Battles Earthquake Across Server 8 (updated)

Server 8 has come alive during the past few days, and while several people have lamented the lack of action up until now, it looks like we’ll have an exciting finish on our hands. Big hits from epic armies have struck several World Wonders as millions of troops clash against one another. And besides shaking up the leader board, they might also be shaking things up behind the scenes, as the NAP between Silent but Deadly and ap.PTT (PTT and Apeiron) seems to be in rocky shape as the final days of the server approaches (but it’s not quite broken yet).

We’ll get to the situation between SBD and ap.PTT in a little bit, but first let’s look at some of the recent battles. In my last update I noted that there had been little major fighting up until now. But now you’ll see how much that has changed.

LEGO, the alliance that rules the Southwest, has four world wonders, but they’ve been at the bottom of the standings for a while now. To make things even worse for them, their two top World Wonders cities (Bellhouse’s and Arnold’s) were paid an unwelcome visit by ap.PTT armies. 

We’ll start with Bellhouse’s World Wonder, which didn’t actually lose any levels, but lost a lot of its resource storage (and – for those of you who are new to this type of thing – you can’t finish building a World Wonder if you can’t store enough resources, because it takes a lot to build the upper levels)

This first attack comes from PTT’s 4th biggest player, and the 17th biggest player overall in the whole game. And he’s also currently ranked as the #1 attacker on the server.

This Roman army took out the Earth Wall, to soften up Bellhouse’s World Wonder city for the attacks to follow. Note the huge amount of Equites Caesaris used (Just imagine if this had been Travian 3.5 and the Horse Drinking Trough had been available, the size of this army would be off the chart.)

After the wall was knocked down, the attacking troops streamed in, and several more waves struck. This one came about two hours later:

And it was followed by several more. While this was happening, Bellhouse tried to build his wall back up as best he could, as you can see in this attack from an Apeiron member.

It’s not very often you see an attack on a World Wonder that includes Praetorians and Senators, but that doesn’t have a hero. Still, it finished off the great warehouses even without a hero to provide an offensive bonus.

(UPDATE: Since the Travian forums are down right now, click here to see another battle report of a hit on Bellhouse that was linked to there)

The other World Wonder of LEGO that got hit was Arnold’s, which was the highest ranked World Wonder LEGO had. This massive attack comes from an Apeiron player who is currently ranked as the #10 attacker of the server.

This was a solo hit, not one that was planned by Apeiron or PTT leadership, according to this post on the Server 8  forums.

Caliban (PTT player):

Going rogue and solo hitting a WW is not a good hit.
No matter how awesome your hammer is.
Hell, because it was such a nice hammer, more is the shame he used it like this.

But at least KI.EN.GRI went rogue on a WW and targeted something of value, which is more than I can say for more than a few people I have seen launching without orders.

So KI.EN.GRI apparantly acted without orders. Well, the leaders of ap.PTT might be upset with this, and they might have had other plans for that army or maybe they wanted to save it for later. But nonetheless, it did do a good amount of damage to one of their enemies. I believe this is the biggest army used so far on this server.

Amazingly, this army was actually once significantly bigger, but it lost some of its strength when it attacked a different LEGO player a few days earlier. (click here to see that battle report).

So with these attacks, it would seem that things are going ap.PTT’s way. They’ve severely set back the only alliance that is officially at war with them. But there are some cracks in the non-aggression pact between Ptt/Apeiron and Silent But Deadly. There are some Silent But Deadly players who have launched major attacks at strategic targets within ap.PTT.

These players allegedly acted on their own, but because there was more than one incident, some ap.PTT players are suspicious.

Let’s start with the hit on one of ap.PTT’s leading World Wonders, and then briefly look at some of the other incidents.

This attack was sent by a player from the alliance Ord-1. Ord-1 is ranked 31st overall when it comes to alliances, and is listed as part of the north east partnership in the SBD alliance profile.

Unlike Hype, Sin, and Dash from Silent But Deadly, Ord-1 doesn’t list Apeiron and PTT alliances in its non-aggression pacts (I’m not sure if that’s a significant point, but I think it’s at least worth noting).

This was a major setback for PTT’s world wonder. Luckily they have 7 other ones. But, they have a possible problem. Let’s take a look at the standings:

Up until now, ap.PTT has always had the top three World Wonders. But with Dani3x getting sacked, and Silent But Deadly seemingly moving into second place, only Fred Garvin’s World Wonder is keeping ap.PTT in lead. If that one suffers a hit from LEGO, or from another rouge attacker, then Silent but Deadly moves into the lead. And that means that ap.PTT would be in the unenviable situation of having to formally break the NAP themselves if they wanted to win the game.

I mentioned that there have been other rogue attackers on ap.PTT from members of Silent But Deadly. Some of these were large armies that were sent to the World Wonder village, but they weren’t large enough to actually damage the World Wonders. I’m not going to bother posting the battle reports for those, but you can find them in the server 8 forums if you want to see them. There is no sign of coordination between these rouge attacks, and SBD leadership says that there’s no organized betrayal taking place. Attacks like that do happen during Travian endgames, where players go rogue and attack someone their alliance is allied or at peace with, and if you read the coverage of S3.com and S5.com you’ll remember that similar things happened there.

But a more interesting, and much more rare event also took place. A player from one of SIN’s wings (SIN-LOK) stole one of ap.PTT’s World Wonder construction plans. His name is Hancus I and he is by far the biggest player in SIN-LOK. He attacked where King of Defense was holding his plan, and since King of Defense was about move his plan anyway, there was little defense in his village. The timing is either extremely lucky on Hancus I’s part, or he had some inside information about what was happening and when would be the opportune moment to strike. Hancus I is a relatively smaller player and you wouldn’t expect someone this size to pull off a maneuver like this.

SIN-LOK is an interesting alliance. They aren’t confederates of the main SIN alliance, though you’d think by their name that they were one of SIN’s wings. They are allied with some of SIN’s wings. They are also primarily located in the Southeast, despite SIN being mainly located in the Northeast. Perhaps with the distance involved, it’s not so hard to believe that one of their members could act in a rogue fashion like this and succeed.

 It’s also interesting that back in May, PTT chiefed four of Hancus I’s villages (Click here to see his account in the analyzer and look at the dates in May). Perhaps that was his motivation?

But while he was able to take the plans, he wasn’t able to hold onto them for very long. Supdude, one of PTT’s leaders, took them back in less than four hours. Click here to see the battle report of Supdude getting the plan back. Here’s a screenshot of the history of who has held this set of plans, and you can see how quickly PTT was able to respond. 

(The blank line is a city of King of Defense that has since been destroyed)

So the overall damage to King of  Defense’s World Wonder was negligible, but the real question is how will this and the other rogue attacks affect SBD and ap.PTT’s diplomancy and future relations?

That’s a question I plan on looking at more in-depth in my next report.  But I’m already near 1500 words, so I think I’ll wrap up this update. It took a while, but Server 8 has now gotten very interesting, and I have a feeling that it will have a ending that will be remembered for a long time.

UPDATE: I added more links due to the Travian forums being down, and more information about the incident involving King of Defense’s construction plan.