“We could have cooperated with the ground walkers for our mutual salvation, but they are humans, and they only understand dominance and ownership. All that we have left is a war to the death.” -- Queen Myrrah (the character, not the tribe!)

Following our last war with Alliance 19: Coming Soon, the Locust Horde (#47) had survived and, after a speedy recovery, we cruised in growth mode for a few days.

After acquiring yet more new talent in the Horde, we were eager to test our coordination and searched for targets to war.

We determined that the human stronghold in Know Your Meme (#54) held a very inviting supply cache and their positions were lightly defended. But it is hard to blame them -- Locust emerging from underground do have the element of surprise, after all. We needed 3470 acres to win.

After a full conversion into warmode with full mana and thievery points, the Spirit of General RAAM directed the attack to begin at 17:50 Orkfia Time on Friday with a declaration of war on the humans.

The first two kill targets, trollface.jpg and Obama.jpg (Know Your Meme's elder) endured a withering thief/mage assault for the next 10 minutes and were dead on the update, helpless before our might. This was what was supposed to happen. Instead, what happened was that it took a sustained t/m assault for the next 4 hours to bring down due to some no-shows and miscommunication within the Horde.

I would say that the battle was entirely one-sided and that Know Your Meme was an entirely inactive alliance from whom there was no glory in our beating them, but that is not entirely true.

For humans are nothing if not tenacious, and I would now like to take the time to commend one of our opponents, trollface for his spirited defense in an attempt to survive with no help from his alliance mates. After our initial home devastation of trollface brought him down to 10,000 citizens at 18:00 from 100,000 citizens, he very quickly started rebuilding his homes and Locust reconnaissance indicated that all his homes would get in by 22:00 along with more than a few accursed churches. This put a time limit on our desperate attempts to kill him, t minus 4 hours from 18:00.

Alliance 54's Trollface managed to keep Elendian on and extended his lifespan until 21:00 despite only having 6 mana to work with and a Mage level of 1 while under sustained magical void, earthquake and arson devastation for 4 updates. He survived against overwhelming odds as long as he could, and for that we give him the utmost respect. A true warrior does not go down meekly, and trollface is one of those rare humans who toe-to-toe, alone and under heavy fire from no less than 4 spellcasters / thieves, nearly lived to tell the tale. It all came to a last, desperate final stand as we noticed trollface pulled soldiers out of his market, no doubt in order to release them on the tick. Both trollface and our alliance knew that it would come down to the first seconds of 21:00 since we did finally manage to deplete his mana and remove Elendian he had no other option in order to survive.

At 21:00:00 we fireballed blind. At 21:00:02 trollface finally went down. Later, we exchanged correspondence with trollface applauding his spirited attempts to survive, and he indicated to us that he had attempted to release his soldiers at 20:59:59 in anticipation of some lag. Therefore, we literally had a second or so kill window where he was vulnerable. Either he actually had no lag and released the soldiers too early or his lag was too long and berserker's fireballs hit their mark before trollface's soldiers turned into citizens. We may never know, but it came down to a nailbiting 3 seconds where the Horde collectively held its breath. Understand as well that had we failed to kill him during the 21:00 update, all of trollface's homes and 150+ churches would be rebuilt on the update of 22:00 and we very well might have been locked out. Thankfully for the Horde, this was not the case, but we understand the role dumb luck (or bad luck on trollface's part) played in our finally putting him down. Trollface, you put up a hell of a fight. Locust Horde is up 1-0.

Meanwhile, Obama, a smaller 800 acre viking and the kill target for the smaller tribes in the alliance, including myself, never logged on or put up any resistance. Funnily enough, however, it took just as long to kill him as it did to kill trollface because only 2 out of the 4 people in our alliance who were supposed to be assaulting him actually showed up. Queen Myrrah and I nevertheless managed to destroy enough homes over the course of 4 updates while everyone else in the Horde had their hands full with trollface and Obama went down 30 seconds after trollface did. Locust Horde is up 2-0.

After the nearly simultaneous destruction of two human positions, we had 600+ acres left to go for the win. Up till now, there had been no attacking at all during the war, which was mostly fought and won via the arcane and clandestine arts of magic and thievery, respectively. With our new kill target being OkayGuy, a 1300 acre eagle, our Berserker broke his chains, bounded into battle, and conquered 180+ acres of the eagle's land right before our killtime set at 3:55 Orkfia time (we needed to recharge after our kills on obama and trollface).

A less than ideal success rate on our thievery / magic ops before the 4:00 tick left OkayGuy with 20k citizens because our alliance again had several no-shows. However, he never logged in or rebuilt his homes, so after 4 more updates of home destruction, he went down just after 8:00 to put the Horde up to a flawless 3-0 and for the war win.

It was an exciting 15 hours even if two of our three kill targets never logged on the entire time thanks to the pitched battle with trollface. There may be no glory in defeating an alliance of inactives, but trollface made us work for it.

Satisfied, the Horde roared back into the Hollow with its newfound spoils of eggnog and immediately began bickering over stockings and presents and the lack of decent Christmas trees in human territory.

Happy Holidays!

RAAM