[Tommy]

Yeah, the cat's out of the bag. The mighty ROCK are hitting Ult too. A few words on that though:

Whatever people may think about whether Rainbows are a training alliance or not, ROCK really are. Go on, look at the numbers a moment: 28 players, average score around the 1.5m mark. 8-10 of those are people who started late and applied in-game because they didn't know who else to talk to. A full third of our membership is still on 6-figure scores. We have a lot of newbies compared to everyone else, a lot of 4 or 5-hour prelaunches, a screwed up race mix and not a whole load of def cover, and we're playing purely for fun, not politics. We've got some nice people, some of them actually active and chatty (!), but up until last night we were hitting whichever gal was hovering around the #50 mark and looking a bit fat for it, and sometimes not even landing that. When the round started, we had no active HC whatsoever, which I presume is why I ended up being press-ganged into HC 2 days after coming back to the game after a 15-ish round hiatus.

The answer to why we're working with Rainbows is a complex one, and involves many points, which are outlined as follows:

1) They asked us if we wanted to.
2) cr0 is smexy.
3) See 2.


Politics doesn't come into it - this is just so our newbies get to know what it's like to work together on big targets for a bit. Given that we only have the numbers to a) hit a very small gal, or b) hit 2 or 3 big planets, I don't think it really matters to the grand universal scheme of things which option we take. It's not going to be forever, but when we stop it'll be because either ROCK or Rainbows isn't interested in it anymore, and that'll be just fine. We'll go back to hitting whoever's #50 again, and teaching our members how to cover efficiently without panicking or crashing their fleets.

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Edit: christ, my signature is depressing now.