Let me share my thoughts with you all.
I accepted Sully's challenge grudingly, on the advice of my team, because it looked like it could be fun, and as if they'd put up a worthy fight, suggested by the networth-difference of 3.1 million for us, compared to 4.4 million for them, and even somewhat by our barely 22k acres to their 28k acres.
We went straight from elite-assembly to war in 24 hours - the only prepartion being 10% guard stations.
I went in expecting a war. I went in expecting an even fight. I went in expecting at least half of Sully's boasting to be true.
What I got after our intial wave was a single message in the warforum, and their inactivity.
The inactivity in question lasted for many, many days, until, suddenly, provinces that had not been doing much of anything previously were attacking us with an activity only their king and two main hitters had shown.
Mysteriously, these provinces preferred to only do anything when their king was online, which raised a lot of questions not only among my players, but on IRC as well - or so I'm told...
Regardless, after submitting our reports to OMAC, we fought on. The next day, OMAC replied. Sully's kingdom is now under their surveillance, and as far as I know, they'll keep an eye on them for the rest of the age.
Despite this unusual increase in activity, it was still too little, too late.
We managed to kill one province, and had anywhere from two to five of them below 500-400 acres at any given time.
Their hitters from the first two days decided to stop hitting eventually, leaving just the die-hards and their T/M's turned hitters to try and fend us off.
This didn't really go so well, and quickly turned into a grind-fest, their mostly-unbreakables hitting our bigger ones for low gains, while we took apart their smaller hitters.
After more of their hitters were reduced to a less than useful size, their activity mysteriously dropped again, but resumed around the same time that their first dragon was started.
I hear people here being so surprised that they got their dragon sent fast, but consider this: except for two gnomes, all their players are running dark elf, and not a single one of them could break even our low-WPA dwarves on a regular basis, so it only makes sense that they used their mana for tree of gold.
Yes, despite running two rouges, one warhero, the rest mystics, and only two of their provinces playing gnome, the rest dark elves, we didn't really suffer any significant damage from magic or ops throughout the war.
I know, I know! High WPA in the ghetto is pretty much the same as low WPA outside the ghetto, but that still surprised me.
Alas, by the seventh day, only three of their provinces had any liquid acres left - the rest of their kingdom being a mix of unbreakable idiots, running weak attacks with 20 hour attack-times on us, or small people, camping out in inactivity-land. Something now changed, and their attaacks grew a bit more desperate, plus we started receiving messages from a few of their players.
Me, being so very wise and well-versed in all codes of the game, quickly recognized their stance as 'deathground' mode. For those of you who don't know, 'deathground' mode is the first phase of 'eternal fake war' mode. Once you're caught in it, there is no easy way out, and when you eventually leave, your kingdom will be as broken down and raped as the ghetto.
Since we would never get them to withdraw, and we'd pretty much detroyed their kingdom, the rest of their age, their name, reputation, and their ability to get into future wars, taken all their acres that we could take, Christmas approaching, and with the prospect of 'deathground' mode looming on the horizon, we started talking about ending the boring war, and it didn't take long to decide it was for the best.
And so we ended it.
Our booty consists of a little more than 4500 acres, generously donated from their best and most active hitters, ~350k extra networth, thanks to their ops and spells being ineffective to us, and - I know it's not that much - some 10k honor, which puts us on almost neutral honor so far into the age.
Bad war?
Hardly.
Everything we set out to do, we had achieved by the end, except for one thing: making them withdraw.
That loot worked very well to make my team settle on withdrawing, and Christmas plus vacations not being so far off helped a bit, too.
What you all need to keep in mind when reviewing this war is that this was a middle-tier kingdom battling a ghetto, masquerading as another middle-tier kingdom.
I'll give them this, though - they have some good players around, and they weren't the worst kingdom I've faced this age, or the one before. Unfortunately for their kingdom's sake, I don't think their good players will want to stick around that place for much longer. I'm stealing their best one for myself currently.
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