Dangerous Stationery 2 - The Disappointing Sequel

Dispatch Version - Forum Version

N-Day 2 - Score: 9437, Strikes: 9437, Radiation: 0, Finishing position: 10th
N-Day 5 - Score: 5277, Strikes: 6655, Radiation: 1378, Finishing position: 11th

Looking at the numbers, N-Day 5, the second time I entered my own faction, was pretty disappointing. I barely achieved half the number of points as last time, and took radiation damage for the first time, with 9 of my 39 nations being destroyed. However, it’s not quite that simple, so let’s take a closer look at what went wrong this year.

Timing

In my local time, N-Day 2 ran from 10PM - 10PM. I didn’t join in the evening, as I didn’t want to be destroyed overnight, so started at about 9AM. I achieved pretty much 13 solid hours of near unopposed destruction, as I gradually climbed up the leaderboard through the course of the day. N-Day 5 ran from 7AM - 7AM for me. This allowed me to start much earlier, and indeed I raced up the leaderboard much faster, but that was most likely what led to my downfall. In N-Day 2 I spent approximately 2 minutes in the top 10 - the final 2 minutes of the event, after the big factions had targeted those immediately in front of me. Had N-Day 2 ran for another hour, I may have been in big trouble. With N-Day 5, I spent probably around 5-6 hours in the top 10, which inevitably drew the attention of one of the large factions. In hindsight, I should have stockpiled in those earlier hours, possibly even in another faction, but we’ll get onto that in more detail soon.

The Timeline

10:30AM - Shortly after waking up (it was a Sunday, don’t judge…), I started a faction with some trepidation. My initial plans had been to ignore N-Day, as I had the previous two, but with a quick look at the leaderboard and the realisation that I would be around for most of the day, I figured I might as well make an assault on the top 10.

11:30AM - The first attack. After familiarising myself with the controls and making a spreadsheet detailing my puppets, their specialities, and my assignment of them to nukes or shields (side note: this spreadsheet was invaluable in helping me know which puppets to switch between when I wanted to do a specific task. I’m really bad at switching between tasks so it helped massively that I knew which puppets were converting production to nukes, so I could do them all at once, for example.), I launched a test attack on some poor idiot who had decided to target me. I took them out without incurring the wrath of their faction (which was pretty small anyway, so I wasn’t worried), and moved into the top 30 on the leaderboard.

Strategy

I’m bad at laying things out, so I’m going to put some strategy here in the middle of the timeline. I just feel like I need to explain this before I describe how my plan panned out in detail. My initial plan was to stockpile nukes and shields, making myself a formidable target whilst remaining low profile enough to avoid the huge factions. Then, towards the end of the day, I would launch a devastating series of attacks on smaller factions and launch myself up the leaderboard.

I should have done that. That would have been a good strategy. I didn’t.

OK, so in my defence, there is some logic behind my decision to be aggressive much earlier than initially planned. Firstly, I was worried that the number of easy targets would be all used up very quickly, leaving me with no choice but to attack large factions later on. This would mean that I would be potentially competing for the same targets with multiple other nations, and that many of my nukes may be shielded. The reality, however, was that there were new factions being created even late on in the game, and the destruction of the Horsemen meant that there was no shortage of defenceless nations to be milked for points later on in the game. Ah well, lesson learned.

The second reason I wanted to be aggressive early was to guarantee a decent points haul. The maximum radiation my faction could suffer is my number of nations (39) multiplied by 100. Therefore, once I got over 3900 points, I was guaranteed a positive score and a decent position on the leaderboard, regardless of what happened.

The third reason I abandoned my stockpile plan was because… I am impatient and attention seeking. I could see early on that the top 10 was achievable quickly with my rate of production, and I hated seeing my nukes sitting there doing nothing whilst small factions were practically begging to be destroyed for points. So, my gameplan totally fell apart and it came back to bite me in the ass. Anyway, back to the timeline.

12:30PM - Some other poor schmuck from a tiny faction decides to target me. They don’t last long. My points total is now about 200, and I’m moving close to the top 20.

2:00PM - OK, now it’s time for my first big attack. But which factions to choose? Here is how I decide:
1 - The faction must be much smaller than me. I must be able to destroy them without them really hurting me. I like being a big fish in a small pond, really. Or a school bully.
2 - The faction can’t be targeted by anyone else. I don’t like to compete for points, so the ideal faction is currently in the process of minding its own business, and is not on the radar of anyone else. It means I can target every nation in the faction up to 100, and feel confident of getting those points.
3 - Ideally the faction will be inactive, so they won’t retaliate (not that it really matters), or shield any of my attacks. This is pretty hard to achieve though, as most factions were active at this time, so I just chose factions with few shields in order to maximise my points.

Now I’m ready to make my attacks. I target three factions using the above criteria and cause a fair chunk of damage to all of them, with most of my nukes landing. I gain about 1700 points in the space of a few minutes, and move right up into the top 10. It’s going well!

3:00PM - We’re a third of the way through the event now, and halfway through the time I’m awake for, so let’s make a few more attacks. Again, factions were selected using the criteria above, and another 900 is added to my total, maintaining my position in 8th on the leaderboard.

4:00PM - Just a small attack this time, to finish off a faction I’d only got halfway through in one of my previous attacks. Then there’s a bit of stockpiling before the biggest attack I make all day.

