Round 44 Ramiel, screaming geometrically

FOREWORD

I had high hopes for returning for the draft round. It tempted me back, like a tempting temptress. And as you can tell from that simile, my roundfail writing hasn't suffered at all from the break.

But I couldn't very well come back without at least trying to see if my old pal and fellow blopper AgFx could also be tempted by the lure of the draft.

It was like bringing an old army vet out of retirement. AgFx was - metaphorically you understand - sitting by the pier in the late Netherlandian afternoon, fishing line cast, beer in hand, serenely enjoying the peace and quiet when all of a sudden, I'm ploughing through on a jetski, flames painted on the side, making an offer he absolutely can refuse.

AgFx: I'm retired, Rush, I'm out of the game. I’m done. No more OD. No more blackops. I found peace.

Rush: I know man. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important. But it's a draft round, and those nerds have been saying that without us bloppers to worry about, they've never had it so good. They aren't even building wizard guilds anymore!

AgFx grimaced, pausing for a moment to look out at the sea before replying.

AgFx: Let 'em coast. My days of playing bogeyman to keep those greedy attackers honest are over.

Rush: There's even talk of them removing fireball from the game. Entirely. Redundant, they're saying. Wurst's writing a 15-page thesis about a new spell that gently tickles peasants that he says will be even better than fireball, and that people will love it 15 times as much as they love new fireball.

That seemed to hit home. AgFx's steely expression wavered.

AgFx: No more fireball tennis?

Rush: No fireballs, no fireball tennis. Just a bunch of excel simulator mathletes comfortably simming for 50 days.

AgFx stood up, crushing his beer can slowly, the aluminium crackling in protest at his quiet rage.

AgFx: Dust off my wizard hat and fetch my tennis racket. If I'm going back in... I need to practice my serve.

Cue heavy synth music. Lightning flashes in the distance. The blopper bois are back!

[SCENE FADES TO BLACK]

We didn't know it at the time, of course, but for all that dramatic set up, this round was about to be as tame and as lame as they come.

WEEK 1 - THE WORST DRAFT PACK IN HISTORY

The captains this round were the most ragtag bunch we've seen yet; instead of being selected for their statistical performance or by popular-slash-most-handsome vote (like that one round I was captain), this motley crew simply raised their hands and were ushered into a command position, no questions asked. Draftmaster Erix and assistant-to-the-draftmaster Damdred, who organised the whole shebang, didn't even conduct a light background check to make sure the captains had even played OD before. Like who is this Scratch guy and why is he running a team? What even are his credentials? I bet it was nepotism. It'll turn out after all this he's Erix's brother or something. The draft has really gone downhill since former draftmaster freeze abandoned us to focus on his career or whatever polite excuse he came up with so he didn't have to deal with us lot, let me tell you. (Just kidding, thanks for organising it guys!)

Most players don't seem to want the responsibility of being a draft captain, but there's a secret I'll let the captains of the future in on so they don't have to worry so much: you can just delegate all of that to your co-captain, and then take all the glory for yourself if your team wins. Or blame them if you lose. That's what I do.

The draft itself went relatively smoothly and without drama, reportedly because DanTheMan wasn't a captain this round. I was naturally picked first, a combination of my raw charisma and history of ruining the safe spaces of maths nerds making up for my complete lack of talent and making me the obvious first selection (I'm not sure why it doesn't happen every draft round). AgFx and I were a package deal this round, so our draft captain Jmerc got the pickup of the century securing the two best bloppers this side of the Atlantic for his first and second picks. Jmerc had his own list of players he wanted to build as a party pack, but we had a few preferred picks in common, and so we were happy to nab Disco, Cronel, Matty, Shanulf, Empoy, bazzaroony and the steal of the round: the legend himself, zooj.

Some speculated that given we were by quite a large margin the worst-rated team in the draft going by the Rio Rank scorings - but only because that rankings system doesn't take into account panache in its player gradings - that jmerc had in fact been playing 5D chess in putting together an incredible support team in the hope that fett's matchmaker algorithm would look at us and think "holy fuck these guys are terrible, I'd better put Poige or some other solo roundwinner on their team" and thus automatically secure us the win, just like it did for B in the last draft round. But instead, fett's algorithm looked at us and said "I know what this team of mostly ops and blops support players needs: more ops support!" and gave us Oment. One of the best ops players in the game, sure, but not what our particular team composition was crying out for. Nonetheless, he'd be invaluable to Disco and Jmerc as our two risk-prone fast attackers sought to carve out an early dominance, since he - much like other Rio-pack regulars, notably except for BigBell - has that uncanny ability to look at a bunch of random tea leaves and predict the weather for the next seven weeks. We also picked up three randoms: Brandon183, who was totally inactive, and Erwin316 who was only very inactive but made himself all the more contemptible by feeding the competition immediately at OOP, and Smokey, who never made it out of protection and later got moved to the graveyard. You know you've got it bad when you find yourself jealously eyeing #7, who got Elf Woods. Later, we'd be joined by cadaver / Volond, a new player that did ask some questions, but didn't really seem to pick up the advice, kept only getting parial ops and bouncing, and then just stopped logging in.

