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Some Thoughts on the first portion of the battle:
1. Its possible to enjoy the game even when playing against bots. You just need to figure out how to engage them. Many people have figured out how to beat them mechanically and our group certainly knew how to do that. But what has been most intriguing to me in the past year of trying to defeat botted accounts has been keeping myself interested in the game. Greengiant made the same comment to me the other day as we were discussing the attack. I kept my interest by looking at what the bot provided my enemy, other than the frustrating auto comfort. For a while we entertained ourselves by looting food from fully stocked bot cities. Very satisfying to pull billions of res out of them. Occasionally we would find one not programmed well and we got the troops as well. Then we began to ask - "what if you could strip an entire botted account at the same time? Could you destroy the food chain and stop the comforting?" Without a doubt the new comforting change makes it possible, but we were already headed down that road as you might see from our grand strategy above.
2. Which leads me to #2 - the bot can make a player complacent. The Atlantis player relied more and more on his bot and multi accounts to feed and defend, especially as his alliance degraded over time, as people left the server or the game. He did not foster real friendships or team play with the remaining players in his coalition. The bot isolates a player, in a game where the health of an alliance or coalition should be a primary concern. A healthy alliance mean people reinforcing, porting in to mess with war cities, and generally offering moral support when you are getting slammed. This final attack was the last in long campaign designed to break down the players morale. So when he came on and saw himself getting hammered yet again, its somewhat understandable his first reaction was to throw in the towel.
3. Morale is Key. The Atlantis Player had 7 minutes to get his rams and about 30 million scouts out when he logged in. He could have gotten most out. His big complaint was that we had used the broken gates strat on him and that we were attacking him 5 on 1. If he had kept his head, he might have saved a good chunk of his army that started in Atlantis. But lets address the broken gates strat. On that subject I have this to say: just as the defender used every means possible to keep us out of 0,0 including the illegal comfort and gate toggle bot, we used every available means to kick him out. The broken gates strat is a legal strat, and we had used it on him before. Perhaps he should not have had such a large portion of his account in the highest priority city in the game. And honestly, I personally don't mind the comfort defense as long as a real body is on the other end of it, staying up 36 hours and working the defense (GG disagrees with me on this lol). Then its either me or him, or my team or his team and the endurance they bring to the table. I have been on the other side and know that its possible to break someone's morale when they need to set an alarm every 60 minutes to click comfort. As to the 5 on 1 comment. This game is a team sport. Its not 1 on 1, but 100 on 100. The strength of your alliance matters. Had anyone in his coalition ported on us and launched a real cav killing wave they would have severely hampered our ability to take advantage of the broken gates and tradefire attacks. As it was all we were being hit with was long range spam, and mostly we ignored it. To close our gates against cav killers would have risked suppression, and to spend time moving cavs in and out would have slowed us down. But this goes back to number 2 above - the bot can make you complacent - make you feel as if you can stand on your own. That is the way to oblivion.
4. A defensive war can only lead to a defeat. To be fair - Our coalition had the enemy coalition on the defensive for a long time. They were unable to rally any significant response against us. If they hit our smaller players we ported on their war cities and hammered them, or ported on their HC and drew them off. We kept them loaded with honor, to the point that they were sidelined during key offensives. Each time we went to Atlantis fewer and fewer ported in to help. If you are on the defensive, you have to find a way to make some counter punches or diplomatic moves. You need to think outside the box, as we were doing when we were looking at hitting multiple cities at the same time across many intertwined accounts in order to take the target we really wanted.
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