Chapter VII: The Second Knights War
(June 2006 - January 2007)

"Look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before."
-Jacob A. Riis

Though OGame proved to be a vastly superior game than Zelderex and Guild Wars was a fun distraction, neither game was really providing as much challenge as expected. Guild Wars never had the best PvP (although it was better than most, options for how to engage in it were limited) and OGame so far was rather boring. Most OGame players seemed only interested in farming inactive players and slowly building their fleets. Even the most "hardcore" OGame players were only interested in "fleet crashing" other players, a process that often invovled watching a single target for days, weeks or even months at a time while waiting for them to make a mistake with their "fleet save" so that the attacker could actually find their fleet to crash it. For the Golden Shields this proved to make for a rather boring game. More action was desired, so after talking it over for awhile with the officers, it was decided that our best option would be to find some similar ranked alliance to challenge to a brief war. Hopefully both groups would have some fun for awhile and once it was over we could possibly even propose an alliance to the other group.

At the time, the Golden Shields was ranked as the 45th most powerful alliance in Universe 15 (out of several hundred alliances). Right above us in the 44th position was an alliance called "The Knights of the Cross" alliance. From a brief look at their alliance page it seemed they had a similar number of members, similar scores and appeared to be a decent, respectable alliance. We also chuckled that it would be amusing to have ANOTHER war aginst a group called the Knights. We decided they were probably a good target and figured we sould contact them to propose the idea of a fun "practice" war to them before actually trying to declare the war. I figured the easiest way to do that would be to visit their forums and post a message for their leader to see.

However, upon reaching their forums I began to have second thoughts about these so-called Knights. They had very little activity on their forums, which is not usually a sign of a high quality group. Plus, their forums were public and anyone could just walk right in to read them. Again, not a sign of a high quality group. But the most disturbing thing was that right at the top of their forum they had a poll asking "should we have a war with the horribly ranked alliance with no ranked players?" which sounded very sinsiter. When I showed this to the other officers in the Golden Shields they agreed it sounded fishy. This changed things somewhat, rather than declaring a friendly war aginst these people in hopes of becoming their allies down the road, we decided that it might still be a good idea to go to war aginst them but not become their allies. Insead we could declare war on them to help this other group low ranked group they were seemingly trying to pick on. We could still have a fun war, possibly gain an ally from this other low ranked group and do a good deed at the same time! This was an even better deal than before... or so we thought.

But if this was going to be a real war rather than just a practice war, we needed to change our tactics a little. To be specific we needed to have more information about these Knights if we were going to be fighting them to the death. First I asked for a voulenteer to leave our alliance and join with the Knights to spy on them so we could see their full member list and any circular messages they sent to each other in-game. One of our best members named Mike272727 from Zelderex stepped forward to voulenteer for the job. He was sent into the Knights and we agreed to give him a week or so to gather information before we would start the war. Meanwhile we needed to know who this "horribly ranked" alliance was. Sadly, the Knights never said the name on their forum and I wanted to talk to them to get their side of the story before we declared war to protect some group of people we hadn't even met yet. We could have had Mike simply ask the Knights now that he had infiltrated them but I didn't want it to seem suspicious that a new member was asking so many questions, it seemed better for him to remain quiet.

Instead I decided to employ a tactic a spy had attempted to use on the Alchemists. The spy was caught eventually but this time it didn't matter if they discovered what I had done later, it only needed to work long enough for us to find out what alliance they were planning to declare war on. I registered an account on their forums under the name of one of their members who didn't have an account yet. It was risky because they might figure it out right away if the member used a different name on the forum than he did in the game, but it actually worked exactly as planned. The Knights never even knew. I registered the account and directly ASKED what alliance they were talking about...

And right there we had our anwser. UNSC was the alliance they wanted to declare war on. And based on the comments from the Knights it was pretty clear that they were psyched up to beat down a small group which was going to be powerless to defend itself.

I contacted "Nightspell" from UNSC to get his side of the story. He said that the Knights were already attacking him and he didn't even know why. His grasp of the english language was very poor and most of what he said was pure gibberish. But it was fairly clear that he was in trouble and wanted help, so I convinced him that both his alliance and The Golden Shields would offically declare war on the Knights to make it a fair fight. Nightspell agreed and soon both wars were officially declared on the OGame forums. Up to now everything was going according to plan.

