TheMercs

One of the most influencial clans during the apex of DarkFall PvP.

Clan-leader was Osium Woof. As the name implies they were from the onset an independent clan working as mercenaries. Among other things, the first clan to build large ships, including a manowar which they later sold to SUN.

(In mid-April 2009 they were helping SB Alliance raid Dawn and Dusk cities.)

After the fall of Hyperion they formed the Afghan Alliance. In World War II they were battling Coalition of the Chillin.

In autumn 2009 they left for the NA-1 server.

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*A full account of TheMercs' run in DF by Osium;*

Part One

TheMercs entered Darkfall with a plan, a plan that had been concocted by myself and Kyrandos years before. It was probably 2002 when I decided that TheMercs would not play the city game in Darkfall. Instead we would raid, we would hit and run, always controlling the impetus of the fight. We are a small guild you see, and playing the numbers game on a much larger guild's terms would result in our aura of invincibility shattered.

Beta was an interesting experience. Yellowbeard was our first member to get into beta sometime in the Fall, he never played. I was our next member to get into the beta, I got in somewhere around December 28th or 29th. I logged in, enjoyed the game but the server was empty, nobody was playing. I stopped playing. Then the beta opened up again in January with more people, the server actually had players to fight. We used up 6 or 7 of our allotted beta slots and our reign of terror began almost instantly.

The first major battle in Darkfall occurred between the Savage Alliance and TheMercs and a couple of friends. All but a couple of us had logged in for the very first time. They had about enough time to sort out their keybindings before the first zerg farm in Darkfall history occurred. Nine Mercs and friends ran into 25+ Savage Alliance. What ensues was lots of ineffectual melee combat with people using leafblades. When the dust settled the fight broke down into two parts. Part one, the initial clash saw us inflict a few casualties and lose a couple people, we then kited SA in a running battle for a good couple of minutes. We ran them out of stamina and began to slaughter them. They retreated and we pursued. They regrouped and hit us again for part two. More of the same, only this time we had already learned from our mistake during the first engagement. We didn't meet them head on, we kited them around in circles while free players cut them down from behind. They were routed again very few escaped.

The beta forums exploded following this battle, here was the proof everyone had wanted. A small coordinated group could trounce a larger one. As beta went on we added a few more people, Rekuul and the Miraguls. The Miraguls would quit early on, but Rekuul remained a prominant figure in our OOB until things started to wind down in the summer.

All through beta we dominated. The only battle TheMercs comprehensively lost in ALL of Darkfall, was an 11 vs 28+ versus the Society of the Anvil during an extremely laggy period. We had to test our limits and we made a very intentional, very calculated charge across a bridge into their massive force. We fought SotA several times in more equal engagements and they failed to score a single kill while getting completely mopped up.

During beta we had operated out of the chaos city Hintenfau, it provided access to good monsters nearby which we could kill by boxing them in with players and parrying at need. Our plan from the moment we arrived in Hintenfau had been to take it in final as our base of operations. With about three days left in beta, we decided to siege the city of Seelie, an island city off the west coast of Agon. We took the city and the next day we made history. The video footage of the Savage Alliance attempting to take Seelie from us is easily the most famous video from beta, and it is easily the best piece of marketing Adventurine got for Darkfall.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDaygL5hjWI

9 Mercs vs 20+ Savage Alliance, we flawlessed them.

It was then that our plan changed. We would take Seelie in final and use it to control the three extremely lucrative Giant spawns nearby. We had no intention of building anything but the most basic amenities. It was to be an out of the way base of operations to insulate us from constant raiding. As it turned out the server conspired to send us elsewhere come release.

That video led to over 150 recruit applications in 5 days. We had prepared and had some idea of how we would handle recruiting, but we were not prepared for this volume. We quickly weeded out the applicants to roughly 100 people who we expected to show up and try out come final. The recruitment guild would be called "Rainbow Ninjas".

With the release of final, the first major screw up on behalf of Adventurine occurred, people couldn't buy pre-order copies. Of the 100 odd people who had applied to Rainbow Ninjas, we had less than 40 actually show up. Additionally, the servers were so laggy and screwed up with sync issues it became impossible for people who PvE'd monsters in a legit manner to make money. City after city was taken by people who continued to exploit monsters with a bug that carried over from beta, or by people who began perching monsters.

We were lost and we were pissed off. All the PvE we had done in beta had been legit, straight up tank and spank the monsters. We tried to remember monsters we could perch, we looked high and low and ultimately found a terrible spawn of garbage to farm. When we were about halfway to our gold requirement, Seelie was taken. So we moved back to our original plan A, Hintenfau.

There is a serious misconception about WHEN we began to exploit monsters, people think we horded bugs coming out of beta to use in final to get a great head start. Well nothing could be further from the truth. We dicked around for 2 weeks killing Giants and Shadowknights near Hintenfau with conventional, zerg the monster from all sides and kill it before it kills all of you, tactics.

It was 2 weeks in when Tofu and Goatbane (Miraguls) found the center dungeon and began exploring it. This is when we first started perching mages. We owned the center dungeon completely, and soon we found something better, a spot outside the dungeon where we could trap mages. This became our primary farm spot but it was not without risks. We fought multiple times per day against large PvP/PvE forces numbering sometimes over 20 who were intent on claiming this spot as their own.

The first month of final for us was fighting over this spawn and skilling up in Hintenfau under constant, unrelenting raiding. The rest of the server was infatuated with building cities and watching Hyperion gobble up the Eastern half of the map. We were fighting for control of the most lucrative farming area in the game. Don't let me mislead you here, we were also extremely active as a raid force in Hyperion lands during this time. Long March was our favorite raid target.

Our first large scale battle occurred against Murder Herd, an enormous zerg guild that lived south of us. They became a favorite PvP target for small groups until they lost their city and quit the game. Our boys would raid them daily killing their farmers and macroers and shit stomping their PvP crews.