6:30PM - There are few things in life more exciting than finding a near-unblemished puppet faction with an absent owner. Comfortably enough nations for me to use all of my nukes on, with no danger of retaliation of shielding. Another 2300 points are quickly added to my total as I move well past the 5000-point mark and into 7th on the leaderboard, my highest position ever.

7:30PM - A nation from a new faction decides to target me. How foolish. I have enough nukes to take out their entire faction, and move past 6000 points. At this stage, the Horsemen are in freefall and the Potatoes are coming back, but I’m hoping of a top 5 position and potentially a 5-figure score. What could possibly go wrong?

8:00PM - It all goes wrong. Now, throughout the entire day, I have been targeted. Usually by small factions, who have co-ordinated attacks of up to 300 nukes on me, but also by rogue nations from the big factions. Nothing I haven’t been able to comfortably deal with though. Now, let’s have a quick chat about leaving factions.

Leaving factions to avoid taking hits was a thing as far back as N-Day 2, though I didn’t need to do it then. I hadn’t participated in events 3 or 4, but clearly the tactic of leaving your faction had become much more prevalent. We saw it with Potatoes, hiding in the Horsemen until the time was right to leave and attack, and we also saw it with other puppet regions, notably Big Pharma, who seemed to have wildly different numbers of puppets in the faction every time I looked.

The benefit of leaving is that you can either avoid attacks completely if you are offline (I do this later), or you can join another faction and build up nukes/shields there before moving back to your faction. The downsides are that if you get targeted while you are in another faction, you can’t leave, and if you are in no faction at all, your production is not increasing. Personally, I didn’t see the need to evacuate my faction every time I had a few targets on me, but in hindsight I perhaps moved too slowly.

The first I knew of the attack was when I suddenly noticed a couple of hundred targets on me. No worries, I have 2500 shields. I refresh the page. 800 targets. Still no issue. No point in having 2500 shields if I’m too scared to use them. I refresh again. 1100 targets. Ok, so who is this faction that is attacking me? The Fuster Cluck Coalition. And they have… 16,000 nukes! Oh no! PANIC PANIC PANIC PANIC PANIC!!!

I quickly begin to evacuate my faction, saving as many nations as possible. Any targeted nation is a lost cause, but I’m able to save 20 of my 39 nations. Now, the issue with evacuation is that my 2500 shields are now reduced to about 1000. Oh dear. I prepare for the assault and use every last one of my shields, before making another evacuation attempt and saving a few more nations. With no more shields left, and all my remaining nations targeted, they are a lost cause. 9 are destroyed, with a handful more being partially irradiated.

I was partially helped by the fact that Fuster Cluck weren’t at all efficient. Of the 1900+ nukes that landed, only about 1200 caused radiation. They wasted more than a third of their nukes by attacking nations that were already completely destroyed. Had they been moderately competent, they could have targeted far more nations and the attack would have been much worse. Not that I’m complaining; please continue to hit one of my nations with 244 strikes (this actually happened) rather than attacking the others that I’m frantically trying to evacuate. Good job!

As I look at the smoking remains of the 9 nations that were destroyed, I decide to take a break. Other factions have taken advantage of my lack of shields to target me, and I don’t want to rejoin until people are leaving me alone. In hindsight, I should have shoved my rescued nations into another faction in order to accumulate production, but I didn’t want to overcomplicate things at this stage.

11:00PM - I rejoin. Having now slipped out of the top 10, I want to at least get ahead of a couple of the factions in front. I also don’t want my last act in this game to be taking hits when I still have nukes to give. Tentatively, I move my remaining nations back into my faction and get to work stockpiling nukes for a final blast before bed.

11:30PM - My last attack mirrors my first, as I blast through a small faction of about 7 nations. Another 400 points are added, and I can at least go to bed on a high note. After this attack, I empty my faction of nations and get ready to head to bed… until I realise that the faction I attacked has targets on 4 of my nations. I didn’t have enough nukes to obliterate the faction completely, and these nations have decided to retaliate. No worries, I have more than enough shields now.

12:00AM - They haven’t attacked. I want to go to bed.

12:30AM - The targets expire and I am able to remove all of my nations from the faction, other than the 9 which were destroyed. I go to bed in 13th, and wake up in my finishing position of 11th.

Conclusion and Observations

Overall I’m bittersweet about how this went. On the one hand, I did far worse than last time, and nobody wants to be worse at something than they used to be. It was also annoying to see my ranking plummet without being able to do anything about it. However, it has been 3 years since my last N-Day, and things have changed a lot since then. The fact that I can still compete at the top with my 2017 knowledge and the same 39 puppets I used back then is pretty encouraging. The tactic of generating production in another faction and then moving back to your own wasn’t really a thing back in 2017. Personally, I kinda think that the production and stockpiling you generate in a faction should be wiped out if you leave, in order to keep things fair. Or maybe I’m just a grumpy Boomer who preferred things in the good old days! Another new development is card farms. In previous N-Days, the military folk had a huge advantage with regards to puppets, but card farmers are now joining them, and seem to be more likely to form their own factions rather than working in teams like the R/D players do. Maybe card farm puppet factions will come to dominate the lower reaches of the top 10 below the mega-alliances.

Right now I’m in absolutely no mood to participate next year, because doing this solo is so much work, and I hate working in teams, so I’m unlikely to join anyone else’s faction. My mood will probably have changed by next year though, so maybe we will see Dangerous Stationery 3 going for another assault on the leaderboard…