END OF AGE: Our Winners from Age 86: Global Viction

This is our end age article covering our winners in the following categories: Networth / Land / Honour / War Win Crown. For the age, fairly cut and dry as we have two kingdoms that covered all categories:

Emeriti won the networth and land crowns
Barcoloco won the honour and war win crowns

I caught up with both kingdoms to ask them about their age and to dig into some of the events that were important and played their part in coming out on top for their respective areas.

EMERITI

Dorje made himself available to talk to me about Emeriti's age:

Mad_Scottish: Hi Dorje, age 86 Global Viction is over and Emeriti have come out on top for the land and networth crowns. Was growth and having a run for #1 the goal set for the age?
Dorje: Sure. We wanted to war some, then grow.

Mad_Scottish: Normally you would think that warring first would stunt growth while those focused purely on growth could get ahead. Was that a concern that you had at all?
Dorje: Growth is always a crap-shoot, because you start with a lot of pool and so long as you are in war you will grow in pool without bound. Normally whoever gets wars is going to be able to double size in postwar and always end up bigger than the province that is OOW. The downside of warring is you cannot get large and strong TMs or cows, which you can do with pool aiding OOW.

Mad_Scottish: That's a really good point that I totally missed with the mechanics! I believe you had 3 wars in total, were these back to back or did they end up a bit spread out?
Dorge: Essentially back to back, yes. In protection we had a war arranged with what later turned out to be ascension, but as they were all undead war heroes we decided that was a suicide move. expected them to wave us but they instead kept relations open so they could put up cows. Then we lucked into a first war by waving a war-tier kingdom, and arranged a second and third war before dumping pool. The way the game works, if you have complete protection in postwar you can almost always simply dump to like 15% bigger than the next biggest kingdom, and then bully them to ensure a win.

Mad_Scottish: Was the success of growth linked purely to the work during the end of war CFs? What was the plan out of war, planned waves/randoms?
Dorje: Planned waves. Randoms don't exist.

Mad_Scottish: Were there any points in the age that were turning points/really helped out with growth beyond the wars and end of war CFs?
Dorje: We waved down on several kingdoms after our last war, so that helped with growth. however two kingdoms began giving us 3 meter a day of plunders/robs, so we could never really stock money as you would normally do in a position when ahead waiting for others to catch up. at one point Ronin did a plunder wave and we accidentally gave them ops so they FG'd 700M GC. having our small provinces always broke certainly made growth hard for most of the age.

Mad_Scottish: Things were getting really hairy towards the end with #2 for nw/land and then the war with Barcoloco happened. What was going on there? What was going on at the top politically?

Dorje: After they waved us, we EoA cease-fired Ronin. But SWEA would not stop robbing, or ceasefire us so that we could fight Barco and of course Barco did the same play of exploring to 15% bigger, so all the gold would be needed for a fair fight. The assumption that Barco and SWEA are friendly made this look even dumber, and SWEA had also out of nowhere told us earlier in the age they might wave into our war prep later. So we did not give Barco the full 97 hours of free pump, and waved into their postwar. After that things went down as one might expect: SWEA did wave into our war prep, we had 7 broke provinces for the fight with Barco, but we pulled out land and networth in what turned out to be a pretty even fight.

Mad_Scottish: If i remember correctly, there looked to be almost a 20k jump in acres. Is that accurate? I want to say I think I remember you being around 156k before the war with Barco
Dorje: My numbers may be imprecise. I think we were around 160k with 10k pool, and Barco explored 105->180k in postwar or something. So we dumped pool, waved, they ended up re-dumping even more pool with the 5 day ceasefire so were around 160k. Then SWEA waved us for 15k or something so we were within ~500 acres when the 5-day ceasefire ended.

Mad_Scottish: Did the war with Barco end or did it just run through the end of the age?
Dorje: Ran through EoA. I believe it was around 40 hours

Mad_Scottish: Any other highlights from the age that made things interesting or just come to mind?
Dorje: From a utopia perspective, it was a uniquely boring age. Nobody was competing except for Ascension, who went inactive halfway through the age, and Barco who was staying tiny to ghetto farm. The highlight I suppose would be the Black Lives Matter movement, which a lot of kingdoms renamed to support.

Mad_Scottish: Any shout outs for the age? effort from the kingdom/particular players? and any closing comments from you?
Dorje: Shout out to everyone in the kingdom: grant, nimtar, arpi, juicebox, unos, universe, hengz, binar, chad, allanon, sjippe, dumnorix, peetah, carber, retard, jalgir, jcdb4, kax0, chris_keeling, tox, octobrev, megafusion, lagski, jorosar, and Nuck. And a shout out to everyone who believes black lives matter.

BARCOLOCO

Maugrim made himself available to talk about Barco's age:

Mad_Scottish: Age 86, Global Viction has wrapped up. Barco has come out on top for war wins and honor. What was your final war number and number of war wins?
Maugrim: Oh jeez, I can't even remember the war score anyway. We ended with 5 war wins out of 6 wars, and we were in a war with Emeriti when the age ended, but that obviously doesn't count towards anything, I think.