Here is he aformentioned big PvP battle we had with them. This is still pretty early in final so character development is pretty pathetic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR\_JEFM1Z2c

You will notice in this video that many of the Herd are naked, that is because this is late in the fight well after we had rolled this enormous never relenting zerg at least half a dozen times. The entire fight raged for probably close to two hours. We raided their Chaos City, killed everyone inside and then fought a running battle with them as we extricated ourselves from their never ending bind rush.

We were quickly establishing ourselves as the number 1 PvP crew on the server, we would pull things off nobody else on the server could manage. Our chief rivals at this time were Serenity Now, but they fought in a completely different manner to us, they focused on skirmishing and never committing to an all or nothing battle. We could raid any city on the server with 15-20 people and lock the city down with zero casualties for as long as we were not outnumbered 3 or 4 to 1 or worse.

Around this time we fought the be all end all 5v5 vs Serenity Now that they had been begging us for, after weeks of getting their asses handed to them. With SN's individualistic jump kiting archery technique vs our in your face hyper aggressive melee combat, we flawlessed them, 5 to 0. We never had anyone in danger of dying, I believe Nathlas dropped to 55%. Following this battle the excuse train began. On another note, anyone who played DF during the jump kiting era will tell you that for you to lose to a primarily melee based crew while you are jump kiting, you got your shit pushed in hard.

Victory followed victory. We were unstoppable, untouchable. We destroyed everyone we fought, anything we fought. One afternoon we led a small 12 man force to Rubiyat to raid the Dusk alliance. They were clueless. They had never been raided, people lost thousands of reagents to us while macroing. What followed however was possibly the most epic escape in the history of Darkfall. Anyone who has ever played Darkfall and raided the Island continents knows that when the hammer comes down, escape is nearly impossible. Eventually you have to swim and then they have you.

As we exited the Old Timers Guild city, groups of 10-15 people converged on us from every direction, we mounted up and ran, in addition to 30 to 40 mounted people, a solid 50 to 60 chased us from OTG city on foot. We retreated the length of Rubiyat to the chaos city situated in the North West of the Island. Every 45 seconds to a minute we would quickly dismount bow down a couple mounts, kill their riders and ride off before we could get swarmed. We repeated this process perhaps a dozen times before we had to make our first swim.

At the shore we briefly debated making a stand, and we did for a minute or two. In the long retreat we had lost two people, one to a crash and another to losing her mount. So we were down to 9 or 10 here on the sandy beaches of North West Rubiyat when the first wave hit us. We cut them down quickly but more and more continued to come. We were quickly over run and we ran for the water. While we were swimming we formulated our escape plan. We would stop and fight south of the Chaos City while two people swam ahead and got a raft out for us.

When we reached the next shore we saw a large fortress we contemplated using as our Alamo but realized escape to the raft would be impossible. Instead Galgorth, one of the TM officers wearing his Infernal breast plate became target numero uno. Without Galgorth's sacrifice and quick thinking to lead the zerg away from the rest of us, we all would have likely died on that shithole. Instead we made the final swim across the channel to the Chaos City jumped on a raft and laughed like school girls as 60+ Dusk swarmed all over the place.

We had our target however, soon we would serve the server notice.

Operation D in the B. The weeklong invasion of Rubiyat. We moved from Hintenfau with our new allies Panic down to the Rubiyat chaos city. No footage exists of this period, but we had daily 20 vs 60+ fights that we won almost always flawlessly. We rode roughshod over the island, destroying morale and preparing the island for a coup-de-grace. That final blow would fall weeks later when we acquired the first ships on the server.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNJN3oH2mdQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6FGGMO0ghU

This is footage of our ship based raiding of Dusk. The constant asset destruction and repeated open field ass beatings we dealt them resulted in Dusk collapsing and breaking up. Dusk at the time was the second largest alliance on the server, and the first of many to fall at the hands of TheMercs and our alliance Afghanistan. In this battle, you see the battle of Symennak in which Dusk rallied over 70 people to attack our 30ish man force. We suffered one death in this battle, one player who crashed near the start.

In part two of our history in Darkfall, I will deal with the formation and rise of Afghanistan as the most powerful force in ALL levels of the game.

Part Two

To continue this history, first I must back track to some extent. It is my intention to give a brief political overview of EU1 from our perspective up to the point we entered the game as a full blown political player. As mentioned at the outset of part one, we did not want to get embroiled in the city on city style warfare that we knew big guilds would favor. We did not have the numbers for it, nor did we really want to build the numbers up for it. This is why our original plan was to operate from a Chaos City, later modified to use a lucrative out of the way city for the first phase or our strategy. Emulating guerilla and asymmetric tactics was going to be our bread and butter. Fight when it is to our advantage. Fight when we dictate. Fight when we are ready. Some people may call this cowardly, we call it smart. Sure we had a couple minor losses where our enemies overwhelmed us to such an extent that retreat and saving what we could was the better part of valor in our time in Darkfall, but I can say this with 100% honesty, we did not lose a single battle in Darkfall where we were not massively outnumbered. Our goal was to draw the attention of the mega alliances but not give them an easy location to pound us with 5x our numbers.

This is where our problem with Sovereignty began. Sovereignty is run by a fellow named Loch, he was a vassal of ours in Asheron's Call. We have carried over a cordial relationship with him and his crew since 2000. We were in two different places strategically. We wanted to piss off everyone, become infamous. Loch wanted to be a string puller, create relationships with guilds and play the political game. Loch also wanted to be a bully with our force to back him up. I can succinctly sum Loch up as a good administrator, an ok salesman and a hopeless tactician. Loch failed to understand the most simple of raiding principles. When you hit a massive alliance, you are on the clock. You have a limited amount of time to get in, smash everyone and get out before you get swarmed. For those who do not remember, Hyperion in the first two months was a monster. They had a massive number of players and they would bring the hammer down with over a 100 individuals for even a minor raid. Loch led several 20 to 30 man mixed TM/RN/SoV groups on raids against Hyperion, stayed too long and got rolled. As a result of this, Hyperion one day rolled up on SoV with perhaps as many as 160 people and took a giant steaming shit on SoV and the TM/RN defenders numbering maybe 40.

