Hello folks, Kadonnut here.
As AFK cannot write the remaining of IKEA story, I will do it on his behalf. The text below goes briefly through my memories about the server onwards AFK’s quitting day. There might be some factual errors and controversial topics included as I don’t possibly remember everything just as it actually happened. The main storyline is still correct.
After AFK quit
The rest of the management were naturally a bit shocked by AFK’s announcement to quit. Personally, I wasn’t too surprised, having followed the situation unfold on KORNSNÖ for a while from outsider’s perspective. The immediate following thought was that what is going to happen with the unique diet now that AFK is not looking after the myriad of diet villages anymore? Even if Kalkkuna said he will keep playing just the same as before AFK’s departure, we were a bit skeptical about it and the skepticism proved right sooner or later. Thankfully, Hemoz started taking a bigger role in KORNSNÖ management and despite his controversial personality and reputation among IKEA players, he took the responsibilities like a champ.
From IKEA management perspective, AFK leaving wouldn’t cause major changes in our daily activities. He didn’t participate much in the daily defense coordination nor offense planning anyways and those aspects stayed the same. However, like AFK mentioned in his own post, IKEA did lose a ”Human Resources” manager. AFK was the guy whose shoulder was always there for player’s account-related or personal issues, like stagnating motivation. None of the remaining management team was interested or willing to take that cape of Mother Theresa to wear – both me and Tempus were jokingly advertised to have our PM’s open for similar cases but in reality, neither of us had the energy for that. Luckily, our PM’s weren’t too popular aftera all. For a regular IKEA member that did mean they didn’t necessarily have anyone to talk seriously with, which might have affected their personal motivation. As an example of this, someone pointed anonymously out in our after-server feedback form that ”Management did surprisingly well despite AFK quitting”.
Quite soon after New Years Truce we were planning to start the operations towards zergers, in this case mainly GoW and GOATS. By the way, it was me who planned the oasis shenanigans against GOATS – our success rate was better than I expected and while the overall effects of the scheme remained little, at least one GOATS capital never conquered their third oasis back. Moving on, the operation-filled early year was pretty intensive for offense accounts. I do not have much to say about that since I didn’t participate in operation planning but what must be said is that despite the operations being mostly successful, they also increased the tensions between us and Duat – just not in the whole alliance level but on a personal level.
While operations kept running by the lead of planners, we were faced with the fact that zergers are sharing defense across alliances. It put us in an awkward position: to avoid GoW and GOATS getting defended by DND and South-Eastern alliances, we would need to fake them as well – or co-operate with GUNNERS by timing operations to avoid cross-defending. Since faking every zerg alliance would have been costly and tedious from us, the choice was quite clear, leading to the birth of ”zerg 2” as some called it. I don’t know all the details behind these arrangements if there are any so I will not go deeper into this, but in addition to timed opses, we shared defense to GUNNERS a couple of times as a response to original zerg. The decision to defend GUNNERS wasn’t received too well in IKEA since we were planning on going against GUNNERS before the zerging happened, which is why we only participated to one def call. Duat took part in some others as well and also caught some enemy offs, which was naturally up to them to decide.
Towards WW’s and plans
During the late winter we also started preparing ourselves for the endgame. Like AFK said, our goal on com2 was to have fun, create chaos and presumably be wiped off the map by strong metas. The last part was obviously not happening, forcing us to reassess our position: what is our stand in relation to building the WW and going after building plans? Like a proper democracy, we arranged a vote in both alliances with three options:
1) Build the Wonder of the World in a hardcore manner, mass-pushing defense from every account etc.
2) ”Midgård option”, as in doing the same here as Swedes did to IKEA on Nordics server: keep the operations running but also build WW infrastructure to several villages to be utilized for feeding if nothing else. If they get shot down, not the end of the world.
3) No WW building at all, just opses.
Option two won by a fair margin and this is what we naturally ended up doing. However, this was a controversial topic in managements in both IKEA and Duat. Some leaders were not willing to contribute to the WW on any level; others were keen on it. Based on the vote results, it seemed that most of members across alliances were supporting WW building and, at least in IKEA, the most vocal supporters of this route were regular members instead of management - even if some management people were involved in crowd manipulation as well.