We had lots of suggested options for themes, but jmerc decided he wanted to do a theme he's always wanted to do. You might think a theme someone has always wanted to do would be quite specific or elaborate, but instead we were delivered the vaguest possible theme directive: anime.

Rush: This is one of the vaguest themes I've been part of. The other vaguest theme was "video games". And when I asked, "video games, or video game characters?", they said yes.

Jmerc: I like the vague theme leave me alone.

Disco: I don't know anything about anime except that I hate it.

Rush: Then that should be your dom name - it's still anime themed.

Jmerc: Name yourself "The greatest joy of magic lies in searching for it", it's from an anime.

AgFx: That's nice and poetic.

Disco: That's the most anime quote I've ever heard.

Rush: It makes you sound like a gay wizard.

Disco: Oh man. Oh God why is all anime so gay.

Rush: I think that quote is like the anime equivalent of Live. Laugh. Love.

Matty: Wait, is my name OK?

Rush: Uhh, you should aim for something cooler. And related to vans.

Matty: That would give away my position, as I live in a van.

Cronel: Fett's brother lives in a van too.

Theme talk is always like this. Although admittedly usually with less random fett family trivia.

And so it was that I became Ramiel, screaming geometrically - a reference to Evangelion, one of three animes I have actually seen. It's pretty good. Watch it if you like mechs and a crushing sense of existential dread and depression.

For a few days until the round started I occasionally gave Disco stick about his name - it made me laugh every time I saw it on the realm page. But he stuck with it, loyal to his captain. Eventually the round started, but the conversation continued when Jmerc posted an anime gif with the subtitles "Death comes for everyone".

Disco: Hey this is a much better anime quote than the gay one you gave me.

Jmerc: Y'all keep saying this. But this exists: https://imgur.com/a/0Gbj532

I know, I know. You were expecting high-level and cerebral strategy discussion from our draft pack. I'm disappointed in us too.

Day one wasn't too bad, except zooj did zooj things and got himself hit.

2025-04-06 12:55:19 Snickers, 6 months, Overdue DVD Rentals (SlyPimp) (#4) invaded fellow dominion I'm gonna become the King of the Pirates -Mith (#2) and captured 34 land.

By day two Shanulf, a sylvan, was fat on land and low on dp, I (also a sylvan) was lower on land and more-or-less following the out-of-date dp chart, and AgFx, playing demon, was both lower on land than me and sitting on way less dp than he needed. It was a less than ideal scenario but with meat-shield Shanulf above me I decided to play a bit riskier than my usual conservative and focus acres. Nobody wants to deal with a sylvan early: high wiz plus bad land types leaves sylvan meat with a bad taste in attackers' greedy mouths. Hopefully I could bank on that and fly a little light for a change. Disco and jmerc were still in the running, but Disco had to thread a needle getting a hit in while being squeezed by other top ops.

Fortunately with Wreckage initiating a gang bang on Master Roshi, it opened the window at the right time for him. I had sourced a juicy 85%+ DE for Disco (Charles Rogers (Shin) (#5)), but Oment over-ruled it saying it was safter to hit another, smaller DE instead.

2025-04-07 09:59:54 Wreckage (Bobbo) (#6) invaded Master Roshi's 3rd Sexual Harassment Lawsuit (Dean) (#11) and captured 66 land.

2025-04-07 12:04:07 Genghis Khandy Corn (SugarJon) (#9) invaded Master Roshi's 3rd Sexual Harassment Lawsuit (#11) and captured 61 land.

2025-04-07 12:21:30 Ulysses STACKED Grant (Erix) (#12) invaded Master Roshi's 3rd Sexual Harassment Lawsuit (#11) and captured 55 land.

2025-04-07 12:37:54 Attila the Hun-dred Grand (HighLow61) (#9) invaded Master Roshi's 3rd Sexual Harassment Lawsuit (#11) and captured 50 land.

2025-04-07 12:51:20 Victorious on the battlefield, The greatest joy of magic lies in searching for it (Disco) (#2) conquered 41 land from I wish to wish the wish instead... (Jaerock) (#8).

Jmerc was also supposed to attack this tick, but instead he would be asleep for the next 36 hours.

Before blops went live I banged the war drums a bit in dom-chat to try and spook a few people into building blops defences, but despite having four S-tier bloppers in the realm (Myself, AgFx, Cronel, and of course, MattyVanHalen), it was only really AgFx who was ready for war. I'd decided to focus on getting 200 schools in, which is a grind with Sylvan because for every 1 acre of caverns you explore, you pretty much need to explore 1 acre of forest so your dp doesn't fall off a cliff. So it takes over 400 acres to get to those 200 schools, which was pretty much the entirety of week one. I don't know how I ever managed to run Sylvan, bring towers online, bring in schools and survive without getting hit in the past. Those glory days of blops being semi-adequate are long gone.