This is where our relationship broke down, and this defines our political motives. We tied ourselves to someone who just didn't get it and as a result took a beating for it. Our guys were instructed to no longer cooperate with Loch unless a high ranking TM officer was present. Loch then went on to try and create his web of contacts by joining Cairn while maintaining his relationship with us. We cut ties and drove them out of Dagnamyr and all our shared farm locations.

Hyperion was plagued by horrible leadership. Hyperion was Hitler to Nazi Germany, minus the top notch professional soldiers and officer corps, when they should have been Bismarck to Imperial Germany. Bismarck understood the fear Europe had for Germany, especially a united Germany, he therefore did not aggressively expand creating an enemy out of the rest of the world the way Hitler did. This is exactly what Hyperion did. The splash they created by surging across eastern Agon and into Yssam ensured the backlash that would see them defeated. Their biggest mistake was letting all the major alliances off the hook when they had them by the throat. They stopped their advance and allowed everyone else to work out an agreement to destroy it. Stopping their momentum simply ensured the eventual fall. They turtled up. Their player base got bored and quit. By the time Cairn, Death and CotC got around to killing Hyperion, Hyperion was already all but dead due to apathy and lack of motivation. If anything it was a mercy kill.

The period following the fall of Hyperion did not really see any alliance dominate the way Hyperion did. Death remained on niffleheim content to hold a few continental assets, the same with Cairn. CotC absorbed much of the former Hyperion lands, but CotC was more an inheritor than a conqueror. Death did the heavy lifting, Cairn and CotC picked up the undefended cities during the major siege activities. If memory serves correctly Hyperion was defeated over the course of two weekends. In which CotC, Death and Cairn all leveled multiple sieges on Hyperion. Hyperion only really defended against Death with strength, while Cairn and CotC were able to capture virtually undefended assets. We emerged into the game as a political entity as a mercenary force near the end of Hyperion's days, I will deal with that more specifically later.

Yssam alone of all the continents probably endured the longest as a continent which was not dominated by a singular alliance. Hyperion never really achieved full domination of it, and in fact soon after they conquered it, it came under the control of a second party born out of Hyperion. Yssam up until the summer always had multiple political groups vying for control. It was never completely dominated or completely subjugated and I believe it was the blue print for the way the rest of Darkfall should have been and our political actions were always with this in mind. We strove to create smaller regional alliances rather than pan-server ones.

Niffleheim was under Death control right up until July when the server transfer occurred, and almost from the beginning. On Niffleheim there were two main antagonists, LoD and Harm. Harm got the early upper hand, creating a small alliance to beat LoD down and begin to chase them off the island. LoD however in an astonishing admission of inadequacy and ego swallowing begged the entire server to help them fight off the overt aggression of Harm and their alliance. I myself offered our services to the leadership of LoD in fighting Harm. However after observing the outpouring of support that flowed towards LoD as only a cascade of tears could elicit, I ignored their acceptance of support. The die was cast, and it was heavily loaded. Harm would have no chance, the entire server conquered Niffleheim for the newly formed Death alliance. Harm was defeated in detail, their alliance destroyed, their assets seized and most of the member guilds quit the game, Harm included. Death went on to live in relative peace, far from the action on Agon, they were rarely raided. They continued to add guilds to their alliance, eventually becoming one of the largest, and most powerful forces, at least on paper, in the game. What Death would eventually realize however, is that tigers need more than stripes to impose that theoretical power.

Rubyiat became the strong hold of a pre-beta alliance known as DUSK. It was an all Alfar flavored alliance that was so incredibly bureaucratically top heavy that it was actually a little silly. They had a charter that is longer than this combined history and that is only a slight exaggeration. The DUSK clans had little opposition on Ruby, and they removed it with a massive 250 or so man siege force quite early on. The focus of their attention was a guild ironically called "The Mercenaries". These poor guys got smashed by one of the largest siege forces ever, and promptly threw in the towel. Some of the history of Dusk on Rubyiat is already covered in part 1, I won't ruin the surprise by concluding that tale just yet.

Cairn was the mountainous shit-hol, I mean strong hold held by the Cairn alliance. The primary players were SUN and Blood. There really is not much to say about Cairn in the first eight months of EU1. Cairn were the consummate opportunists. They did not get involved in any wars someone else was not already fighting. They piggy backed on the winning side and gobbled up territory in every single instance. Moreso than even Death, Cairn reigned on EU1 as the ultimate theoretical power, never really putting it together. Worse, when they eventually tangled with Afghanistan late in the day in June and July when everyone was winding down, they allied with Death to fight us, still losing every open field engagement embarrassingly. After I stopped playing actively in early June, Zen took the reigns and led our campaign against Cairn. The romp continued with multiple cities taken and abandoned as we continued to stomp all over Cairn.

The formation of Afghanistan was really an impromptu thing. We had never planned to create an alliance, nor had we any indication that we would become the most powerful force on the server. There is a difference between being the best fighters on the server, and being the most powerful force on the server. We were one of those from day one, the other one we matured into sometime in April. During our many raids into Hyperion lands there was this one group of players that consistently gave us good fights. These guys all had tagged themselves with the last name HAIL. Respecting good opponents I began a dialogue with them, essentially my goal was to subvert them from Hyperion and pull them into our fold. Our relationship continued to grow even though we continually fought each other in Hyperion lands, and often it was the arrival of HAIL to bolster the numerically superior Hyperion forces which would finally drive us off. However it wasn't HAIL that signed up first. TM and RN had lived in Hintenfau since the first day of final. It was our home. We were raided constantly by people trying to score a horse, or someone not paying attention with gear on. I credit this constant, heightened state of alert we were in as an advantage in later city raids on Aradoth. Our reaction time, and the violence of our counter attacks were complete and decisive.

