Paradise Rains

(Paradise Rains about his IC-history, from Harkonnen forum Dec 2002, posted in here by Altruist:)

Well if you want the long version I'll put it here so as not to clog up the thread. I'm warning you now though that I tend to wander off on tangets that are interesting to me when telling a story, so this is mostly for Altruist and anyone else who wants to read my story, otherwise of course feel free to skip it.

I started in beta 2 I believe it was, anyway I'm bad at remembering rounds so I'll just go from there, and I went to Andromeda because Milky Way was well into the round. Andromeda was still fairly early in its exploration phase, and my family had a much bigger family next to us who made us their allies, although basically using us as a buffer against other families, as they were in the corner and we were directly towards the middle from them. Anyhow they restricted our growth, but there were plenty of inactives an no enemy % rule to hold me back, so I burned and explored a lot of families and started doing rather well. Eventually I made it into the top 20 or so, and the biggest player in our neighboring family had gone inactive at some point, so I attacked our neighbors and gained 20 or so planets, and the leader and other active player in my family got a number of them after I had wiped out his fleet. Naturally the other family didn't like this much, after cancelling their unreciprocated alliance, they declared war on us and I had my first real taste of IC war. Their family only had one really active and reasonably sized player at this point too, and I had grown quite a bit larger than him so after about two days their family gave up and I was bigger than ever. After that I had convinced a friend to join the galaxy, and he ended up in the family of the then #2 player, and read about a plan made by this guy and the #3 and #4 guys to take down the #1 guy and then keep anyone else from getting into the top 3. Anyhow I was quantam at the time and starting to develop a sense of IC strategy, so I started moving my portals closer to the center of the galaxy, where these guys were clustered, while this small alliance was destroying the #1 guy. I was barely in the top 10 at this point and quite a bit smaller, but I knew who the leader of the group was, so I planted 6 or 7 nukes on the guy and agreed not to detonate them in exchange for an NAP with a 72-hour cancellation. With that NAP I concentrated on growth, and ran into a guy named pleithosauria or something, and we were the two quickest growing players in the galaxy, and he was being targetted by the top 3 alliance. I made an alliance with him, and cancelled the NAP from earlier, and we fought another short war near the end of the round, which we won fairly easily, knocking them out of our systems and then spending about a week competing for the top spot. I planned a small jump at the end of the round, saving for about 16 hours and then building a bunch of soldiers, which never got finished, so I ended up #2 in NW there, and #2 in size behind some third party I believe.

The next round, I moved to the MW along with my leader and a few other decent players we had picked up. That round I started playing a lot more with the core group of my family than on my own, other than my brief and only war against the Harkonnens. I can't remember exactly how it started, but Altruist/Bizarre Dreamclouds was in a system I was in during the exploration phase, and either he tried to eject me from the system or I tried to do it to him, which in retrospect is amusing because we each had 3 planets there and the rest of the system was empty. Anyway we traded unportalled planets back and forth for a couple of hours, and then I watched him attack an unportalled planet, and hit his portalled planet effectively winning the system. After which point our families made an alliance and then moved on in our own directions. Later that round my family would gain some infamy for some dishonorable tactics, but well I'll give my version of how things went, which are obviously biased. Our family happened to be next to a 5 or 6 family alliance "chain" and also in the same sector as Evael and Thakendar and their triple alliance, which comes in to play later. Anyway we declared war on one of the chained families, which was led by a character a lot like High Heavens (edit: probably refering to Carpathian, thinks Altruist), and we were winning that, until their two allies entered the fight, and even then we were still winning, until the allies of those two families entered in, we ended up losing the 5 on 1 war. I'm pretty sure the harks were busy with a war of their own at the time, and we didn't have any other families. So we ended up with a NAP, which my leader never had any intention of honoring, and he broke it 48 hours or so later, after we had both done some rebuilding. After the initial attacks by my leader, I followed his actions and together we knocked the enemy families out of all of our shared systems, but then Evael and more so Thakendar decided to take action against us for breaking our NAP. So, being the largest player in the family and sharing systems with them, I was subjected to fighter runs and then had my ground broken a few times by that triple alliance, and then we ended up being beaten down badly by the various forces against us.