As the week played out, it was realm #4 who rose to the top of the pile. I suspected this was Damdred's draft team, since he'd built the sweatiest team in the entire draft, and that realm looked pretty lethal towards the end of the week. They had an early abandon on like day two, which turned out to be DanTheMan - I guess Wurst forgot to lock the pantry where he kept his special Kool-Aid (the secret ingredient is custard) before he went to bed - but it didn't seem to hinder them too much. Realm #4 would go on to secure an early dominance regardless.

I asked Oment to read his tea leaves at the end of the week, and he summarised: "Now that the moon is in the seventh house of Aquarius, Winton is ahead of the pack in terms of training capability - he out-trains anyone on OP and it's not even funny. He has enough WRs to make himself "un-9hr-able" at about 3.3k extra dp, and the amount of barren land he has lying around is also on good types. He also has in-realm backup and his competition - Genghis, Bingo, Ulysses - do not. Genghis has no FA buddy, and Nancy is already out of range of Winton."

I understood some of the words he was saying and nodded wisely, as if contemplative. But really I was thinking, who the fuck is Nancy? Should I know who that is?

As luck would have it, the name never came up again, so either Oment was having a stroke or Nancy fell off hard.

Ultimately, as a realm of mainly oppers and bloppers, and with Disco staring to fall behind, and jmerc already contemplating a deconvert, we also couldn't really do anything about Oment's read of the situation. We discussed the possibility of warring #4 to burn their spirit, who could potentially become a real headache later, but the threat of mutual war (which has been squarely in favour of the most dominant players in the game for far too many rounds now) was too overbearing for it to warrant any serious consideration.

WEEK 2 - GOLDEN CARROT

So how do you, as a blopper, circumvent the threat of mutual war? There was only one way to do it as far as I could see: take something your enemy wants and make them come to you. The Throne is like crack for attackers, and at the very least it being under the control of a blops realm early on deprived #4 of its benefits, unless they came after us for it, which would deliver us the war we craved while keeping the op bonus at a more manageable level since we obviously wouldn't mutual (although part of me was more than a little paranoid jmerc might do it anyway). With our blops firepower we were one of the few, if not the only realm in the draft that could take this Wonder and not immediately get spanked by #4 for it. Realm #4 getting it from #0 early was also not a scenario I wanted to see play out, so I made the argument for the Throne and jmerc agreed.

Cronel, AgFx and I started the laborious process of cycloning the wonder, and Oment helped out with a few here and there too. By day eight we'd done about 125k damage - although we didn't know the actual damage numbers since we weren't tracking it particularly closely. I considered it pretty likely we'd be able to grab it. The other realms that would want it most didnt have the blops power to dedicate to cyclones, and having bloppers is frankly a huge advantage when it comes to securing the Wonder of your choice.

At the end of day eight I decided to throw a few at it before I went to bed, and then reported that I'd sent five at the Throne. Little did I know, if I could have afforded six, it would have knocked it down! I was still running on mana fumes with my low towers, having only just switched to building them again after finally getting to 200 schools. Fortunately AgFx, seeing my message, decided to throw some of his own - and the very first one he sent knocked it down.

2025-04-13 22:54:20 The Golden Throne has been destroyed and rebuilt by Porcelain Peasants are below us (#2).

It was another feather in AgFx's cap for crazy Wonder snipes. Jammy bastard.

Someone else had been cycloning the Throne too, but we don't know who - but they did about 25k to it. I had a quick look at the air ranks and saw Elf Woods was #1 in cyclones, but he'd done almost 50k to something, so it probably wasn't him. I don't know what Wonder the mostly-mute Elf Woods would want, but I did know he was deciding for #7 whether they liked it or not. My guess based on the other cycloners was that realm #12 - which we were pretty sure was Mith's realm, not least because it had the most Erix-coded theme ever - were starting to try for it.

In theory, the Throne would be immediately useful to Disco and Jmerc, but as the week played out, Disco ate a couple of hits and fed #4 both times, causing him some pretty big setbacks. Meanwhile, jmerc had already gone AWOL and was logging in maybe once a day, so his plans changed from initially being a strong fast attacker, to instead positioning himself to be a kamikaze missile. Then after achieving neither he starved a bunch, and then eventually deconverted into a blopslorer. It felt like a complete jmerc round lifecycle compressed into the span of a week, but without any of the explosions. The round would forever be missing that fireworks show and it was all the poorer for it.

As the week went on it became clear that #4 wasn't going to take our bait, and they were instead focused on consolidating their position. Winton had secured an early lead but it was the spirit that had everyone concerned. In our estimations, Winton was likely going to act as a protective shield to the spirit as he climbed the ladder to the top. There had been a few opportunities for #12 to do something about it, but it probably wouldn't have been their smartest play. Unfortunately once that spirit snowball starts gaining momentum, which Snickers now absolutely had, it had the potential to become a real monster.