While operating out of Hintenfau we laid claim to the central dungeon, and there we began to encounter heavy PvP to control it. One of the groups we began to run into in a frequent basis was the precursor guild to Panic, whose name escapes me. Their leader began to inform me through private messages that he intended to move his 60 or so super hardcore players into Hintenfau and to drive us out. I eventually convinced him we were not going anywhere, and such an attempt would result in a never ending circle jerk at the bindstone. He decided to try Ottenhall instead. It was then that the first Panic cockroaches appeared in Hintenfau. They could hear our macro'ers but they couldn't find them. They spent a good two or three days until a careless macro'er ran through the gap in the wall that was our macro club house. The Panic crew found our macro location.

Being rather pragmatic, I made contact with the Panic people immediately, established a relationship and offered to share Hintenfau with them. Having found our macro locations, they posed the first credible annoyance to our macroing. We took a potential enemy that could do real harm to our long term agenda and made a partnership with them, we were stronger for it as we picked up a solid core of good players. I must clarify, at this point there was no formal alliance. This was an informal, "You can PvP with us when we raid, and we won't fight each other in town" arrangement. The next day we made our first raid on Rubyiat. That same day I made the same pitch to HAIL, they accepted and joined us on Rubyiat the following day during our first week long invasion. We were still not Afghanistan at this point, and our alliance was still not formal. However the seeds had been sown, the name had been given by Bonedancer prophetically in a political overview he did some weeks earlier in which he indicated if anyone could unite the small warring clans in central Agon (Afghanistan) they would become a force.

That is where the name came from, we did not choose it ourselves, it was given to us. Initially the operation of our as yet unnamed informal alliance operated on unanimous consensus. TM were setting plans and policy, but HAIL and Panic were approached with all plans and consensus was reached. Later as the leadership of Panic and HAIL quit, these two guilds became more extensions of Afghanistan with TM as the brain. This is another reason for our rather unique level of success. Two guilds with skilled players and egos to go along with that skill completely subjugated their ambition, their own agenda to that of TM's and through that Afghanistan. It allowed us to have a singular command structure, with a singular goal, and a singular objective. There were no ulterior motives, all the guilds were singular branches of the same military apparatus. Alliances like Death and Cairn clearly had issues with multiple honchos with different ideas on how to achieve their goals. In any case, Afghanistan was born as a political entity as a result of this union.

It was one day early in final that I came to the decision that Afghanistan needed to strive for something that would set us apart, more importantly we needed something that would force guilds and alliances to engage us. This was prompted following one of our trips to Rubyiat in which we briefly stopped to raid Mar Shral. In very short order CotC had a solid 120 or more people on the walls facing us. A certain chubby guild leader had been carrying on a dialogue with me for some time at this point sent me a private tell. He said he would not allow his charges to come fight us because he did not want them to be slaughtered. This to the 35 man force outside his walls. It was then I knew, we needed warhulks, and we needed ships. Asset destruction was the only threat that could lure these people out of their cities to fight.

We immediately began putting our plan in motion. We began to buy up wood and iron ingots en-mass. It did not take long for us to construct our first ship, and the following day we upgraded to a Brigantine. We knew exactly what we had to do. We had to put the server on notice. For our plans to progress people had to fear our new weapons, and the will and ability to use them. Rubyiat and Dusk were our target. It was a strategic target. Our previous week long raid had left the alliance strained. It had plenty of well built coastal cities. Attacking Death or Cairn would have been a waste of an opportunity. Dusk would be made an example of. For a solid week, every day we would ride to Rubyiat, engage their defense forces on land, smash them and then field our warships razing cities. The first casualty was Adeptus, the first two nights we laid into their city completely razing it to the ground both nights. Adeptus then quit the alliance.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVGNsSzTcSI

Action depicting the first two nights on the Adeptus city can be seen here.

Some of our best times in the game occurred during the blitz of Dusk during this weekend. We had several massive battles, with 30-45 attackers, versus 60 to 80-90+ defenders. Huge open field archery and melee battles. After Adeptus called it quits, we turned our attention to the Bad Boys 4 Lyfe city. They were the self proclaimed badasses of Dusk and in truth they probably were. After three or four nights of the constant destruction of most of their city, Dusk imploded. Below is the first battle that proceeded the first night of asset destruction on BB4L city.

Part 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNJN3oH2mdQ

Part 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6FGGMO0ghU

The attacks continued on Dusk for a few more days as we attempted to extort the defenders, however by this time the defense had broken down into small localized pockets of resistance. The composite guilds fending for themselves rather than sending help to each other. The only semblance of organized resistance came from the mainland guilds of Dusk.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDgG3ipwd3k

Here we see the death throes of the Dusk alliance as Oromea and other mainland Dusk guilds attempt to drive off an Afghan force that was destroying the Sturmgrenadier city. As you can see they enjoyed about as much success as the native Rubyiaters. Also note the lack of magic used in this battle.

We had served notice to the server, we were a force the server had to respect now. The fear mongering on the forums during this period was quite hilarious. To say there was a ridiculous level of fear towards us in this history doesn't do the reality of the situation justice (It became even worse later on. When we invaded Niffleheim in July, the entire alliance was so terrified of fighting us they went all Mahatma Ghandi on us, rolled over and conceded defeat while pursuing a policy of non-violent placation until we had what we came for). This began our role on the server as a mercenary force. We offered our services, both land and sea based to the highest bidder. We primarily accepted payment in wood and iron as our next objective was to be a Frigate. Developers intervened however and nerfed the holy hell out of ships and we stopped attempting to make this ship at approximately 80% completed. They are still useless as a siege platform to this day. For example the brigantine with its ability to bring 3 guns on target was almost as effective as a 25 gun Man-O-War post nerf. Despite the nerf we found plenty of work. Hyperion began to hire us regularly, while we picked up odd jobs here and there to assist in siege prep work. To list the number of jobs and payment at this point would be futile. However in the first two weeks of our operation as a mercenary force and extortionists we easily netted a million gold in cash or wood/iron.