After that round my leader quit, and I asked Altruist if I could join the Harkonnen's in the next round (beta 4), and I was given a place in the best round of the new Harkonnen history. We fought some great wars and worked together very well, and really all I have from this round are some questions, since most people here remember that round at least as well as I do. That was the first time I remember encountering the Tortuga Nebula Thugs, at least I believe so, they, or you guys depending on who reads this, were fighting the family with Catastrophe and such if I'm not mistaken and they were quite a bit bigger than you guys? Anyway somehow some Harkonnen got himself involved in that war, and I traded planets with him to get over there too, cause I remember the war had been going on for a long time so I decided it was time for some Harkonnen justice. Anyway I don't remember exactly what the situation war, but I lost one or two of my new planets from Catastrophe's family while the portals were building, but I ended up with one portal. I launched a few attacks, gained a few planets, then along with my family member Dire Straits (another retired Harkonnen) we offered peace to their family in exchange for them ending their war with the thugs, and I wanted a few planets for the ones they had taken from me. Anyway I think then the thugs and the other family became allies, but Catastrophe held a grudge against the Harkonnens, in large part because of me?

About the only other notable aspect of that round is that somehow I was convinced to save up for an end of the round jump, but I got bored so I jumped several days early and went looking for a war, only to discover that everyone big enough to fight was either NAPed with us or had long since ceased to share systems by one means or another. I ended up fighting an ineffectual war against another large family over a distance of a few hours, but I couldn't hold the planets because they still had portals in the system, so all I really achieved was forcing them to spend some of their savings, then I saved up a little bit more because we found out Alt was leaving and wanted to try to boost him to #1 for his last round.

After that came the donut rumble, which doesn't need much explaining here, and other than that I tried my hand at banking, but I got off to a bad start, and some of the attackers were busy with RL stuff so it didn't work out as well as it could have, then we had our war and fought it for a long time, but we were on the front lines and the Harkonnens ended up losing a lot of planets.

After that I quit for a while and now here I am, heh. That is long with a lot of little details that I enjoy remembering and now it is time to shut up for me.

edited followup dialog:

Altruist: Davelot was in that illegal alliance you were fighting and NAP- breaking in beta 3 and the leader was Carpathian (I think). Oh, and how I wished you would have just asked us to join your war instead of breaking the NAP. It would had been a feast. The way it was we felt only legitimated to stop #40 and one other ally of them to make them 'decide' to lower their illegal alliance down to legel 3 families.

Vesium/Paradise Rains: Heh, yeah those names are all sound right. As I recall, you guys were rather busy with your own problems at the time as we were getting into ours with yet another pair of names I feel that I should remember but can't, who jumped and launched an assault that wiped me out of your sector and looked unstoppable at the time. I can't remember how it turned out though.

Vodka Drinkin Pirate/Davelot: Indeed, Altruist is right there, on all three counts. I was there, Carpathian was the leader, and we would have been dead and buried if the Harks had hit us too

Well the way I see it... it was not really an illegal alliance - we had 2 allies, 1 of them had another ally, and their leader, who noone really liked anyway, kept trying to get more ppl to make some sort of illegal alliance, and did not seem to shut up about this, gaining us a rather bad reputation. If my memory serves me right I guess there may have been a few attacks from that fam and one other, but they did nothing much. At the end of beta 3 he kept trying to convince us to set something like this up next round, I told him if my fam chose to have anything to do with it I would delete. But it turned out that noone else liked him either, as mentioned earlier

And BTW, if you did not know, your leader that round, Endless Armada, joined our fam mid-way through beta 4

Well anyway, no hard feelings I hope

Actually, even though we took a rather large beating in that war, it was probably a good thing - it turned out one of our allies, was someone we had completely destroyed in SD the round before. He was planning to attack us and get his revenge, until that war, when he changed his opinion of us

Well that ally was DWFS, if it was not for knowing DWFS, Crazy Convicts may never have ended up in my fam, so I might not have got to know the thugs, and I might not be here today. So I guess theres a happy ending of sorts

Vesium/Paradise Rains: Heh, no hard feelings at all, it was a long time ago and I rather enjoyed that round anyway. Speaking of happy endings, if that round hadn't gone the way it did, Endless Armada might not have left, and I probably wouldn't have ended up in the Harkonnen and well here I am cluttering up the family history board, heh.

Vodka Drinkin Pirate/Davelot: ahh well, all is well that ends well