Thank you Prestone. I always enjoy hosting, but would one day enjoy a chance to compete in this tournament. This has been one of the less openly contentious tournaments despite potentially accurate perceptions of megacorping.

Was there a stated policy on megacorping in this game?

For clarification, there was no rule against megacorping.

Apparently, everyone read this the same way except for ... some special guy who, for some reason, is unable to play with the integrity that would be expected in a tournament.

It's funny how getting killed seems to make people experts on integrity.

It sure took a lot of integrity for someone to boot and kill a member of their corp mid-tourney. That might have been the greatest example of integrity I've ever seen!

Lol... Yeah never play with Farley on your team... He kicked and killed CBY in one tournament, and I think CBY was the CEO... Players like Farley, EPI, Commet, Helix, etc... are just corporate dynamite...

I have always been PRO mega-coping. back when it was harder to change alignment and mixed corp penalties where higher, it was very common for a team to run a red corp and a blue corp. I am not sure when it became "TABU", but it used to be the other way around.

On the other hand, being sadly outnumbered is not fun. The resulting teams need to be about the same size to be fair. No one ever said life was fair though, so maybe of someone can put an 8 man team together they should win. I guess I am on the fence here.

Don't forget: DrWakko ...anyone else remember that guy

Speaking for C2....

I offer our Concession to the Corp 1/4 Mega Corp.

Speaking for myself......

I will never play another Game/Tournament where Mega-Corping is Permitted, and the rules and winning conditions are not spelled out B4 game starts(Granted some of this is my fault as I asked for the game at a late date and helped arrange for the server).

Playing with integrity is more important than winning.
I will say nothing else on this matter.

To my team....

Marley AKA Micro: Thanks my friend.

Fezziwig AKA Xanos: Script god as always pulled many rabbits out of the old
hat this time.

Cratchit AKA Deign: Thanks. I know you got stuck with a lot of crap jobs this time. Playing red mostly sucks in tourney's.


I would be Honored to play on this crop again with this team in any game...

Scrooge AKA SK signing off....

I do! Quite a character.

Funny story - there was a game I was in against him where a weird bug occurred - we were in some sort of war and he pdropped and lifted to kill me but I think maybe had no IG? Anyway I twarped out just as he hit me with the wave that would have killed me (ship had no pod) and the twarp succeeded and clv showed me as #sd# but I was still in my ship in the game. A few minutes later, I killed him. He called me a cheater for years. I have a log of that somewhere, it was very funny. I told him the undead had come for him.

Thank you for this, Micro, and I will address this now before I post my general speech about this game.

Yes, we ran a two corp strategy in this game. The reason we did this is simple: the rules said it was allowed, and we felt it would allow us to try some new things, manage our turns better, and bring in a larger group of friends who don't always get to play together. We have had to cut our team down for the last several tournaments because the corp size wasn't big enough. This time we didn't have to do that. We did not hide this at all, even using the same player naming strategy. The other two teams could easily have chosen to form an alliance, and it would probably have been more competitive if they did.

There have been comments about "integrity" which I find frankly laughable. As Micro points out, megacorping has been a part of TW since before I played the game; it was practically a core strategy during the heydey in the 90s and early 2000s, and occurred in nearly every tournament. There have been suggestions that it is now unfair because there aren't as many players left; but would you rather we have tournaments with two corps of 5, at most? I don't find that very enjoyable, and that is what we have dealt with recently. In fact, ICE 2018 and HHT 2019 did not occur due to lack of player interest.

Deign, presumably out of frustration, suggested the idea of mega corping was mine and mine alone. I will let my teammates speak for that, but this was an agreed upon team strategy among 8 players, most of whom are well known and respected in the community. I didn't make this choice in isolation nor was it my idea alone.

We ran one blue corp and one red corp; rider was CEO of the blue corp and zip was CEO of the red corp, and I was the overall team organizer. Corp 1's mission was "seek and destroy" and was responsible for data mining, gridding and hunting; Corp 4 was responsible for all the cash production.

Both corps contributed equally to our success, and I was honored to play with the entire group.

Good game and thanks to all who played. We enjoyed the game and felt that everyone was civil and this was a much more friendly game than others in recent years. Thanks especially to Sultan for hosting and doing a great job running the game, and to the other two teams for making it interesting - chasing Xanos around was not easy, and if not for blowing dock and cimhunting after probing the game out, it would have been very hard in a 20k sector game. It also gave me the opportunity to try some new tactics and develop some new scripts, which will serve us well going forward.

