was kept the same and did not change much. We have won for the second time, yet big shutout to the scooberman which tried to fight as a racer for every point given to his team.

Here are results from the game.

Looking on final rankings my thoughts were that UTB should focus more on organized rally hits as an alliance, rather than personal solo hits, as clearly there were some outstanding warriors within their side, yet did not make too much of an change if we are looking on the score of the overall match.