Originally Posted by
Gigglebits
Ok so for an AvA perspective in-house;
Start acres:: relatively same between kds, our tpa/wpa/sci slightly higher, even peas count, they had 90k more military (with 1 less province) and about 1mil NW diff at start (could be wrong but arguing semantics really) . For all intents and purposes a very even fight start.
Our prep was solid - most humans hit the right numbers, although one did build Armouries instead of Rax, should've guessed that was a sign of things to come...
Instead of putting our mystics on top, we left our hybrids there, which also gave noobs a good shot at taking them down on the opener which they did quite quickly. Again, errors on our side saw 60-70k defence on one of our mystics desert in lieu of thief dropping/soldier desertions. They were never going to be UB at the top if we had of grown them, but it would have been at the cost of WPA dilution which we agreed we didn't want to do.
Our opener was the worst of the age, having think-tanked it for a good 24-48 hours we went with the option to avoid the oopsfest that has been our whole age nemesis with our NM/NS chains. I really hope Jeff & Dave and co read this 'cos designing a strategy to get around **** servers and throttled/error ops is ridiculous, especially at the peak of the season. You've had a whole 2 ages to fix it and both sides are generally still locked out for 30mins at war start. See Noobs complaint even regarding a dragon drop and FB ops only causing oops (which we had similar of our own) in a 1 way op affair still caused it to freak out. Horrible.
Basically after the opening wave we were on the back foot, we couldn't curb their top offence quick enough whilst simultaneously chaining down their 2 HA/Rogues, we lost all 3 mystics and 1 rogue in the transaction.
We lost 2 humans outright because of main army bounces, well over 750k offence lost in 2 unrecoverable chains early on.
Fast forward 4 days - all the humans have been rotted out on both sides, our's still have favourable and usable offence to take down their last remaining rogue and/or an elf heretic that over-extended and we failed to capitalise on those opportunities.
Econ was closing, they had 70k troops up on us and when they broke through on one of our heretics and couldn't retal, that was curtains.
Some minor acre tweaking at the start, deeper humans (on our lower acres) and better overall activity during clutch times may have yielded a better result. As the planner I would say 95% of the blame lies with me and the opener, and to my KD I apologise.
All in all I don't think we lost any face by losing, its disheartening sure, but I feel we gave a good account of ourselves given our mistakes.
Well done Noobs on the win, thoroughly deserved and hopefully we meet again soon :)