WEEK 3 - HEAVY IS THE THRONE

Bloppers gonna blop. You know it, I know it, your mum knows it. Ask anyone, they'll tell you. What do bloppers gonna do? They're gonna blop, that's what your mum will say. Death, taxes and blops, the three certainties in all our lives. We were a blops realm with a limping fast attacker and a primo attacker Wonder that currently wasn't working to entice #4 to war us. It was time to shift gears.

They say the number 13 is unlucky, but really, realm #13 forged their own fate when they elected to copy most of the names of our draft pack. I didn't care, because I'm far too cool and aloof to get involved in such petty inter-realm politicking, but it rubbed a few people the wrong way in our draft pack.

"Who are they calling a servant?!" Shanulf demanded of his doppelganger. "That's so rude. I hope I can hit them later."

(Shanulf would not manage to hit him later.)

"Zooj aint nobody's SLAVE," thundered Zooj, benchpressing a full-sized couch.

"The guy who's supposed to be me hasn't even taken my name!" Cronel fumed from inside his home-made Darth Vader costume, his voice muffled by a helmet made from a cereal box wrapped in duct tape.

In fact, there were only two dominions in this evil twin realm that had elected to snub our pack by way of exclusion - Cronel and myself had both been dissed in such a manner.

"They haven't even put the 13 on Jmerc, nobody's gonna believe that's me," Jmerc scoffed, before downing a shot of bourbon and punching his parole officer.

It would be the last time anyone would hear from Jmerc for the next few weeks.

Suffice to say, realm #13 seemed to have quite a few blind spots. But perhaps the greatest blind spot of all was not understanding that bloppers gonna blop - and they'll gladly take any excuse to do it.

And so it was that #13 became the obvious choice to offload our dead weight Throne onto. We just had to warm them up to the idea. With fireballs.

[Cue AgFx laughing maniacally]

There was a strong possibility they might not want it, given it would likely immediately paint a target on their backs and potentially draw them into a second war right after ours concluded. But I didn't expect any 4D chess moves from a realm goading the Jmerc draft pack; they'd take it for sure.

We had several days' notice before Matty, our General, planned to pull the trigger and declare war, so I took the time to scout out the draft pack and identify their vulnerabilities. Here's the kind of report you get when I'm bored enough: https://imgur.com/a/8Wjb8ef

Ultimately we decided to leave Steward (Chud) - Cronel's identity thief - off the burn list, much to Cronel's disappointment, as he was in a good enough position where he could be trouble for #4 later on, but everyone else on that list qualified as fair game. Oment and I focused fireballs on Kamikaze (Calvin) while we sunk Golden Boy (Weaser), who Oment had identified was at a critical stage in his convert, and Cronel and AgFx focused on their troll, Prospect (King Jota), for fireballs and sinking. We had Worker (nurtho) as a potential second wave sink target. He had such low docks that I said he should be sunk on principle, but after the war started he quickly started upping his docks, and saved himself from any serious wave two harrassment.

Over the course of the second week and into the third, our realm had speculated on several occasions that realm #12 had an opportunity to suicide the spirit. Oment assessed that the earlier opportunities were pretty risky, and would've resulted in unfavourable hit trades that would just have benefited Winton, so it made sense for them to do nothing on those occasions, but on this occasion, there was a window where their halfer could've suicided the spirit with Winton hitting out of range, making it a slam dunk and taking the spirit down a peg, but they squandered the opportunity. And so, Disco resigned himself to flamboyantly invading another bot.

2025-04-19 06:59:57 Winton, 1 year, violating 50m restraining order (Wurstmeyer) (#4) invaded Rage Against the Converters (Danimoth) (#10) and captured 113 land.

2025-04-20 10:24:20 Snickers, 6 months, Overdue DVD Rentals (#4) invaded De Niro jr. (Saimon) (#3) and captured 103 land. 2025-04-21 15:05:54 Victorious on the battlefield, The greatest joy of magic lies in searching for it (#2) conquered 92 land from Kremolf (#0).

Shortly before he did, Winton made another stonkingly sickening hit:

2025-04-21 07:59:54 Winton, 1 year, violating 50m restraining order (#4) invaded I wish we came up with a better theme (Zar) (#8) and captured 146 land.

Realm #8's realm name prior to this hit was "I wish people would stop feeding". They sheepishly changed it after the hit. I wished the 'I wish' themed pack had focused less on their sass game and more on their dp game. But someone always feeds the runaway in the early game. Always. Today it was just #8's turn to be that in-every-round constant.

In the second day of our war with #13, their sunk attackers were reduced to sending on the Wonder instead of making hits for land, which suited us fine. We kept the heat on Kamikaze and Prospect until their lame-o for-babies blops-immunity buffs kicked in, and Golden Boy was badly hurting for boats even after upping his docks significantly. We timed our sinkings around his sends for maximum nuisance.