Mad_Scottish: How did the wars work out over the age? Were you able to plan all wars or did we have some good old waves and declarations?
Maugrim: I'm probably the worst person to ask these things. I know the last three wars were arranged for sure and we had start dates and stuff. I think the first OOP war we lost was too, but maybe the 2nd was from waving, I can't recall exactly. We sat OOW a little longer than we would like to on some occasions. But that can be timing and a bunch of different things. Overall, I think it was pretty smooth

Mad_Scottish: You pipped Hipmunks to the honour crown. Do you think the setup helped hold on to honor?
Maugrim: For sure, we had a few extended wars too which let us float more upwards.

Mad_Scottish: I should have taken a screenshot of the kingdom page before the age resets. Were the T/Ms able to stay out of range and hold onto the honour or was there more of an even spread across the kingdom?
Maugrim: Most of the honour was definitely on the TM provs, we had a few big avians who managed to hold some, but that honour is always fairly fluid. The TM did most of the honour carrying and it's a lot more protected there

Mad_Scottish: Was there a particular war where you grabbed most of the honor or fairly spread out across each of the wars?
Maugrim: Our war vs the hitch hikers guide kingdom, 7:11??? I want to say, it lasted maybe 4 days and that one really let us pack on some big honour stacks. They had quite a bit of honour themselves, and just the extended nature of the war let us take a lot more than one might be normally able to.

Mad_Scottish: Between wars, were you waving or was it a case of sit and pump to get ready for the next war?
Maugrim: No, we waved a few times. That garbage 5:11 kingdom Fluffy? We waved them. We're often forced to wave, and it's fun that way. Excited for this age and waving all the time!

Mad_Scottish: Any real stands outs for the age that come to mind for you? Anyone that you want to give a shout out to?
Maugrim: It was a fun age with some good ol' fashioned drama. Looking forward to this age though! Shout out to everyone in Barco

Mad_Scottish: End of age got very interesting with the moving pieces related to the war with Emeriti. We received the version from them, what is your version?
Maugrim: After we beat Hipmunks, we were faced with a choice many have faced in the past while sitting in the shadow of Emeriti at second place: be content with second best, or try to win it all? The odds were decidedly NOT in our favor: we were less than 50% of Emeriti’s size, Emeriti had *billions* of gc, and they had sat on the throne of the number one spot for *weeks*, with nothing to do other than to pump GC, WPA, sci, whatever the heck they wanted. They even tagged up after their second war win, confident they had secured the age.

Keeping with our fighting tradition, we went for it all. For 48 ticks into our EOWCF, we did nothing but send aid and hit explore on our provs. Each prov was absolutely dry- no GC, no soldiers, no WPA, nothing. And Emeriti could see this, because they intell'd us each tick. Nothing but empty acres. How could Emeriti possibly be scared?

So what did Emeriti do? Trad and raze into our EOWCF like a bunch of cowards. The only explanation was their PTSD from the last time they literally handed us their crowns after we dumped our entire pool, Emeriti accused us of cheating, DavidC confirmed we hadn’t, and then proceeded to farm out to us to the tune of 22,000 acres.

Emeriti’s pathetic excuse for their cowardly actions? They couldn’t get a CF with wee little SWEA to protect their 2.5 billion GC. Odd—seeing how Emeriti still had 1.15 billion GC after training at the start of our war (10x more than us) . . .

After being completely stunned by Emeriti’s actions, we fortunately found out that we could force CF because we were decidedly *well* out of NW war range. What we *didn’t* know was there was a known bug that had prevented Hipmunks from crowning just the age before, that sat unfixed for an *entire* age. Until now. When it was Emeriti—and not Hipmunks—running with its tail between its legs to DavidC, he immediately fixed the bug within half an hour. The cherry on top was DavidC’s audacity to send a snarky, patronizing in mail to each of our LS, “thanking” him for helping find this bug. As if he hadn’t known about it for an entire age, but couldn’t care less until now that it was affecting his golden child.

Everyone thought we had given up by that point, having been beat down by both Emeriti and DavidC. But we made the impossible choice to kill 4 provinces—Adi, Bry, Powwow, Rageman (they deserve shout outs)--that had worked hard the entire age in order to get our kingdom out of land war range—our last hope at fighting Emeriti.

Dorje claims it was a fair fight. Frankly, that’s the only way Emeriti can sleep at night. But the fact of the matter was that it was a 25 v 21 province fight, Emeriti still had a +1 billion GC lead, and they had literally 3/4 of the age to pump sci/wpa against a kingdom that Emeriti could not even stand to let grow peacefully from 70k to 150k acres in 2-3 days.

Emeriti’s decision to hit into another KD’s EOWCF was an act of cowardice. They knew it and everyone knew it. Dorje even had an explanatory speech ready at his fingertips to post in Discord within *minutes* in an attempt to justify his actions. They’ve established a precedent that, if ignored, will ultimately result in the demise of this game: (1) there is no code of honour or conduct in this game, i.e. anything goes; (2) developers, particularly DavidC, are biased towards certain players and kingdoms that will result in age-changing bug fixes for some and not others.

**End of Article**

Journalist note: Congratulation to your crown winners. Best of luck in the new age! HERE WE GO!