The WWs were positioned to KORNSNÖ to gain the maximum benefit from unique diet and Hemoz orchestrated those mostly on his own, with the help of Tempest and petrn from ALGOT. As you should know by now, despite this gameplan for the endgame we had practically no WWK’s or WWR’s prepared for the final fights (except Eye of Ra, call that a WWR if you wish), leaving us in an underdog position in that regard. This issue might be fought by acquiring majority of building plans, for which we were perfectly positioned close to origo. We agreed that both alliances deal with the plans of their half of the map individually, Duat taking care of the north and IKEA of the south. This meant me and our main offense coordinator, Jimb00 had plenty to do to assure the southern plans to us. Before the BP spawns, GOATS came at our WWs with force and damaged infrastructure heavily. Because of this, we needed to swap KORNSNÖ village number 41 into our main WW, leaving 42 as a diet village like before. The previous main WW, 40, remained a secondary WW and the repair works of infrastructure began.
There were some uncertainties regarding BP spawn mechanics. We didn’t have previous experience of this level of planning with building plan spawns and needed to find answers to many questions related to the mirrorring mechanics especially. It was crucial to make sure that forcing the plans in TEN quadrant wouldn’t screw up the BP spawns in Duat’s region. Also knowing GUNNERS wants to try forcing one of North-Eastern plans to spawn closer to them, verifying the spawn mechanics was of high importance to us. However, this proved quite difficult: our contacts from the tournament servers, to whom the plan forcing is a part of everyday life, gave us confusing and contradicting data about plan spawn behaviour. We didn’t know whom to believe, which is why we took things into our own hands and fetched the BP spawn data from a recently ended but still online Nordics server, where only 2 plans had been taken, and also the tournament server that had BP spawns some days ahead of com2.
After analyzing both servers we came to a conclusion that the degree of randomness in the spawn variation around reference coordinates and mirror mechanics is too much to make any solid statements. We made coordinate lists to be settled around each BP we wanted to have a try on in the Southern side, settling SW first since it was our dominant territory after all and less threatening. After completing SW settling, we created similar lists for deeper SE plans in TEN region but delayed the settling to occur just before BP spawn to avoid TEN counter-reaction. Only exceptions to the delayed settling were catapoints settled by BLÅHAJ and Osiris to gain us maximum coverage on the areas. The squares we wanted the plans to spawn into were left empty. At the same time we also aggrosettled one TEN catapoint close to 4|-35 plan and dealt with Mythical (DND) starter the day plans spawned as a safety measure – the account seemed too idle to create a threat.
The plans were a success from both us and Duat, leaving the zerg with none. It had been a tough week of planning and hoping everything would go according to our plans: we couldn’t control if people had actually sent their settlers in time to SE locations. I wasn’t worried about plans in SW at all, they were covered easily – the SE ones were the source of stress as they were crucial for the whole zerg’s hopes to get any of their WWs up. Luckily for us, everything went smoothly despite some individual mistakes in settling time and leaving an unwanted village slot empty, where the deepest SE plan ended up spawning.
After the BP spawns
Zerg being left without any plans, they put on a lightshow at our plans – probably to GUNNERS as well. The endgame seemed like a race between us and GUNNERS now, and knowing the apparent hatred between zergers and GUNNERS, we expected most of the zerg WWKs to be heading towards Tyrant regardless of the situation. The only WWK we were somewhat worried of was xtased from GOATS due to IKEA’s early server backstabbing that left GOATS heartbroken for the rest of the round. This fear of a single WWK manifested later as the deadliest operation of ours, leaving xtased still standing strong and us with a lot less off. The walling was needed though since some accounts were struggling with feeding, and with WW going up, we couldn’t afford defending all the important targets unless some offs were gotten rid of. The size of the defense was unexpected though, good job at GOATS with that one!
Before the xtased train happened, a shock came at our way. One evening Loffe said dreadful four words in one of our shared management chats: ”We lost a bp.” If I have even been frustrated and tilted, that was the moment. A Duat member holding the plan had forgotten to demolish treasury to move the plan internally in the account – twice! – leaving the plan undefended against a relatively small TEN hammer. To be fair, I had been pretty confident all the time that zerg will get at least one plan – but that it would be a GUNNERS plan, not ours. Losing the plan for such a ridiculous mistake by a otherwise well-performing player left me extremely demotivated to do anything management-related for some time. In my mind I thought we’re done with our server win. The next day we got also an operation from GoW, making us lose a few decent-sized operation sweeps as players didn’t switch capitals to avoid conquests. Not the brightest days for us by any means. GUNNERS losing another plan a bit later didn’t help my personal depression at all – it just proved my initial thoughts about GUNNERS losing a plan to be true. I still tried to cheer our members up, telling them that we didn’t come here for the victory anyways, but at that point it felt more like a lie.
