426 vs 265 Battle of Wits

Few events bring nervous excitement as KVK does. The folks who farm are nervous of their bubbles dropping and nodes getting hit. Theirs is a harder path to personal points relying only on the resources to add to their scores. Those who fight wait to see the opponents. Will it be an impossible match? Will I still have troops for Siege of Winterfell? Will we dominate? Every month for KVK we have 24 hours to score the maximum number of points for our server. Since most people are not awake for 24 hours, this leaves strategy an important aspect of the game. Strategy can allow a group to go from being on the weaker side to level 5 diamonds. Some players don’t care about strategy and focus more on personal glory. These folks are more worried about being in first place, rather than winning for the server. It is not a matter of right or wrong, it is all about personal preference. The key is to create a group of like-minded individuals to maximize success and avoid headaches. In our early days on 426, we knew FLY was largely a farming alliance. They would participate in KVK in their own way helping achieve the victories. Our last few KVK’s however, they have not been as active. This has left dtP to take on all of the responsibilities. We take the risk, try and keep our Kings Landing, we fight and we rescue lords of well intentioned players who did not think through being unbubbled or not knowing their limits and attacking where they shouldn’t.

Trouble was in the air before kvk even started. WarOwl with TsB always joins us for kvk’s and we enjoy having him. He is not afraid to fight or help where he is needed. This time was to be no different, until it wasn’t.

M1lf had decided to “joke” with WarOwl and make him think we would all be joining TsB. This made it so WarOwl didn’t join us, and probably didn’t think very highly of us, likely assuming we were all in on the bad joke. The enemy had not even been announced and we were already trying to defeat ourselves. This was not a good omen. While we may be ok against a weak server, if we are matched with a stronger one, we just made victory that much harder to obtain.

Finally, our enemy was presented to us. We match with server 265

Home of some accounts I recognized from many AOW’s ago…. These were people who melted me like butter on a hot knife when we last met. While I had gotten stronger since those days, so had they.

Since we were down some players, our initial strategy was to try and rack up both points and time in the castles. We would be going to bed in a few hours and smart enemies just waking as we go down can capitalize on that.

I went into some castle on my account and my alt. Vegeta was there as well. We were a bit bored, but we were gaining good points. No enemy had shown up yet, there was no real action. When it was time to go to bed, Vegeta offered to keep my accounts in the castle a bit longer. He too was concerned about waking up to our lead erased and wanted to build on it further. I agreed and tried to get a few precious hours to be rested for what the next morning held. When I had awakened, I rushed in to see what had happened while I slept. We were still in the lead, but before Vegeta went to bed, Suniel had shown himself. He attacked some of the farmers nodes, he attacked some castles, he found unbubbled targets of opportunity like my baby Skeeter…

She took a loss on paper, but when you look at the numbers, she did rather well compared to him, having 4 times plus her power and almost 10K on her combat rate.

After the first hit, he did not go after her again but focused on her husband Trunks.

I am not sure about the logic, but he kept hitting.

Yes, Suniel was winning the fights, but the losses would not have been worth it to me. He was helping us by attacking points wise…

I knew we had to keep our lead, but how? Suniel was strong, while I countered him, I didn’t know if I could beat him. There are many spears out there that can destroy me. Counter does not equal victory; it can help but it is no guarantee. Plus, he was but one of the strong ones, there were others. Could I take a rally? Did they have blockade? Will I still have troops for SOW when this was said and done? Lol

Vegeta came on and we planned to go back into Kings Landing. With so much time left in the event, we wanted to ensure no matter what we kept our Castle. It did not take long for Suniel to hop over. He sent his scout. Not wanting him to know who was holding KL (it was meeeeeeee)

I abandoned the castle, so his scout saw no one. Once the scout had begun to return, I immediately took Kings Landing again. My plan was to frustrate him into just attacking with his spears, then taking the chance of trying to counter me. My plan worked as Suniel immediately Launched an attack.

I took a deep breath knowing this would be a test of the progress I have made. I could hardly look, but I could hardly look away.

OMG, I screamed. If we had one more person in the castle with me (I dunno like WarOwl), I would have capped his lord. We could have then rallied and attacked until Suniel could bubble again. I managed to kill some of his T5’s in that attack.

He did not come back for more, likely seeing in the battle reports the same thing I was seeing. I was pleased with our little skirmish but did not let my guard down. A rally with another strong lead may not go in my favor next time. Suniel had instead sought targets of opportunity. Low hanging fruit if you will. So we decided to pull back our troops and remove the low hanging fruit knowing he couldn’t stay online forever. We had a comfy lead, there was no need to feed them points allowing for easy attacks.

At this point a couple of accounts M1lf had scouted unbubbled. He knew we were chilling but could not help wanting to smash the accounts. He did well and obviously won the fights.

It rocketed him from 4^th place to first place in eliminations by a lot.

He also took those two accounts from unraked in overall points to in the top 40. One thing many people don’t realize is winning and losing is not so black and white. You can lose on the report but kill higher tier troops than the enemy, while they are only hitting the low tiers. This is no big deal in a blow out type of match but something to be considered in a close match. We had not yet reached the point where winning was inevitable. Fly’s LordSolemar launched an attack on Suniel, I don’t know why he would want to solo a 2 billion plus power account with big boy commanders and t5 troops, but he lost his lord and assisted in feeding the enemy a bunch of points, helping them to close the gap on our lead.

Knowing that there may be others who just want to hit things with no regard to its effect on the match, I went back into the castles. It was a risk since I had only been tested by Suniel and there were more fighting accounts about. But we needed to get more points to widen that gap. It wasn’t exciting work, but we held on until it was mathematically impossible for them to catch up in both score and hold time for the castle. 

I credit our win to strategy on this one. Our enemy was strategic in their own ways. For the most part trying to minimize their losses and maximize their wins with the low hanging fruit. Once they tested us, they looked only for opportunities that we would not provide. Winning was nice and all, but after this KVK change was in the air….