I realized after skype randomly updated on me and I checked out the conversations I was in that a lot of people never actually got the story from me on why everything went down the way it went down in CE2. I also learned I was in conversations of random alliances that won and I’d really appreciate if Josh would send me my well deserved blues, jokes aside here’s what happened in CE2.
After CE I was pretty exhausted from leading back to back alliances so I decided in CE2 I would not lead. I wanted to enjoy playing as a strategist and player, not as a leader. This is pretty humorous thinking about it because no matter where I go I end up leading because I get too invested in the alliance I’m with and I’m an egotistical guy so I naturally know I’m better than whoever is leading me.
I got a pretty random message from Gavin (KodaK) from skype asking me if I had any interest in playing with ARM. At first I thought he was talking about E1 or E4 because I never knew that ARM had any real opinion of me. When I said yes and was thrown into a skype group chat that had CE2 in the name I laughed. Here I was joining an alliance I didn’t really know that well for the championship. I’ve done crazier things though so I stuck with it.
The era started exactly how I thought it would. We had our side of the world locked down by our coalition (half of Asia and Australia) but Rania’s coalition immediately went hostile because it turned out the rest of the world was Rania. We ended up getting pincered very quickly in Asia and I made the recommendation that we quickly turn into India to prepare the front there in order to secure ourselves into Australia. This sparked the first of many heated arguments I would have with Tigran who was fully convinced we should stay split in Asia because we were better than the alliances we were facing. I’ve faced Rania multiple times, the skill level doesn’t matter when facing that many units early on. Consolidating quickly will allow you to create a bigger territorial advantage and lead to eking out some more resource ops which you desperately need. We lost a member or 2’s armies due to remaining split, and the argument Tigran and I were having spilled out into our alliance’s skype group chat. It quickly devolved into rudimentary namecalling which everyone knows I definitely win at which didn’t help anything.
Ultimately it was decided that while I was a jerk I was still absolutely correct in my recommendations, I was named strategist and it quelled the arguments Tigran and I would have since I gained the authority to battle how I saw fit. This ended with our successful front being drawn in Southeast Asia (since we lost priority in India) and the completion of the turtling of Australia.
Now came the more boring part of the era. With the front complete it created a lull in the era. Rania’s numbers didn’t matter since the chokepoint was too hard to clear and couldn’t be brute forced. ARM lacked the knowledge of the new playerbase so diplomacy became very awkward. It was decided since I knew the new playerbase better that I should reveal and talk to them. Honestly I’m bad at diplomacy. I just want to kill everyone and take all the relics. I assume that everyone also has that goal when it’s quite clear that people don’t play that way anymore. I started poking around into Rania’s coalition though and found some interesting people also diplomatically representing their alliances.
Colin, diplomat of NJ. James, leader and diplomat of Pre-RDH. VRU and Nick, diplomat/leaders of WSS.
3 of those guys are permanently named CBop members, and Nick is a great player in general.
When we realized we were all diplomats for major teams in CE, we laughed and got drunk in a skype call and pledged to tear Rania’s coalition inside out. Pure luck of us not creating our own alliance and Rania’s ego thinking that she could recruit us and keep us from thinking about the win is what ultimately destroyed Rania’s own alliance. Anti-KCA coalition was established and we began to fight back.
Things were not going well internally though for most of us. I hated a lot of ARM. Tigran and I clashed often and had conflicting personalities. It was a toxic environment and I just couldn’t swallow my pride to follow Tigran and Tigran couldn’t swallow his pride to apologize to me for some of the arguments we had. I held it in a lot, but the last straw came when I realized that our own ARM coalition wasn’t playing clean. I discovered one of our main members was using another account in our sub alliance for resources and claiming it was his brother. Poking into this matter I revealed a couple more accounts and anonymously sent messages to the admins. Somewhere along the line I admitted that I reported the accounts in ARM and yet again Tigran and I argued. I would like to point out that Gavin was the only person who really took my side in that matter. He and I made sure to clean out the ARM coalition of other players who were multi’ing. I would later apologize to Gavin for backstabbing ARM and forcing ARM to lose the era.
Colin wasn’t having a great time maneuvering NJ. They were very lazy and clearly weren’t looking to win, only to join forces with whoever was winning. He hated that mentality and could not find a way to convince them otherwise. This became the driving force for Colin scheming with me to backstab everyone.
James’ alliance was too egotistical thinking that they could maneuver themselves to win even though half the alliance wasn’t playing very well and were not maintaining activity. Milan and Geen joining helped boost the alliance a bit more in skill level, but ultimately there would have to be some major changes to get them to win. James also didn’t like the players in the alliance and they frequently tried to usurp his leadership.
Nick just wanted to smash some people, and WSS was down for anything.
So we all 4 started planning the creation of 2 mega alliances and a worldwide backstab of well… the rest of the world. We thought about only tearing apart some alliances but it was clear that the remnants of everyone else were going to come at us regardless if we left them alone based on our careful research of them. We took a vote on whether to disband RDH prior to the backstab and I voted it down. We concluded that Milan and Geen would not be able to convince the rest of RDH to not give up and that there were not enough players left in the world to Milan’s standard that could join RDH to boost them up to a serious alliance.
That was obviously wrong. Also NJ the lazy alliance that never moved when we asked them to somehow became active as hell as well. We would ultimately lose the world backstab due to those 2 major reasons, but it was fun anyways.
Also shoutout to Josh for making Russia an exclusion zone and allowing Colin to create his mega alliance within Russia. Without that the numbers would’ve been way more lopsided than anticipated. You were very useful Josh.
<3 and good luck on CE3. I won’t be participating due to not wanting to lose my sanity over this game.