Realm #13 declared mutual on us, because the mutual war mechanic is so totally braindead so why not - but that signalled to us they wanted the Wonder, because this would let them control the cancellation timer. Hey more power to them. Come take the shiny thing.

I had floated the point that us donating the Throne to #13 could potentially bring #4 to war them for it, and thus meant in a roundabout way we were just passing it to #4 by way of #13, but nobody in the realm seemed to care. Least of all Oment, who said "not our problem" and then immediately began a rant about how much he dislikes Icekin. "Fuck Icekin," he said. "On a personal level."

He had more to say about Icekin but you don't need the detail, the raw emotion is what's relevant here. He had a Liam Neeson revenge energy about him, there was something dark in his past with Icekins. It was starting to make sense why he was so keen on sinking Golden Boy. I decided not to probe the issue. I mention it here only as a warning to those who come after: tread lightly on the subject of Icekin around Oment.

Meanwhile, #4 decided they weren't done with the wishful thinkers, and declared war.

2025-04-22 01:51:53 ̶T̶h̶e̶ ̶F̶a̶i̶r̶y̶ ̶G̶a̶r̶d̶e̶n̶ Unicorse #1 (#4) has declared WAR on I wish you didn't (#8).

2025-04-22 04:15:12 Winton, 1 year, violating 50m restraining order (#4) invaded dominion I wish we came up with a better theme (#8) and captured 126 land.

2025-04-23 04:59:29 Bingo, life without parole, decapitating Calypso (#4) invaded dominion I wish I had picked Planewalkers (bigchris27) (#8) and captured 119 land.

Realm #8 was really just falling over themselves to gift land to #4. Hopefully they get a nice thank you in Winton's roundwin story.

We had cancelled our war with #13 to let them have the Throne, and now it was just a matter of waiting for them to take it, and then sitting back and waiting for the next war to smack them in the face.

2025-04-22 23:40:11 Awww!!! 🥰 The Feeling Was Mutual! (#2) has CANCELED war against [Through the Valley] (#13).

Realm #13 would have about a day to enjoy sitting on the Throne before realm #9 warred them for it, and took it from them before they'd even really had a chance to warm the seat. When it arrived in #9's realm, the cushion still had Jmerc's buttcheeks contoured on it.

While we were taking a breather, some hilarious timing from Ulysses in #12 ruined the spirit's day, and because Bingo went pretty much at the same time, it was consequence-free for Ulysses.

2025-04-23 04:59:29 Victorious on the battlefield, Bingo, life without parole, decapitating Calypso (Sizzler) (#4) conquered 119 land from I wish I had picked Planewalkers (#8).

2025-04-23 04:59:28 Ulysses STACKED Grant (#12) invaded dominion Snickers, 6 months, Overdue DVD Rentals (#4) and captured 194 land.

After we'd ditched the Throne we had a bit of a pause to recover and then went after #5's wonder: the Underground Society.

2025-04-24 18:49:09 DUN dun… DUN dun… DUN dun DUN dun DUN dun… (#2) has declared WAR on Don't even think about it (#5).

This war, Oment did all the scouting for targets to mess with, and we both ended up concluding that the only nuisance blops of any use would be lightning on their Human, who was otherwise protected against sinking thanks to their Wonder. But Oment said we could just knock it down and then sink him, which seemed like a plan - until Zooj, our court jester, updated the realm name to expressly telegraph that our blops plans involved sinking the human. I didn't write down the exact name but it was something about humans needing boats. Oment gave him a stern telling off and we didn't end up sinking him so presumably he got the message and brought in docks. Even when he's not donating all his land to the enemy, Zooj finds other ways to give them a leg up!

Zooj eventually modified the realm name to be more vague:

2025-04-26 18:13:30 Avengers, Boatup!! (#2) has CANCELED war against Don't even think about it (#5).

So anyway, we had the Society. This was good for everyone, since it meant all spy ops against us would have a 50% fail rate. It was good for our attackers, they don't like being sunk. It was good for our explorers, we could stockpile plat and not worry so much about theft. It was good for me, since my spy ratio sucked, and I was about to start picking on the ops bitches coasting in the Chaos League - and when you wiz blop an ops bitch they usually retaliate with snare, which is just cancer for any rank chasing blopper.

WEEK 4 - BREAK

It all starts falling off here folks. Real life stuff, like turning 40, then taking a trip to the absolute dive that is Kilmarnock - the fly-tipping capital of the UK - meant that I was less than focused on the round for about a week. So instead of fleshing it out like I usually do, you can instead enjoy my raw, unedited notes for Week 4. It's amazing I can usually get so many words out of these shitty notes really. I am a masterclass in waffle, and this proves it.

2025-04-27 14:51:10 I'm thinking about it... (#4) has declared WAR on And now you know (#6).