Once the war was on however thigs became very complicated very quickly. The first member of the Knights to respond to the war was actually the person who had started the poll on their forums, Tyekai. His story was that this whole thing was a huge misunderstanding and that the war should be called off. He claimed that a former member of UNSC had contacted the Knights to tell them that Nightspell was attempting to convince his members to cheat by doing what OGame calls "pushing" which is where lower ranked players send their resources to a higher ranked player. If this were true then Nightspell would be cheating and would probably have been banned from the game over it. At first we didn't believe Tyekai's story because he was never able to produce any evidence of the existance of this former UNSC member (he couldn't even remember the name of this person) and UNSC obviously claimed that the whole story was a lie and that they would never push.

It also did not help Tyekai's efforts that the second member of the Knights to reply to the thread was Foodman, the "leader" of the Knights. Foodman, quite simply, was an ass. He lied constantly, bragged about very minor accomplishments and even outright insulted us in ways that were blatant violations of the forum rules. As a result Foodman was eventually banned from the forums, but not before even Tyekai ran out of patience for his non-sense. When it became obvious to Tyekai that he would never be able to end the war as long as Foodman was being such an ass he finally demanded that foodman knock it off and apologize. Not only did Foodman refuse but he branded Tyekai a traitor to the Knights and Tyekai ended up quitting the Knights that very same day. While this was in a way our first victory in the war as the Knights had lost one of their best members (and their only able diplomat) it was also a setback because after that we had only Foodman to deal with. We celebrated much more when Foodman was finally banned so that we didn't have to put up with his antics any longer.

However the first real setback of the war was when UNSC broke their deal with us and dropped out of the war. They whined that they were losing and their members weren't high enough in rank to fight, so it was pointless for them to go on fighting. They seemed to forget that the whole reason the war was started was to protect their members who were being attacked by the Knights. Nightspell suddenly turned from playing the victim into acting like just as much of an ass as Foodman. The Ironic part was that Tyekai's story about Nightspell cheating was true. Shortly after he dropped out of the war he and another account were banned from the game for multi-accounting and pushing. The war went on anyway however, by this point UNSC was only an after thought anyway. After we had seen the way Foodman conducted himself on the forums all the officers in the Golden Shields agreed that the war would go on until we had removed Foodman as the leader of the Knights or the Knights were disbanded. It was going to be a very long war.

After that there were still several more setbacks. Foodman sacrificed several hundred of his ships to distroy one hundred of mine that I had sent to attack one of his planets. Even though he lost much more in that attack then I did, he still bragged about it non-stop for as long as he could before finally being banned from the OGame forums. Another attack which went poorly for us was when Bthorne and Mordred planned a major attack on Foodman's home planet which was going to involve Bthorne launching interplanetary missiles at Foodman to wipe out most of his defense followed by Mordred attacking with his fleet. I was trying to help them plan the attack over our vent server but I made the mistake of trying to have them time the arrival of the missiles and the arrival of Mordred's fleet down to the last second and as a result several missiles did not hit the right targets and several others didn't arrive in time. Again, Foodman lost much more than we did but still bragged that Mordred's fleet was wiped out. I blame myself for that one because I was leading the attack and should have asked Mordred to recall his fleet when I knew the missiles didn't land correctly. None the less, we learned from these early mistakes and further attacks were made with much lower losses for us and much higher losses for Foodman and the other Knights.

The greatest reason that our attacks were so successful was simply because the Knights were barely even fighting back at all. They weren't communicating and some of them didn't even know a war was going on until they started getting attacked ten times more often than normal. As soon as the war started the Knights were so paranoid about us reading their forums that they stopped using them. They couldn't secure the forums because their only forum admin had gone inactive and never returned. On the rare occasaion they sent a circular message in-game our spy would see it and report it to us before most of the Knights even had a chance to read it, so any attacks they planned that way we were prepared for. I think Foodman must have figured out fairly early on that we knew what was going on inside his alliance and just gave up on trying to organize his members because of it. Either that or he was just a completely incompetent leader, I'm not sure which although its probably a little of both.

