Hephaestuses Rage info.
I saw Hephaestuses Rage was mentioned a few times, and have some info if anyone is interested. (If you don't care about HR, you can skip my post.
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I was probably the reason for the collapse of it, and the 'supposed' merge into Serpentine Medea.
Back when Gamma was brand new, Ocean 45 was looking pretty bleak. There was Serpentine Medea, GrepoHugs, and a few others around. But other than them, Ocean 45 lacked quality alliances almost entirely. Most of them were MRA or recruiting inactive players. (Sorry I can't remember specific names at this point)
Personally, I didn't want to join (or at least try to join) SM or GH. I try to avoid big forum personality alliances. But there was an alliance called, "United Alliances", led by a nice guy, but he was rather clueless how to lead. Making the best of a potentially bad situation, I joined them. In trying to guide the alliance, I eventually picked up all leadership powers.
The guy leading before me had UA spread across all 4 core oceans. Somewhat less than an MRA, but still not a pretty picture. Eventually support lines were getting slashed and members far out of the big picture couldn't be supported if we wanted to. Several internal conversations took place, and we basically split into UA East (O55) and UA West (45). Almost instantly, UA East died, and UA West was renamed to Hephaestuses Rage to represent our new alliance.
Using my TW experience, I made HR a decent alliance. We showed that we could quickly climb the charts, but being newly forged, lost a lot of our BP stats. Nearing the end of HR, we had 45 completely locked down, except for the advancing Serpentine Medea from the North/Northeast.
We had a good alliance with the up-and-coming, Knights of Freedom (Knights of Honor?) in O35. O55 was in good standing with diplomacy, and our closest threat (other than SM) was League of Erinyes, which were aways from us in 46, doing their own thing. We had a few run-ins with Illumanti on the south-east of 45 when the merged some broken alliance down there, but nothing escalated. (Wish I could find my old maps, I believe one was leaked onto the Gamma forums at one point).
SM was rolling through some of our villages as we were being formed under a type of tyranny. Credit mostly goes to Hellraiser. But we held our own. At the time, we were pretty equal on stats with Force Recon, Illumanti, and Stag Nation. We had some decent players, Leiffe, Speedyboy, eumenes, peterheata, daiju, just to name a few. (Of which i'm sure none of their names are familiar anymore). But as the trend goes, about this time we lost some very key players. They simply didn't want to devote time anymore. On the bright side, SM lost a lot of their forward players in 45 to the same cause.
But, summer was ending and I had to follow suite. I couldn't afford to play due to starting college. Sadly, I was the one doing just about everything. Diplomacy, forum moding, coordination... you name it. I put some other players in elected leadership rolls that they wanted. And thinking I was leaving the alliance in excellent shape, I quit. It wasn't but a week, and I guess the other guys never stepped up. The alliance broke up.
Active and aggressive players replaced the SM masses we worked hard to defend against. Not sure what happened to the core of the alliance, but it appears none of the familiar faces are left.
Ocean 45 should have little defenses left at this point. Could have been pretty easy to absorb players or take cities.
Sorry if that's too much, haha. More complete for the Gamma encyclopedia, right?
