Fight summary as promised. This was a war of fine margins. The kd that made fewer mistakes won. And deservedly so.
Pre fight up to notice expiry we were probably 40-60 on paper. Gold not an issue either sides on a kd level but province level we were pretty short on our faeries. Had to do some DS.
If sleepy had conserved their BE at 110++ i would put us on 30-70 odds. But they didnt. That said we also messed our prep on few avians and one or 2 undeads. One undead apparently didn't even receive the memo to go 70% homes. Some avians, crucial ones as well being biggest few, overdid the peasant conserving BE sh!t that they were still stuck on 5 ppa when train date came, meaning he was going to show at fight expiry 4mpa less (though there were tickly training after). Leadership was busy getting wasted at Oktoberfest to micro and hold everyone's hands and these kind of bs happens.
Things i felt sleepy did wrong:
Opening first 8 hits from prosperous (fhey admitted that). Rest opening wave hits they moved to aggro. But this allowed us to declare and chain those who hit from prosperous and beat home. And chain another bunch who were still out.
Pwrsonally if i were them i would open from bottom and semi turtle top. And play from there. If we retalled on their top then they can commit another few bigger dudes knowing there's a few chainable avians once/if we push. Fully committing when the war is this close almost never works out great.
Second mistake was the chaining of the undeads that got ns'ed half his offense from 1.3m to 650k. Leaving him at 5k msking poor hits was better than chaining him 2nd wave. With 650k off he was able to quad and finish chains for us at 2.5k.
Third mistake i felt was going 6 rtpa on humans then not doing tds. This meant they lost tpa fast on ns runs and the tpa couldnt sustain.
Things working in our favour (not in sleepy's control):
Our nw ranges made for better chains.
Humans were fast first wave but too reliant on builds. They went something like 18-20 rax and did minus h to keep up with our avians but that couldnt last long. By 24h they were unable to match us for speed due to even lower BE and diluting rax from razes and incoming.
Undead war hero. The gains were sweet being unaffected by emerald and helped us take their 2 faeries down.
Sleepy had no rogues. This meant no GA and AW from them. We could run our faeries with no wt and go heavy wt on core to counter their 6 rtpa. They needed to raze to break our builds.
In summary, we needed to play near perfect and for them to make a few mistakes and this was what happened. Credit goes to my co leaders for executing the first 2 waves while i was stuck in flight using the limited free 20mb to give orders. Aside from 2 asian dudes sleeping through their overpop i think everyone at my side did well.
It may not look obvious to the outsider who the winner was, given that the nw was dead even. But it was fairly certain from the inside. I am indeed surprised the wd came because i thought ot might go another 12 to 24h. But they stood to lose much more if they cant turn it around. It would have required some mistakes from our end which i dont think we were in the mood to commit.
We were 4m nw down at cf drop but we closed them to even nw in 48h. Sleepy's bigs at wd were their 3-4k's mostly except Patek which we AW'ed to make for LL with low tpa wpa and defense. On the other hand, most of our big avians were our bigs to start the fight with. And clerics too, so much more sustainable. We were able to semi turtle and send out between 600-700k MO on most of the big avians while keeping 550k def home. Their top had offense of about 900k and would leave under 300-350k if out. This means they struggled to break our bigs since they could only 1x while we could 2x their top comfortably and 2x bottom chain(who had 40-70k def).
Still a great fight and credit to coss and sleepy. Ggwp.