Careless:

2025-04-27 19:12:50 Winton, 1 year, violating 50m restraining order (#4) invaded dominion Keel-Haul (#6) and captured 261 land.

Especially after they already donated land three days prior:

2025-04-24 02:23:20 Winton, 1 year, violating 50m restraining order (#4) invaded dominion Wreckage (#6) and captured 148 land.

Then later, #12 feeding:

2025-05-02 01:28:22 Victorious on the battlefield, Winton, 1 year, violating 50m restraining order (#4) conquered 253 land from Dwight D. EisenPOWER (lokiramza) (#12).

WEEK 5 - GROUNDHOG DAY

Taking a look at the state of our realm, we were pretty much all dead. Either dead in dom or dead in interest in the round. If it weren't for Oment playing quizmaster, the discord would've been a ghost town. Jmerc had been like an absent father the entire round, ironically partly because he was committed to being a present father in the real world, but he also said the state of blops generally meant he just wasn't that interested in playing at all. Matty was off building some sort of space laser in a classified area that definitely isn't Area 51. AgFx still hadn't recaptured his mojo, but would pop up now and again to clear bounties or ask who we were fireballing when he realised we were at war. His appearances would also become almost as sparse as jmerc's. Zooj had been on a downward spiral all round, his usual spirit shenanigans suffering from a chronic case of mortality, and kept getting bottomfed-upon. We pointed out that there was this thing called the guard that would stop that from happening, but Zooj has some sort of ideological disgust for the guard. He was clearly quite willing to die before he clicked that guard application button. And so most of the realm was dead, or bored, or dead bored. In fact pretty much everyone besides Oment had fallen into a quiet, waiting-for-the-round-to-end mentality. At this point, I'd probably say only myself, Oment and Shanulf seemed to be still 'on the rails'. Shanulf was having the time of his life invading bots and not getting hit after converting, so he was doing fine, although it was clear he had fallen behind. It was certainly not the catastrophic dumpster fire you usually expect to see from first-time converters - yet. It would all fall apart for him too in short order.

Oment and I had both been running different Sylvan builds, but it was only into week 5 that the difference in his more economy-focused choices became really pronounced. Until the end of week 3 I'd been significantly ahead of him, and slightly trailing him by week 4, but by the start of week 5 he was 200 acres ahead. The differences in our strategies had also put him ahead of me by 100k networth. He had a large prestige bonus from attacking at oop and then immediately deconverting, ran generally (slightly) lighter towers than me, slightly more schools (skipping some blops techs for econ techs), and vastly more lumberyards, putting his overall forest land at around 78% compared with my 60%. My percentage differences were allocated in about 10% guard towers, an extra 2% towers, and an extra 1-2% in smithies and alchemies. Oment had about 15mil less in improvements than I did however despite much more lumber yards, indicating he took a much more flexible approach to resource trading for platinum than I do as sylvan, which partly explained his rapid boost past me. I tend not to trade until much later unless I really need it, but this demonstrated that it was definitely a "judge the situation" kind of thing rather than the rule of thumb I'd been taught by other explorers, so I started trading when I felt I had the breathing room to grow.

WEEKS 6 AND 7 - IS IT OVER YET?

I have barely any notes on the final weeks due to the aforementioned realm disinterest so I'll just ram through a quick summary:

Shanulf eventually started sending on dodgy DP and got gangbanged multiple times and that was pretty much the final nail in the coffin for our realm. He then adopted a zooj-like "fuck it" approach after that and kept getting railed every time he sent.

Disco had somehow found the grit to chug along as an explorer, having enjoyed a few blops wars much to his own surprise, and was banging the drum for war along with Cronel. It would later transpire he was only playing because I'd called him a "flight risk" on the podcast and felt like he had to prove that reputation wrong. But all it did was teach him that playing a playstyle you don't enjoy for 35 days sucks balls, so it ultimately just reinforced his flight risk potential for future rounds.

In our second-to-last war, which was with realm #5, we had a "those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it" moment when #5 knocked down our Wonder, the Society. Empoy had logged into discord and seen Zooj talking about knocking down the Wonder and, without consulting anyone, pre-empted his hit so that he could bag the prestige instead. Unfortunately, Zooj was waiting for the go-ahead when our General, Matty, would be around to cancel the war, and in Empoy's lust for a small amount of prestige, he knocked the Wonder down while Matty was asleep, and we ended up unable to cancel.

I told Empoy the fable of a wee man called Sly D, who once was so consumed by greed for Wonder prestige in a former round that he did the exact same thing, and in less than an hour, Yami's realm had knocked the Wonder down and taken it back again. It may have been an unkind comparison since our Wonder had plenty hp and #5 were only able to scuff it before Matty woke up, but Empoy went very quiet. And then the next day one of his pinoy mates in another realm started fireballing me every waking moment like his life depended on it until the end of the round. Probably a coincidence.

