A battle over SECONDS | CCS Hall of Ages | Events with N0X

Champion City Siege was returning again, and Hotep was not prepared at all. Usually he was really focused on having a decent amount of troops for the event, but he had been busy recently and so missed his Lord of Lords training phase and, with that, his chance to build a lot of troops efficiently. He spammed out a few more troops shortly before the start of the match, but he knew it would not be enough, especially since the bulk of his troops were cavalry and his main leads were not.

Talking about leads, Hotep had decided to join his usual allies from BDR and HD!, mainly in the form of the baby and Tanalyn accounts, one of which was spear and the other inf main. 

Although their team grew over time, it was still very small, but the other teams were all the same. No team had more than, like, 20 members in them. This truly promised to be a very close match. 

The match came closer and closer, and Hotep was in voice only with George; the rest seemed to not be interested, which would make planning much more difficult than usual.

mml from another faction would get in first, so their BBY team quickly started to set up rallies.

baby was spear and heading into mml’s inf, but due to baby having almost 2x the troops and better advisors, the counter is not an issue. Similar to this, their other rallies also win, and since IFW is a small team just like BBY, George gets in.

George was not one of their top leads, though, and while strong, the enemies have just as strong rally leads. Good for Hotep that George ran cav so he could make use of his troops, getting the report of a solo attempt from mml that ends up not working but dealing heavy damage to the defenders. Soon later, George would lose the Hall.

Trying to mention every change in possession would take centuries since all teams had so small defenses when taking the city, that the first rally waves basically always kicked them. Since Hotep had basically no inf or spear, he was happy for any moment when they were not on defence.

At one point in time, baby was defending, and with his last low-tier spear troops, Hotep helped to defend, fighting a rally led by YGI here. Hitting into the counter against a stronger account, even the 2 million more troops in his rally could help, although he did deal significant damage.

In another defense, Tanalyn would lose to one of the RoD rally leads that, as far as Hotep knew, was quite close to his account. The report was super close, though, and he would have loved to see that report in full.

Half an hour in, and there was no clear winner yet. While mml had the upper hand, BBY had places 2-4.

mml seemed to get that first spot since he was constantly doing expensive solos, and while they were successful at draining BBY's fillers, they also bled his own t5 a lot.

It was not helping BBY, though, that their time was split across 4 different leads.

When George was in, they tried to organize a swap, but with just George and Hotep in voice, that was just impossible. With full voice coordination, they could have had first place by now potentially.

After giving up the swap idea since it was just not possible, Hotep and George focused on intercepting mml. With his reinforcers running low, the Hall was weakly defended seconds after the bubble dropped, and that gave George a chance to intercept. Hotep only had to time it for him. After some difficulties on the first attempts, the second time, George was able to snipe mml, preventing another minute of creating rallies to kick him.

5 minutes before the end, the Tanalyn account was still 2 minutes away from getting first. By now Hotep had accepted that first place was not really realistic, but he wanted to try, especially since George was still optimistic.

Tanalyn got another great time in, and with the match coming closer to the end, the fillers, including Hotep, just started to send anything they had left. When mml took over again, the gap had shrunk to 30 seconds, but with him back, the gap started to increase again. They needed to be fast now

When Tanalyn got back in, mml was back up to a 2-minute difference, and with exactly 2 minutes left, this would be an insanely close call. Tanalyn had to hold until the very end, no matter what.

Inf, cav, spear… troop types did not matter anymore now. No matter what, the Hall had to hold, and so Hotep sent whatever he could scramble together.

Somehow they were able to hold; maybe mml had run out of troops to solo, or maybe the BBY fillers had found just enough troops.

But even with them holding, it was not clear if they had gotten enough; it was a difference of one second.

It turned out to be just enough. Tanalyn had gotten rank 1 by just one split second, and with such a small win, every single person in BBY could claim that without them this win would not have been possible. Since everyone else dodged, George got the title, something he was very happy about. Meanwhile, Hotep was happy about the token he had gotten, bringing him very close to a full red badge set, at least badge-wise. There was still a lot of red dust to go.

Hotep had been underprepared but had found just enough troops to get a good performance. Before the next match, he had to remember to train more troops, especially infantry and spearmen. For now, Hotep was off on a vacation, though, and would only return for KvK, which he was looking forward to…

GOT WIC Chronicler HotepRa