It was about this time that the anti-climactic battle known as World War 1 kicked off. We had two suitors for our services, Hyperion and CotC. We had stifled CotC twice already in Hamlet sieges at this point, both times at the Kompaniet hamlet north of Mar Shral. Our contract was free going into the war, Hyperion made an offer, I told CotC exactly what we were offered. However their leader seemed more interested in making less concrete intangible offers. Such as "CotC will make you famous", "You will be somebody under our command" along with vague promises of future payments. Hyperion offered resources, lots of wood and iron, what we valued above all else. CotC made hilarious offers to improve our stature. One of our first jobs was during the siege on Darkmoore. Savage Alliance had thrown in with Hyperion which kicked off WW1. We were hired by Savage Alliance to attack a hamlet Winterblade the same time Darkmoore was sieged. We took the hamlet and then were contracted to assist in the defense of Darkmoore. By the time we entered the city however the defense was a lost cause. CotC and Death were hammering down the Clanstone and the game was a total slideshow.

It was based on our experience with Darkmoore that we chose not to get involved in major sieges for a while. When our Hyperion contract during the end of WW1 began, we were primarily hired for non-siege time asset destruction which we carried out constantly against CotC guilds. We were involved in several hamlet sieges against CotC, twice we defended the Fallen Angels Hamlet during WW1 against CotC aggression. The following two videos are action from one of these sieges.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXdRgTJJY7I

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6M5Xhvu9Rf4

As you can see in this video, CotC had virtually zero success against us, and this trend continued throughout their limited remaining time in game. Our final day of contract work for Hyperion was rather farcical. We spent the entire day riding around from location to location not engaging in any fights, and when we were finally committed to battle, the server was in the process of crashing, the entire hamlet failed to load, players were floating where tree-houses should have been. Within two minutes of our arrival we had pushed into the hamlet and began clearing the entrenched siegers, then the server crashed. The day however began with a grand feint, we were sent to Seelie, home of KillCult to stand around and pull mean faces. We were then sent to a Mahirim NPC city to attempt to kill a Shard carrier who was barricaded in a tunnel blocked with nearly 30 defenders due to city mechanics at the time, it was impossible for us to war dec the half dozen or so guilds blockading. We gave it the old college try with needle volleys, the result was always the same, half the blockade dead, all of our aoe'rs killed by zap towers.

Hyperion threw in the towel and collapsed following this war. Our total siege record in WW1 at this point was two successful hamlet captures, three successful hamlet defenses, one failed hamlet attack and one server crash. One hamlet taken from SBA, one hamlet taken from CotC, three hamlets defended from CotC, one failed hamlet attack on CotC hamlet.

Up until this point Afghanistan had been a mercenary force, we were not overtly involved in politics, however due to the superior work of our growing spy network we came to control the majority of all Hyperion rare ore. This is when we became involved in the economic side of the game. First let me address the rare ore. We robbed Hypertron twice in the lead up to WW1. First through a defector from Anvil Society who brought with him their entire rare ore bank. Next through a spy we were able to lift a substantial quantity of rare ore from Hyperion itself.

Economically speaking up until this point the majority of our liquid assets came from individual mage or devil farming. This was organized only insofar as we attempted and successfully locked down 2 of the 3 devil spawns, and all of the best mage spawns on the northern side of the map. We even had certain individuals farming mages on some islands off the west coast. As a guild we made our money from mercenary work. However it was during the end of WW1 that we realized we needed something more. Simply put, we became probably the single largest merchant force in the game. Alternate accounts were acquired. We used well known traders to buy up huge quantities of materials in Mahirim lands at what were highly discounted prices. We would then resell these materials in the Human and Alfar markets. We became the federal reserve for Darkfall during this time. Chances are if you bought a large quantity of anything, we were involved either directly selling it, or we were the money behind the merchant who was. Only one major merchant that I can think of during this period was not either one of us, or working for us and that is because he was working for a gold selling site. I won't give his name away but I'm sure you can figure it out. During this time, we were also buying up every scrap of rare ore that was available outside the major power blocs. By the time we took Aradoth, we controlled probably 90% of the rare ore that had been mined out of Agon, and probably 90% from Yssam, as well as the vast majority of the rare ore from Rubiyat. Cairn and Niffle were the two regions I don't think we got anything from.

In the immediate aftermath of WW1 we were pulled into the Dusk remnant vs ShadowBane Alliance war. Dusk (TCA) was dead set on taking Erinthel. How this happened was essentially this: SBA gave us a bloody nose one afternoon when we were pissing around doing asset destruction on the Shipwrecked Pirates zeppelin city. They ambushed us with close to 2x our numbers as we ran around over confident looking for their force. We were going through a period of turnover, many new recruits made up our force. We kited them, ran many of them out of stamina, we called for the dismount and fight. We dismounted and then half of our force turned and ran away. First and only time that ever happened. SBA had given us what I consider our only real loss, a fight we should have won, by killing half a dozen or so of us in that fight. We then began going at SBA pretty hard. Naturally this resulted in TCA contacting us for mercenary work against SBA to capture Erinthal. We also had our eye on Erinthal and when TCA informed me that they were thinking about using us to take it, initially I said nothing but then informed them I would have to think about it as we had our eye on it as well. Ultimately we used my plan for the TCA. It started with a siege prep, destroying all their housing and defensive structures as well as strategic walls and gates. TCA was to launch the siege immediately at server up, move into the city enforce and hold it vs SBA counter attacks. Afghanistan would login and arrive at Erinthal when the siege went live and provide the extra muscle to finish taking the city. Well things didn't go exactly as planned. TCA dropped the siege about two and a half hours late. I decided to stay up during the server downtime so I could assist with the logistics immediately on server up. As a result I said 'fuck it' about an hour after they dropped the siege and went to sleep. When I woke up, I woke up to a shit storm of accusations. First Afghanistan didn't uphold its end of the bargain. Actually, there was no bargain, this was pro-bono work. We used 15 mortars and hundreds of battle spikes doing the night before prep work. That was the extent of siege weapon contribution that we agreed to. Second we were accused of not logging on for the siege. We never agreed we would hold a devastated city for them, it should have been easy. Due to their late siege drop SBA was able to rebuild most of the city. We had promised to show up when the siege went live to help them finish the job. Third, we were accused of not bringing siege weapons to the actual siege. Again we never said we would. After this, I kindly informed TCA they were retarded and that we would be presenting them with a bill for the work we did do. Some peons talked plenty of shit, but in private their leadership bent over and coughed up nearly 200k for us. At the end of the day a mutual respect was established between SBA and Afghanistan. Following our occupation of Aradoth we established a mutual defense pact. We would not offensively siege with each other unless our mutual enemies were working in concert against one of us. We would only pledge to defend each other IF multiple enemy alliances sieged one of our cities and even then it was up to the sieged party to decide if they wanted help or not.