As I mentioned in another post, we ran one blue corp and one red corp. Rider was CEO of the blue corp and Zip was CEO of the red corp, and I was the overall team organizer. Corp 1's mission was "seek and destroy" and was responsible for data mining, gridding and hunting; Corp 4 was responsible for all the cash production.

The Woodland Critters are:

Corp 1 - Imaginationland
Skanky the Skunk (CEO) - Rider
Beary the Bear - Shadow
Mousey the Mouse - Loc
Beavery the Beaver Lover - LoneStar

Corp 4 - Satan's Manger
Deery the Deer (CEO) - Zip
Rabbity the Rabbit - Zep
Foxy the Fox - CBYNot
Notsure - Doomed

There are so many people who contributed here - so I am going to call out each:

Rider - my partner in strategy, CEO of corp 1, co-chairman of the overall team, and master of fast game starts. I am naming Rider MVP of this tourney - he had dock locked down five seconds after the game started and kept nearly everyone in the tourney from doing anything for the first night, which allowed me to probe 100% of the game and set us up for everything we did after.

Loc - who as usual podded several enemies and would have had two kills if not for a cby and one that I stole from him Loc put in a ton of hours, gridded and found enemy bases, and in general made sure we kept the pressure on the other guys.

LoneStar - what can I say here - Lone would show up for 2 or 3 hours a day due to his job and somehow find an enemy base or planet every single time he came to keys. I'm always honored to play on the same team as Lone.

Zip - you taught me how to CEO a corp, and how to red cash, when I was new, and you still are the best at it.

Zep - came up with several new ideas for cashing (well, new to me) and made sure we made as much cash as possible. Zep is always our cash machine.

Doomed - does everything well, and doesn't mind if we use his turns for gridding or cashing or whatever. Usually gets the jobs that are less glamorous, and does a great job. Finds all the bugs in my scripts for me

CBYNot - replaced another player who wasn't able to join the team, and did whatever we asked - and probably would have done a lot more if we had included you from the beginning. Also helpful with strategy advice and good humor.

While you might think this was an easy win due to having two teams, it wasn't - corp 2 in particular made us chase them around for a long time, and eat a lot of fotons, to take them out. I was writing new datamining scripts on the fly, created a series of scripts and techniques to intercept foton planets with great success, and relied on Lone and Loc to grid and search for the other teams.

Thanks to all who played, and I hope we see all of you in ICE. And for the record, while we enjoyed this game, we do not and would not mega corp in any game where it is not allowed in the game rules.

Forgot to add my thanks to bey for hosting.... putting up with us...

sk

Really good game all around. A brief word on Mega Corping: having Shadow, Rider, or Loc, on your team turns any Corp into a MEGA-CORP. Game prep was off the charts.

I wasn't able to witness game opening, but I suspect that the competition had this kind of reaction:

Don't mind the megacorping, using probes was the real despicable action from what I can read!

A few words in response...

I'm not sure I rate MVP in this game for making suggestions and watching them be masterfully carried out in a way I never even imagined. Playing with these guys raises the bar every game. We can plan all we want to, execution wins the game.

Shadow pulls this together and is the driving force behind each of these tourneys. He consistently comes up with the right response and executes it on the fly. He stays up all night holding the line, and rarely complains about it. His breakdown of the other teams methods and formulating a response is what won this game.

Loc aka "Dr. Savage" takes the hits like a pro and deals em out just as well. He was concerned about his keytime through work/travel times....but he was always there when we needed him to be and probably put wayy more time into it that he planned to. I feel like a turtle compared to his performance.

Lonestar's time was limited but in the hours he was here he ran his turns, stepped up our strategy game and helped to break down what our enemies were doing. I always learn something new playing with Lone!

Our red team performed beyond expectations. From initial start to running SDT without dock (and stopping the fake bust cascade before it started) we rarely had any issues with cash flow. Zip and Zep operate like trained professionals and folded Doomed and later CBYnot right into the mix.

There was no dead weight on this team. Everyone contributed and was here everyday. It was nice that we didn't have to tell anyone they couldn't play this game, though I suspect there will be a firm "No MegaCorp" rule in the future.
The truth is we sit around in chatrooms together all year long. We didn't assemble a megacorp, we just let our whole corp play.