Quote:
Originally Posted by Clouds
Personally, I would've concentrated on building up my core and had a neutral round, but Spore decided to go for the round win, and considering Spore is a newly formed alliance this round, kudos to them for going after Ultores (a renowned top alliance) from quite early on.
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Actually, the decision to hit Ult wasn't decided purely on the basis of going for the round win. We of course hoped that would be the eventual outcome, however the driving factor was that Ult were running away with the round at that point, they had played a politically brilliant game. Unfortunately, we could find nobody else who was willing to hit Ult at that point, every other alliance wanted (for whatever reason) to continue gal raiding or continue a private war with A N Other. At this point we had no immediate backup available (although CT had said that whilst they weren't joining in from the start, they would step in and help if we ran into serious trouble) and it was a massively uneven fight by that point due to Ult having a large value lead over us, so attacking them actually looked remarkably like suicide rather than an attempt at winning (as was the position amongst some of the HC team and I am sure there are many in the community who would say that proved to be the case).
Despite this, we felt that it needed to be done and as nobody else was ready to step up to the mark, we had to just hit them on our own without support. You could argue that we did this for the good of the round, or as an attempt to win, but the truth of the matter is that we saw only 2 choices at that point:
1. Capitulate and accept Ult winning the round unchallenged.
2. Go in alone and pick a fight that we probably wouldn't win.
For us, #1 is no choice at all, we're either going to win or go down fighting, we're not going to tight-rope walk along a fence to try and find the easiest route to a "respectable ranking" out of a fear of losing, that's too negative a mindset; second place is just the first loser. We'd rather go down fighting for the chance of victory with a positive mindset based on hope and ambition. That's a respectable way of fighting and keeping our values intact is far better than the superficiality of losing by less than someone else. Far better to have tried and failed than failed to try!