People also had this wild misconception that magic had entered the game in a big way very early on. The truth is that the first people to get high levels of magic were few and far between and I believe the first person to get 100 fire got it in may. It wasn't until the end of June that any single force could field more than about 5 people with one school over 90. It wasn't until August that people could cycle high end aoe's and the fact is EU1 was a dead zone from the end of June until the sea tower patch.

The first person on the server to hit 100 in a non-gimped magic school (air) was Robi from LoD. About this time Afghanistan was contracted by a guild living north of Hintenfau to take out a shard carrier hiding in Aradoth. We made good on the contract, rolling into Aradoth and killing the shard carrier. However something about this job peaked our interest. Aradoth had a zap tower inside the bank room. Aradoth had long narrow tunnels leading into the bank room making it highly defendable. We were just getting our first high level mages out the door at this time, Zen and Natas were both just past 75 fire and as such had the highly annoying fire field spell. At that moment we decided to siege Aradoth from the KFC alliance. We went back to hintenfau, picked up a shard and created a new guild to hold the city, primarily to hide the fact it was Afghanistan responsible for the siege. Phohammar dropped the siege and then we promptly knocked his ass 80 feet in the air to land on top of an unreachable spire outside of Hintenfau.

Drama started almost immediately. Spies in CotC informed us that CotC was going to move to assist KFC against us. Then spies in Death informed me that Bonedancer was preparing to lead a 40ish man group to Aradoth to get involved as well. I opened a dialogue with Bone to gauge his intent and dissuade him from getting involved. The worry wasn't that they would stop us, in the confined fighting we were expecting we knew they wouldn't, our worry was more over the possibility of a giant cluster fuck causing the server to lag and thereby removing our tactical, strategic and player skill advantage. In the end Bone lead Death ironically to their death by siding with CotC and KFC. In what was easily one of my top 10 moments in Darkfall, Galgorth logged on his Awful Company character, logged into their ventrilo and joined the 60ish man raid force riding to join up with KFC for the defense. I prepped our 27-30 man crew and started riding south. A few minutes after leaving Mar Shral Galgorth dropped from his group and joined a group with me. Using his icon on the map I was able to guide the Afghan forces to a nearly flawless ambush. Gluttony led the CotC force directly for Aradoth and chose to lead his raid through the enclosed devil spawn. On the west side is the lake which is ringed by an impassable wall with an entrance to the north and to the south. I split our force in two, leading the northern force myself we jumped into the exit tunnel blocking them inside. Due to timing part of their force was able to escape out the southern tunnel before our southern force led by Rekuul closed the tunnel. The end result however was Gluttony dead with 75% of his force. The second attempt to reach Aradoth by CotC was much smaller as a result of this.

When we arrived at Aradoth there was no defense outside the bank room. Death took up positions in the skeleton room in the western tunnels. Our first attempt came down the eastern tunnel but we could not get good fire on target (This was our first usage of higher end cannons) produced by our merchant characters and contacts. We switched positions and dug in at the Y fork between the skeleton room and the stone room. We then laid down 1 head shot and 1 dragon cannon at a time to pound the shard and 1 headshot facing the Death forces in the skeleton room. Zen and Natas rotated their annoying field AoE which definitely kept the pressure up. Death fought hard against us for probably 20 minutes, suffering heavy casualties while inflicting zero on us. Once the battle was no longer in question, the stone at sub 20% Bonedancer lead Death in an attack on KFC and CotC in a giant chickenshit backstab. The only explanation I have for this reversal is that Bone felt that by turning on the defenders he could somehow take some credit for our victory.

Once we controlled Aradoth the game changed for us. We could macro around the clock with virtual impunity. Additionally, as a result of CotC engaging us in the siege a state of war was established between Afghanistan and CotC. We quickly bought up the stone we needed for two more towers and a foundry and we used the wood we had accumulated from our earlier efforts to build a frigate to finish those modules. Within 48 hours we had two new towers up and a foundry. Once we had the foundry up we dumped all of our warhulk ores into creating modules. Everything was happening at a frenetic pace. We sincerely believed that Death and CotC would collaborate to siege us in those opening days as we believed them to be at least moderately astute and that to allow us access to a foundry with the resources to make use of it criminal. The morning we constructed the first vileforge we were convinced a siege would occur that morning. As it turned out it didn't.

During this period of time we had been hatching our grand plan for the decapitation of CotC, a siege on Mar Shral. The plan was essentially this. Use contacts and spies within CotC to mark 50+ runes to the plateau in Mar Shral. We would then launch a siege on Mar Shral. Two specific sieges would be set. The first siege would be a bluff, we would use the siege to pin CotC forces at Mar Shral while we used our two vile forges with flame throwers to rapidly destroy Andruk. If CotC committed from Mar Shral to protect Andruk our entire raid force would recall to the plateau, deploy cannons and capture Mar Shral in a matter of minutes. In theory the plan was flawless. We would drop sieges on Mar Shral whenever we wanted to level a city, trading the siege fee for the cost to repair the damage would have been heavily in our favor. Eventually CotC would grow weary of false sieges, under protect Mar Shral and we would swoop in and take it. Unfortunately vileforge flame throwers were not siege weapons and as such did not deal building damage. This basically rendered our entire push for warhulks as a massive waste of time. They were expensive, difficult to drive due to terrible clipping issues and they did less damage than mortars. The flamethrowers not working on buildings was a massive disappointment for us. We then changed the plan. We would dick around with Andruk for awhile, buy up some mercenary guilds to deal with the nearly 200 people sitting in Mar Shral and then attempt to smash Mar Shral with a picket line screening a series of cannons.