After Duat lost the plan, the tensions between IKEA and Duat took a major leap. In the operations Raymon had planned during the late winter, the public feedback on IKEA side was that our off players did nothing but screw up time after time. Accusations and name calling was the prevalent communication method of Raymon and our players. Everyone got collectively the blame for individual mistakes, which obviously do happen every now and then. Sometimes he hopped off the IKEA Discord out of sheer frustration, which is surely better than staying and behaving like he did in public. Funnily enough, after the most significant individual screw-up in the Nordics meta (in my opinion, feel free to disagree) happened in Duat, getting a taste of his own medicine by IKEA players wasn’t too enjoyable and he left the Discord for good and didn’t participate in any operation planning or other common action anymore despite saying he wants to win after our success with building plans.
To clarify previous paragram: I do not claim mistakes didn’t happen in IKEA. I do not claim we didn’t have difficult individuals who, at times, caused more headache than benefit. What I’m saying is that we weren’t the only ones to mess things up, yet we got the unwarranted hate for it. The point is not to compare who did better, Duat and IKEA were in it together since the very beginning – we win or we fall together, no matter how many insults one guy manages to spit out to co-players. I also want to emphasize that there were practically no issues in co-operation with Loffe or almost any regular Duat member, many of which were in our Discord due to KORNSNÖ diet village channels or artefact rotations. For the remaining server, Loffe was the only management-level contact between IKEA and Duat, leaving him in a rather awkward position, which he handled great nonetheless.
Shortly after zerg got another plan, we needed to focus on keeping TEN busy with the zerg WWs, the unique architect and both plans. At the same time we needed to wall offs due to insufficient def numbers, in case zerg decided to run at us again with big targets in mind. Luckily, GoNu game back from his Travian hiatus to arrange some fake trains to important targets, as other operation planners had fled the scene or were on the verge of a burnout. Meanwhile, some Duat members who had no interest in toying the building plans around anymore as the situation seemed desperate, just requested anyone to pick up the plans from their accounts, whether it was ally or enemy. Basically this meant more WW related responsibilities to IKEA, which some players were luckily willing to take. I suppose many Duat members would have volunteered to hold the plans as well, based on the earlier voting results.
One day the fake trains turned real and ended with all zerg WWs damaged except 2.01’s. I wasn’t so hopeless anymore, and it actually started to look like we had a chance after all to close the round with a victory! Exchanging artifacts with GUNNERS also led up to us having a large architect, which came in good use during the zerg WW hits to both our current and previous main WW. Azaezel could barely damage the WW through our over 17M defense. At this point I want to salute the holders of NPC villages, which were used to feed the WW def especially during WW hits: Aeklav, Basic & Och, Urk & xerii and others with nearby granary villages, without your efforts we would have starved a lot more def than we ended up doing during the whole WW period.
From this day on, however, IKEA moving defense capacity remained horrible since many defense accounts had been routed to support the WW defenses or our important targets like building plans, unique diet and large architect that couldn’t be risked to move. Duat moving and overall def numbers exceeded our heavily, which was a cringey situation for us. Luckily, we didn’t have too many important targets to defend anymore after the initial off splats – losing SENSUELL sweep was obviously not pleasant for the account but didn’t matter too much in the overall scheme of things.
At this point we put our offensive side on hold for a while since we wanted to keep some sweeps in reserve in case the zerg doesn’t go and drop GUNNERS WW behind us and we needed to pressure their remaining plans to try claiming the victory for ourselves – with our remaining offenses, we had no chances of dropping GUNNERS ourselves if zerg didn’t do that. For all smaller offs, free fire to self-chosen targets was permitted as long as bigger sweeps stayed home, Anyways, zerg delivered and played GUNNERS out from the WW race. After our situation was secured, the free fire command expanded to all offs, eventually leading up to a civil war-like situation of some IKEA players shooting at each others’ capitals. That’s basically your every-day experience in Finnish Travian scene.
This was the story of IKEA, the Swedish furniture store, consisting mostly of Finnish players reinforced by some Scandinavian companions. The server didn’t end up for us like we initially planned – but not in a bad way at all. I would say we achieved our goals here, and managed to grab the win on the way out. I hope someone from Duat will shed light to their side of the Nordics alliances since, despite the mutual efforts, we were still somewhat separate units.
A walk-through of IKEA management:
Main leader: AFK (until d137, onwards nobody individually)
Off team: Jimb00 (main planner), GoNu (planner), Arget (planner), Metsamies (opinions, technical support)
Def team: Tempus, Arget, Kadonnut, Tempest, Superriku, Kämmis
WW team: Hemoz (& Manlet) (KORNSNÖ) + Tempest & petrn (ALGOT); Kadonnut (backup for nights)
BP planning: Kadonnut & Jimb00
Scouting: Moxxi & vilhou
I will post my personal (and much shorter) end notes in a separate post to keep this one a bit shorter.
On behalf of everyone in IKEA, I thank all com2 players for joining the server. 