While the Knights were completely disorganized, we were exactly the opposite. In addition to using our vent server to discuss, plan and carry out major attacks we were also using our forums to the absolute best of our ability to amass and distribute information on every single member of the Knights. Using the Knights members list that Mike provided (and updated for us on a regular basis) we always knew exactly how many members they had, what their names were and where their home planets were located. Starting with this information I created a new section on our forums and in that section I created a thread for each member of the Knights. Every time there was any news on that member (be it an attack on that person, that person attacking us or just a conversation with that person) one of our members would update the thread with the new information. In this way we had constant up to date info on every single member of the Knights at all times. They could barely even walk away from their computers to use the bathroom without us knowing about it.

As the war went on many Knights began to become greatly fustrated by our continual attacks and Foodman's apparent apathy of the situation. As the Knights fell further and further into disarray many of their members began to quit just to put an end to the attacks. When this happened we stopped our attacks on them, wished them luck and moved the thread about them to another section of the forums.

While our constant attacks on the Knights were doing a great deal to drive them into giving up and leaving their alliance Foodman was also doing his part to tear down his own alliance. His general asshattery combined with his inability to galvanize his alliance to fight back was adding up and his own members were clearly starting to figure out that he wasn't the leader he claimed to be, or even the OGame player he claimed to be. Many Knights were actually contacting us when they quit to inform us that their lack of confidence in Foodman had a lot to do with their reasons for giving up the fight. We decided to capitalize on this by spreading the word about Foodman's incompetence to convince even more of the Knights to quit. I wrote up and posted a long essay about why Foodman wasn't qualified to be a leader which was then posted onto the Knights forum. Although it was quite a work of art most of the Knights didn't see it right away due to the fact that Foodman had been trying to keep people away from their forums. None the less it must have annoyed Foodman and the word about him was slowly spreading.

Despite our victories and Foodman's shortcomings the Knights still proved to be more stubborn than expected and the war dragged on for six months. Foodman put his account into vacation mode after we wiped out the defense on most of his planets with interplanetary missiles and one of the top ranked players fleet crashed his now poorly protected fleet. Most of the rest of the Knights quit one by one over the passing months. Once the Knights were down to about half of their original members we began to pressure them to appoint a diplomat who wasn't banned from the OGame boards to discuss an ending to the war, but Foodman dealyed as long as possible and when he finally did appoint someone he tried to fool us with a very poor tactic. He knew we wouldn't agree to end the war until he stepped down as leader of the Knights so he tried to fake it to make it seem as though he had appointed someone else leader. However the new leader was inactive and what Foodman had actually done was create a "2nd leader" rank which left him with full control over the alliance as long as the first leader remained inactive. We didn't fall for it, so as soon as the first diplomat he sent out started talking to us we convinced him to quit the Knights and he did. The next Diplomat Foodman appointed was barely active and never posted on the forums, so we attacked him until he quit and he did. Foodman didn't send any more diplomats after that.

In the end, the Knights had only six members reamining, four of which were hiding in vacation mode to avoid our constant attacks. According to OGame rules a war can't end until one side is totally diasbanded or both sides agree to end it. The Knights were obviously just refusing to give up or talk to us at this point so they could drag out the war and not have to admit their defeat, so we dicded that something had to be done. I contacted a moderator on the OGame forums and asked him if we could possibly set up a new deal where he would agree to end the war without any imput from the Knights. The moderator agreed and I posted a new message in the war thread declaring our victory and giving the Knights 48 hours to reply if they wanted to dispute our claim. In that thread I covered our victories, how many members the Kngiths had lost, how they were hiding in vacation mode and so on to explain why we had obviously won (in other words, all the same stuff you have read in this chapter but with more stats and numbers). 48 hours passed and the Knights did not reply so we decalred our victory and a moderator closed the thread for us finally ending the long war aginst Foodman and his so-called Knights.

After the war Foodman's universe 15 account never left vacation mode but after a brief attempt to claim he won the war where he only proved what a fool he is, he finally disbanded the Knights once and for all. Shortly after that he was caught multi-accounting in universe 19 and banned. Foodman was never heard from again.

Go to Chapter VIII, The Legend of Zaidan