One of the major misconceptions here is that we had an unlimited number of cannons. We didn't, I think in total we had around 33 dragon cannons, maybe 30 headshot and untold mortars Parfex created when he skilled up. We used around 15 Dragon cannons and 10 headshots at the Mar Shral siege. The plan actually went flawlessly. We set up outside Mar Shral broke down the wall and began putting fire on the clan stone. This was the first big siege we had actually taken part of and so we did not know about bug which allowed CotC to rebuild the walls during the siege. Even that however did not really defeat us. It was a tough blow and we were out of time to go get more cannons and take the wall down again. I believe the stone was at around 30 to 35% when the wall went back up. We then went for our ace in the hole, the recall runes we had to the plateau. This is where everything went tits up. Only Afghanistan had the recall runes, and when we recalled at least 80% of us crashed. Of that 80% probably 30% ended up back in Aradoth. We arrived on the plateau two or three at a time. SBA did a good job of holding the base of the plateau but we simply did not arrive in sufficient quantity to finish the job. The remaining dragon cannons were deployed in a last gasp effort to take the stone down but time was running out and bind rushers began to slip past SBA, past our needle volleys at the elevator and to begin harassing us on the cannons.

We had lost the siege to a bug. At the end of the day we moved on and adapted. However as a result of CotC calling the Dusk remnant to the defense of Mar Shral, we activated our offensive siege clause with SBA. Neither SBA nor Afghanistan wanted to escalate the war, we would have been far more happy fighting our individual wars, however CotC moved to escalate it, and SBA was in a sense forced into helping Afghanistan or else it would have faced Dusk and CotC by itself. We began offensive siege operations at a high tempo combined with constant asset destruction. When WW2 began I predicted on the forums it would be all over in two weeks. The first weekend saw the siege of Mar Shral the following weekend saw the siege of Hal'Kalic and Tughri and the counter siege of Erinthel. Tughri saw Cairn jump in to gobble up the scraps. They piggy backed onto the SBA/Afghan offensive siege. This was a hard fought battle and Cairn showed just how completely incompetent they were. We moved into the city, tore down an outside wall and then camped in firing range of the clanstone. Cannon batteries exchanged fire, TM with its few AoE magic users created a fire team to mop up trouble spots while SBA held the left flank and RN held the right flank. Cairn was supposed to move into the city as well, instead they stood outside the wall and fought a handful of naked people trying to push into the city. Ultimately Cairn collapsed, pressure from reinforcements mandated part of our force turning to face the growing force outside. When the pressure let up on the clanstone, TCA rebuilt the curtain wall we had taken down, the siege lost we were forced to retreat. I was one of the last to leave the city and was killed outside by the river. I dropped around 3 headshot cannons and 10 or 11 mortars. CotC and TCA forces unable to get their story straight claimed I dropped anywhere from 15 headshots and 20+ mortars to 20+ Dragon Cannons. In actual fact, we brought ~6 Dragon Cannons which we used, 10 Headshots and we had to make a mad dash to the bank to get more mortars and headshots out as we had run out of cannons. By this time in the fighting we were dangerously low on manufactured Dragon Cannons.

We then regrouped without Cairn whom we derided for generally sucking, and made a mad dash for Hal'Kalic or Vindi city. Fighting was fierce but brief. We were woefully outnumbered as we had lost many SBA and Afghan fighters to breaks. We pushed in briefly, setup a perimeter and began putting fire on the clanstone before we were overrun and had to retreat back to Erinthel to defend there.

The following video depicts action during these sieges.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5wLuLvhlZU

In the video we see the devastating defeat CotC and TCA suffered to SBA and Afghan forces as they attempted to breach into Erinthel. Notice in the video the differences in discipline between the two alliances. When on the defense they were simply numbers and lag. When we were on the defense we showed superior restraint and fire discipline to lure them into a bottleneck that resulted in the death of a massive portion of their force nearly instantly. Again, notice the magic used in the mass kill. Primarily mana missiles and needles with a scattering of rank 50 fireballs and rank 75 fire fields one volcano user (Zen) and a wall of force.

Nothing was settled at the end of the first week, things would change the following weekend. Afghanistan upped its game in asset destruction on CotC, nearly every day we would level an alliance members city. We also began concocting our second offensive the following weekend. Our target changed from Mar Shral to Andruk. Andruk was very close to Aradoth and belonged to an important member of the CotC alliance, KGB. Phase 1 was the razing of all CotC aligned bind stones near Andruk by Afghanistan. Phase 2 was the occupation and razing of Andruk itself. This entailed destroying towers and as much housing as possible. Phase 3 was the denial of Andruk by SBA forces while Afghanistan using its spies within CotC launched spoiling attacks on rallying CotC/TCA forces. Afghanistan was successful in several spoiling attacks, our timing was usually impeccable. In one instant during this phase however our timing was slightly off. Galgorth, our spy master was using his informants to advise us to CotC and TCA rally points and movements. We got word that TCA and CotC were moving to merge up, individually they had roughly 80 players each, to our 40ish. We knew we could roll either force individually and so we moved as quickly as possible to intercept the CotC force before it joined with the TCA force. We thought we were in time, as we jumped off our mounts and engaged a wall of enemy mounts coming over a low hill just south of ottenhall. At first I thought they were going to ignore us and ride through taking whatever casualties we managed to inflict. At first we thought it was just CotC, but that wall of enemy mounts rolling over the hill didn't end. It kept coming and coming and coming. All told there was over 160 guys rolling by 37 to 40 of us. I still thought they were riding by, then they started to turn and it was a sea of bad guys riding down on us. I called the retreat, we mounted up and hauled ass. We lost a half dozen guys and probably demounted close to 30 of them. This began what we can call the last ride of the CotC/TCA alliances. We rode in amongst them literally shoulder to shoulder. We frantically informed SBA of the massive clusterfuck of retardation bearing down on them and told them we would be arriving in the middle of it as we raced for Andruk. Hasty battle plans were drawn, we would hold the northwest corner against all comers for the next 1:45 to 2 hours.

