CCS: I Came for the Rewards and Stayed for the Fight

Champion City Siege is coming again. This event used to be my favorite for a long time. I used to organize a team to compete in this event, trying to get a place in the top three. Unfortunately, I have been slacking on improving my account strength for the past year, and I am no longer a rally leader in a top competition of this level.

Rally leaders who play in this event have high-end accounts, while I am now barely a mid-level account. A high-end cavalry player would easily solo my full spearmen defense now, so I was not really motivated to aim for a ranking.

For me, CCS is now just an event where I get the minimum points for the basic reward of 60 battle diamonds. These 60 battle diamonds can be very useful for upgrading my equipment. So usually I would just join any team on the spot and hope that I could get the minimum points, or maybe some easy merit.

I was in Kingdom 440, and we were matched in the Shadow of Fortress bracket at 04:00 GMT. I did not even bother checking the bracket to see who the main contenders would be.

UTB Contacted Me

Suddenly, the leader of UTB contacted me, asking if I would support their team. I thought, why not? I did not have any plans anyway.

And then they told me that Ganicus would be playing with them. I was surprised. Wow! Maybe this was going to be interesting.

Ganicus is one of the strongest accounts in Westeros. An absolute monster, that is how I would describe him. There should not be more than ten accounts in Westeros that can compare to him. This could be a great CCS without many losses and with plenty to gain.

I notified all my friends in Kingdom 440 to come and support this team at 04:00 GMT the next day.

CCS Day

We gathered in a temporary team named AnU. Other than Ganicus, I noticed that we had two more high-end rally leaders who qualified as building holders: Lord Pratap and Dragonflyer.

On the enemy side, I saw a huge group of CXI players. This group was going to be our main competition. They also had some high-end accounts. One of them was Big Angry. He is a rising spearmen player with rapid account growth. He is definitely a high-end account that poses a threat.

And then I saw a familiar castle sitting at the corner of the map.

....... Σ(っ °Д °;)っ

Oh no! It was Meridianos!

Meridianos is also a maxed account, comparable to Ganicus. So much for an easy CCS, hahaha.

This looked like a very balanced matchup, with two big teams.

The result would depend a lot on which maxed account captured the Great City first, either Ganicus or Meridianos. Once one of them captured it, the opposing side would have a very hard time kicking him out. That is just how strong they are.

Let’s see how it goes!

The Great City Opens

The match started! The bubble on the Great City dropped, and players raced to see who would capture it first.

Big Angry from the enemy team won the race and captured the Great City!

Damn, this was a bad outcome for us. Although, not the worst scenario.

Although Big Angry was strong, we still had rally leaders capable of winning against him. So we started simultaneous rallies.

Dragonflyer, with his maxed infantry lineup of Night King, Vorian, Jaqen, Daeron, and the Mountain, managed to easily shred Big Angry’s defense. Infantry is a natural counter to Big Angry’s spearmen, so this result was not surprising.

BuggyThClown rallied with a full spearmen lineup. Unfortunately, he crashed badly against Big Angry’s defense, despite it only consisting of low-tier troops. Although both players used the same weakness spearmen synergy, the massive gap in account strength was very obvious.

Ganicus, the absolute monster, lived up to his name. He absolutely destroyed Big Angry’s defense with very little loss. Big Angry did not stand a chance in front of this beast.

After multiple simultaneous rallies for around four minutes, the AnU team finally managed to kick Big Angry out of the Great City!

And even better, it was the best scenario for us! Ganicus was the one who managed to capture it!

Now, we needed to focus on defense.

I am a spear player, so I really do not like training infantry or cavalry. I do not need them for my PvP. But I trained two million T4 infantry at the start to help defend Ganicus.

Luckily for us, there was only one person on the enemy side who could win against Ganicus: Meridianos.

Knowing that Ganicus played infantry, Meridianos immediately changed to a cavalry setup to counter him. As expected, Meridianos’ cavalry rally wiped out Ganicus’ defending march.

But this was not enough to kick Ganicus out with his 30/30 reinforcements. The enemy team needed more rally leaders if they wanted to remove him from the Great City. So they sent Immortal, a strong cavalry player, to rally Ganicus.

The result was as expected. Even though Immortal is a very strong cavalry player, Ganicus is on a whole different level. Immortal died very badly against Ganicus’ infantry defense despite having the troop-type advantage. Though, Immortal inflicted quite a bit of damage.

30 Minutes Passed

After 30 minutes, Ganicus finally secured first place. Now, we needed to swap our building holders, which could be very tricky.

One mistake, and we could lose the building to Meridianos. Then it would be over for us.

We planned to swap with Lord Pratap, a very strong cavalry player. We were hesitating so much. It was a risky gamble. Even Lord Pratap himself was not sure hahaha.

But we needed to do it anyway if we wanted to secure the next two rankings. So we did it.

We swapped successfully! Yeah!

It was surprising and funny, haha 😂

Now, we needed to defend again. This was going to be a bloody defense, because the enemy now had at least three rally leaders who could win against Lord Pratap.

It was a tough defense. We had to keep resending troops to Lord Pratap to make sure he was not kicked out of the building. Lord Pratap is not weak, but this was a bad matchup. Meridianos and Big Angry could naturally counter him. Pratap should be able to comfortably beat Immortal with equal troop numbers, but the defense size in the Great City is smaller than the offensive rally size. Because of that disadvantage, Immortal could also beat him here.

And then, in the middle of the match, I had to train four million T1 cavalry to help defend Pratap haha. I had already trained infantry, and now cavalry too. I was a spear player! I just wanted an easy match, but somehow I was getting too invested (｡•ˇ‸ˇ•｡)

For almost 14 minutes, we managed to hold the Great City, although it was quite bloody. But we did not want to lose, so we kept going.

10 Minutes Left

The timer now showed ten minutes left. We needed to swap in another building holder if we wanted to secure third place. Otherwise, Big Angry would get it.

So we decided to swap again. We disbanded the building to a weak opponent and let Dragonflyer slow-march to solo the Great City when the bubble dropped.

Yes! We managed to execute another swap perfectly. Dragonflyer was now sitting in the city.

This was going to be an easier defense because one of the enemy’s rally leaders, Big Angry, would not be able to win against Dragonflyer’s defense.

We focused on defense again. We sent infantry over and over. We only needed to defend for seven minutes, and then we would secure third place. Big Angry would not be able to catch up anymore.

After seven minutes of bloody defense, we finally managed to secure Dragonflyer’s ranking.

Let’s go!!!

It was a complete victory. We managed to secure all three rankings.

Then the reward notification came into my mailbox. That surprised me, lol.

I was only planning to do the minimum for the basic rewards and merit, but it turned out that I was heavily invested in making sure the team won hahaha.

I even ended up training two million T4 infantry and four million T1 cavalry, despite not wanting either for my own PvP. It was a funny but very satisfying feeling, knowing that I contributed to this team victory.

Congratulations to Ganicus, Lord Pratap, and Dragonflyer!

Thanks for reading.

See you next time!