It was Rage Against the Converters (Danimoth), and he was launching a genuinely impressive amount of fireballs at me. It was the classic worst case CL scenario, dealing with some little git on low acres and massive ratios. He had an offensive wpa of around 3.5 or something like that, tons of investments into Spires, but since we had just four days to go, I wasn't about to get into an arms race with a small fry nor was I about to be bullied out of the Chaos League. Until he started blasting me, I had eaten maybe two full volleys of fireballs the entire round (all from Grapes), maybe 30k defensive casualties, coasting through Chaos League without a care in the world. By the final day, I had 173,000 dead peasants. They weren't all from Danimoth - some were my own critical fails, and plenty were from Grapes, who decided at the worst time (for me) to start getting frisky as well. In just three days I had over 110 fireballs thrown at me, the vast majority from Danimoth, at something like a 70% success rate until the last day, when I had Cronel and Oment casting a protective Ward and spell reflect around the clock.

Initially it made no sense to me why he was so relentlessly fixated on fireballing me when Oment offered a much larger peasant kill count on the same wizard defence ratio at around 2.9 wpa. Oment said he was mastery farming - I had accumulated over 1,000 mastery by the final week from consistently fireballing hard targets in CL all round. I initially rejected this theory because mastery was a pointless thing to chase in the final week - you can only really benefit from it if you focus it over the longer term - and was convinced it was personal instead. But as the days went by, I began to think Oment could be right: maybe this guy really had developed a mastery obsession in the final hours of the round, and he shot up the ranks from the low hundreds when he started fireballing me, to 980(!) by the end of the round, getting around 9-10 mastery points for every successful fireball. And between him and Grapes, my mastery score was stunlocked - you lose points for every hostile spell that hits you - so I was barely able to progress it, getting 5 points per fireball but losing around 50 points per day to their combined efforts, so Danimoth had a good chance of actually getting the rank.

Grapes, it seemed, had also been gripped by this late-round mastery chase - except he didn't have the output to take the title. But that didn't stop him from doing it anyway! It really highlighted to me just how deranged rank-chasing behaviour can feel when you're a single target on the receiving end of it. Neither of them could beat me in fireballs, and lets be honest, that's the only rank that matters. I have never chased mastery as a rank, I don't care about it. I just wanted the fireball kills - that's a blopper's high-water mark - and ended up with high mastery because I was forced to target other Chaos Leaguers to get those kills. The explore cost reduction was nice at the end, I suppose, but it's too much of a slow burn to really benefit much from it. And the economic damage, as my 173,000 dead peasants can attest to, is not off-setting that!

In the end, the absurdity of this relentless rankwhoring managed to annoy me enough to want to do something about it. And so we warred #10, blew them up with fireballs, sank an attacker that was competing with Matty so he couldn't do anything for the remainder of the round, and had a good chuckle when Matty one-shot their Wonder and sent it back to #0. It was a stomp and #10 were in bits. #10 tried to retaliate by invading zooj, but sent out on dodgy dp and just got hit back for it.

2025-05-21 14:07:52 BoomBoomBoss (Blafiora) (#10) invaded fellow dominion I'm gonna become the King of the Pirates -Mith (Zooj) (#2) and captured 180 land.

2025-05-21 15:02:11 James BUMchanan y Bottom (platoyi) (#12) invaded BoomBoomBoss (#10) and captured 192 land.

Danimoth kept on fireballing me, triggering burning by himself pretty much immediately, and did double damage to my peasants for the last day before rejuv kicked in. But I also had Oment and Cronel casting Ward and spell reflect on me round the clock which was really impeding his ability to farm me for mastery, and by the time the round ended he was third place on 980, only just behind Cronel in second place at 998, while I finished on 1,097. It was a good effort, but ultimately in vain and so unfortunately I must award nil points. Thanks for at least keeping the final week interesting!

And that's all there is to it. Congratulations to Team Damdred and Wurstmeyer for winning the draft round. It was very boring but no one can deny Damdred drafted exceptionally well, and that the team performed like a (mostly) well-oiled machine with very few mistakes.

I finished 28th on 6,432 land. Top fireballer, highest mastery.

As for my draft team, it wasn't quite the blops chaos party we - or indeed other teams - had expected from us. I think we pulled our punches and made good decisions in the early game from a blops perspective, and then when it was clear nobody was taking #4 on, just did whatever we pleased for the end of the round. It was funny to see some people hinting that we were idiots for not targeting undefended attackers in our wars, not appreciating they were spared the rod on purpose - not that it made any difference, because they still couldn't catch Winton. Maybe next time we won't try to be so conscientious!

Thanks to Oment, Cronel, Empoy, Matty, Disco, AgFx, Shanulf, Zooj and even the mostly-mute Bazzaroony for a fun round. Special recognition goes to Matty for his blops efforts. Who knew he'd be such a formidable blopper with his no wizards and no spies? One-shotting Wonders and taking top saboteur. Just goes to show you don't even need spywiz to blop, all you need is a bit of determination and some space lasers.

