I started an account on s5 while I was still playing on s9, as I recall I'd told myself I was just checking a technical point of game play but I confess I don't remember what it was, I think I may have known I was actually going to keep the account on because the "why" was, I think, short for "why am I doing this again?"
In the early weeks when I still clung to the intention of abandoning the account after a short while I had a confrontation with a particularly aggressive and unpleasant neighbour called TUPACY and once I'd seen him off I found that I had engaged with the server and I was unable to let go.
I had started the account on the 19th October whilst the server had started on the 2nd. That, and the delay that I had imposed on myself before deciding to commit to the server meant that that I didn’t get round to settling my second village until very late and by that time the options were limited. I was delighted when I located a 125% bonus 15 cropper, it was a risk at 60 odd tiles away but I went for it anyway as there was nothing better than 75% that was left available really close to my spawn village. Had I checked more thoroughly I might have realised that the area was home to a player that had already settled their 3rd village and was looking likely to be the dominant force in that corner of the world.
Within 48 hours my new capital was dust. It took a no more than a couple of igm’s to make my peace with what turned out to be an account run by very reasonable people, elie, who had sent the catapults, and his partner Sam. That's how it came to be that the account that I would eventually help to win the server destroyed my capital.
Skip forward 10 months and in igm conversation I asked Morgana if she’d like a little help at the time l was pre-occupied in the real world and I volunteered Tim (Old McDonald) to assist and when I came back from a trip abroad for work on 15th September I joined the team myself. Tim was limited in what he could do due to external pressures and it became apparent that was also true for the original players in the MDDragon account and whilst it wasn’t the case that Morgana was running the WW account on her own it is fair to say that she was carrying more than her fair share of the burden.
On the 17th September Karl came on board with the team and I have to say that I think his introduction really made a difference, boundless energy and real dedication to the cause, I can’t imagine that anyone else would have been able to cover the hours that he did and they needed to be covered. Immediately after Nirvana’s attacks of the 11th September stalled the WW build there was a defence at the WW of just over 4 million cc. Although the WW ½ crop rule and unique diet meant that only 1 million crop per hour were actually being consumed but granary capacity at the time was less than 1 million and whilst incoming from the Panthexn faithful was good, it wasn’t consistent and the “constant” watch that Karl provided for such long stretches was not a luxury for the MDD account, it was a necessity.
By the time LoDm succeeded in grabbing replacements plans off MAD on 29th September it was over 5 million and at the close it was just a little shy of 8 million consuming 33k crop per minute out of a granary that held 1.2m – that’s 36 minutes stock. In fairness by the time we reached the end the crop deliveries were coming in so well that I rarely saw granaries below half full in the last day or so but there were times when if we hadn’t had a Karl we’d have seen much more starvation than the limited amount we did. That’s not to say that everyone else on the team didn’t do their bit, it’s just that he really put in the hours.
By the end I had succeeded in rebuilding my offence to 65k excluding siege (I still had the 1400 catapults I’d left at home the three times my army had been sacrificed for the greater good and I’d rebuilt 3,250 rams since my and JEE’s futile attack on PbRk’s artefact on 16th September). I was scheduled to use this in a wider operation to hit the Absolute architect artefact ahead of MDDragon’s 8,800 catapults (and others) hitting their WW on 9th October (I’d be launching that about now instead of writing this). If the hammers that hit our WW over the last few days had done greater damage those attacks would have gone ahead and my understanding is (although I’ve seen no reports) that they would have met significantly less defence than we had mustered and would have severely delayed their WW build. I ended the server at 28 on the offence points board (3rd after Peter Plys and JEE out of Panthexn) and I’d like to think that if we’d gone on a couple of days I might have made the top 20 (or I might not who knows who else would have had another hammer hit in that time) still I’ll end happy with that on a server I wasn’t going to play.
MDDragon’s phenomenal defence from the Panthexn membership resulted in kidsun’s attack from over 8k catapults doing no damage at all to the WW when it stood at level 99 and similar numbers of catapults hitting GW’s only lost 1 level each (and we’d had 2 weeks with no plans so it can have been no surprise to anyone that we had storage to spare). It took Gambit’s 13k catapults to damage the WW with an escort that was the strongest Roman army to be fielded on the server and then it was only 2 levels lost, a little over a day to replace that. It’s that defence that won the server and that’s why this is deserved victory for Panthexn and it came not from JEE or Knossos (well a little bit of it did) it came from the Panthexn membership so my thanks goes to them.
My thanks also goes to Morgana for trusting me to help her, Karl, Bea, Kratos, Tooter/Raj, Budaka, Sam (immortalsam) for the Skype support group chats, Sam (MDDragon) and Elie for not killing me off entirely when I had the cheek to settle a cropper they wanted back in November and then not chucking me off the team when they realised 10 months later that I could sabotage their Wonder in revenge at losing that village, and of course to Tim (Old McDonald) and to George (gevo818 -who wasn’t on the MDDragon team but helped on my account when I was pre-occupied with making sure the WW didn't starve).
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