Just a few notes on Chaos League to finish us off.

I had been consistently fireballing hard targets in the Chaos League all round so I had a comfortable lead on fireballs against my only potential challenger, which happened to be Cronel. And since we were both in the same realm any wars meant his targets were my targets so he had very little wiggle room. That didn't stop him from fireballing everyone at every opportunity though, so I had to keep ahead of him right until the end, which meant continually tangling with people in CL who all had around a 2.0 ratio by this point in the round, as well as dealing with lunatics on tiny acres on 3.0+ ratios, like the goblin in #10, Rage Against the Converters. I don't know why he decided to target me for fireballs in the last week - a rank he couldn't beat me at, for mastery he couldn't benefit from, versus my wizard guilds, when Oment had a higher population and no wizard guilds. But this is the perennial problem of Chaos League: it is a playground for dead noobs to play god, but ultimately it's just a bunch of people slapping themselves for no tangible gain except ranks. And this guy wasn't even getting those. If he'd targeted me early in the round I would have just left the league but in the final five days or whatever, I didn't care enough about the damage to give up my lead on Cronel for top fireballer.

Chaos League generally feels like an iterative improvement upon Shadow League by improving the 'gamification' element of it. It surprised me a bit just how much I enjoyed the critical success / failure element, which definitely made volleys more fun. After learning the mechanics about how it actually works, and how your 'chaos level' spikes off of critical successes to deliver more critical fails, though, it has definitely curbed my enthusiasm a bit. Now whenever I get a crit success I know that I've just basically guaranteed my next fireball will hit me in the face, rather than it being RNG - and I'm noticing that to be consistently the case. It is a bit too deterministic an element for something literally called the Chaos League. It also doesn't help when you have multiple realmies in CL all contributing to your chaos level. Especially when one of them is completely inactive (cough, Jmerc, cough)!

Usually when fireballing someone I would have a mix of critical successes, which I very much liked for the ranks boost, and critical fails, which just burned my own peasants (and presumably credits them with those kills), and regular fails, which were losing me about 50 dryads a fail by the end game - most of which get re-queued, but is still dp down the drain. It's a blessing and a curse being a wiz race in CL - natural ratios from dp, but dp that dies on regular fails. I hated regular fails far more than I did critical fails.

I'd like to be able to see my chaos level on the magic page, and for the benefit of everyone in the Chaos League, you should be able to see how much your realmies are adding to your chaos score too. This info is obfuscated at the moment. And for future development, perhaps consider ways to 'vent' your chaos so you don't absolutely have to eat a critical fail. The spy op "incite chaos" could be repurposed for this (it's not currently a useful or at all utilised op). And I would LOVE to see it affecting self spells, not just offensive spells. Imagine a high chaos blopper at war with another realm, and they transfer some of their chaos to the target attacker through the incite chaos spy op. They try to cast Harmony to mitigate Plague, and their chaos rating causes it to fail, and credits the blopper. Some attackers run tight mana budgets, this could add a new and interesting strategic spy option.

Alright see ya.

EPILOGUE

At first, it was glorious. AgFx and Rush, reunited at last, soaring through the ranks like a pair of budget warlocks with a point to prove. Fireballs rained, peasants cried, and somewhere, an attacker spontaneously combusted from sheer spreadsheet stress. The old magic was back.

But slowly... something shifted.

AgFx stopped showing up for late-night ops. His messages grew shorter. The glint in his eye, once sharp enough to slice through an energy mirror, dulled.

Rush tried everything. Motivational messages. Throwback screenshots of their 9,000 peasant-scorching streak in Round 39. Even a custom realm theme song called "Blop Like You're an Anime Magical Girl". But nothing worked.

By Day 42, AgFx was a ghost. Not a cool, spectral, vengeful ghost mind you. Just one of those sad ones that hover over their own grave muttering about range issues.

The final straw came on Day 48.

The realm had a rare opportunity presented to them: the perfect storm of grudge and blopper-vs-blopper action. A chance to finally blacktop the realm that sheltered the smug dominion of Rage Against the Converters, who had more wizards than braincells. He mocked Rush, the very King of Blops, blasting him with a seemingly unending stream of fire, safe in his ivory tower.

Rush geared up. Set alarms. Badgered General Matty to declare. Did a whole montage of war-readiness, and...

AgFx never cast a thing.

Not a single spell. Not a single peasant tickled, burned, gently caressed, or otherwise inconvenienced. Not even a friendly spell, for which he was always such a bold advocate, cast upon his burned and frazzled realmie.

AgFx went out not with a bang, not even with a whimper. Just the faint sound of a wizard hat falling into the sea, and drifting away.

The synth music tried to kick in again. It stopped halfway through the first arpeggio.

Because this time the blopper bois weren’t back.

They were just boys.

And sometimes, the racket stays in the shed.

TL;DR

This round in a nutshell: https://imgur.com/a/rVLPyjK