Again the 5 or so TM with aoe magic became the fire brigade. RN held one corner, SB held the other and the most epic street to street battle since Stalingrad went down. Literally 80 SBA and Afghanis fought roughly 150 to 160 bad guys. We fought in the streets, we fought in the alleys, we fought in houses and we fought on the walls. We fought in the hills outside Andruk as both sides dead rearmed and rode back to the battle. They would surge forward, threatening to overrun our positions and we would push back. It was a constant struggle. Slowly but surely however our vastly superior kill/death ratio began to tell. We were in the ascendency for the last half hour, in part because Death alliance had arrived to crash the party and was roaming around Andruk with a massive cluster fuck of their own picking off stragglers as they rushed back to the city to rejoin the fight. This strangulation of the city impacted CotC and TCA more than it impacted us, less of us died, which meant less of us had to return. We also organized groups to sally out of the city, push Death away and allow our reinforcements to get back into the city. By the time the siege went live CotC and TCA were desperately pressing us and Death was also attempting to breach into the NW corner of Andruk by riding up onto the hill and leaping with their mounts directly into the city. It was hairy, touch and go, but in the end we held off the last desperate CotC/TCA rush and the increasingly aggressive Death attacks. With the ground around the stone secure we quickly dispatched the Bindstone in a manner of minutes with two of our few remaining Dragon Cannons.

The following day, demoralized and defeated CotC and TCA disbanded. SBA and TM ceased carrying out offensive sieges together and SBA continued its private war with the Oromea the holders of Tughri. Afghanistan took possession of Mar Shral through a careholder group. SBA ultimately sold Andruk to a group of ex Hyperion turned Mercenaries whom became an auxiliary force of Afghanistan.

CotC had fallen as predicted in two weeks. Our arsenal however was in rough shape. We had expended virtually all of our dragon cannons and as a result we were forced to rely on warhulks for most siege operations from then on.

Peace was short lived however as adventurous Afghans began probing Death. The war that resulted between Death and Afghanistan was at least from our perspective a war for sport. We simply wanted PvP. Sieges were never considered. Statements of capability were made when we repeatedly occupied, locked down and razed Sun Throne, the seat of Sinister. However no plans were ever made to actually take assets from Death.

In any case, these was a battle between the two server powerhouses. Death outnumbered us, and through those numbers they presented an equally sized group of advanced magic users. By the time CotC fell we had 5 or 6 members with 1 school over 90. When hostilities with Death began in earnest we probably had 8 or 9 people ranging from 1 to 2 schools at or over 90. Death had similar numbers. Magic was beginning to take over the game, it hadn't quite yet completely taken over yet. Maybe 10% of Deaths force would be using rank 50+ magic, and perhaps 25% of our force.

When we fought WW2 against CotC Magic was a force multiplier, but this was still the early days. We didn't have the numbers or players with it, or players with multiple schools to really turn fights on their ears. You need only refer to earlier open field fights with CotC in which we were outnumbered 2+:1 and took a couple casualties to see that 5 people with a 50 damage aoe field nuke was not going to change the outcome of the battle. We were already smashing them. What the limited aoe's allowed us to do, was to have a better chance in the laggy, less skillful siege environments where we were outnumbered by MASSIVE numbers of players.

City fighting is an altogether different beast than normal fighting. Numbers count for more, mobility is lost. The aoe magic we had in WW2 was not battle changing in the scale of fighting we had. It wasn't war changing. It was tactical in nature allowing us to counter hordes in laggy sieges. It became more a tool of suppression than a tool of killing. We still killed predominantly with fireballs and arrows.

When we fought Death, magic was in the ascendency, no doubt about it, both sides relied heavily on our magic wielding players. The difference was our mobility and command and control. Death was a large, bloated, unwieldy force. Fights typically went like this. We would attack, press, retreat, attack, press. Death was unable to react to or cope with our tactical tempo in these fights. They would pursue our feigned retreats directly into our next attack and press. We would also move along the flanks, with one flank retreating drawing enemies into enfilading fire (flanking) often times our right flank would hold while the left retreated, the right flank would then split, part pressing the forces opposite it, while a second part moved in behind the forces pursuing the retreating left flank. General panic would ensue on behalf of Death, Bone would usually die within seconds of contact and then urge his force on by droning "push" over and over.

Death ultimately had their most success against us by simply outnumbering us significantly, 2:1 or more and by staying all mounted. In one battle they managed to score perhaps as many as 10 kills using this tactic before being routed and chased off suffering at least two times as many deaths.

The following video is perhaps the best example of our patience in dealing with Death, and our superior coordination as we deliver an absolutely crushing defeat on them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPQwfKzV4-E&feature=related

The back story of this video is that we made contact with a massive Death force near a Sinister hamlet up near the northern coast perhaps 2 hours earlier. We were outnumbered at the time at least 3:1. Being confident but not stupid the game of cat and mouse began. We began maneuvering to find an advantageous position to fight from. We dismounted two separate times on reverse slopes and offered battle which Death seemed reluctant to charge into. Both times we mounted up and vacated the position before Death could envelope us. The third time we attempted to flank Death from a high mountain peak, we instead ran into a small mounted scouting party which escaped. It was night and extremely foggy at the time, neither force could see more than 40 feet and both forces settled down and waited for sunlight. Contact was lost with the Death force and we returned to the Hamlet to finish smashing it. Our spies then logged in and we had intel on Death movements. We then moved towards the old Anvil Society city. We bombed the shit out of it, razing essentially the entire city when word came down that Death had formed up another raid force, this one perhaps 30% smaller than the first, and was moving to engage us. In the video the first brief battle sequence is an ambush we set for them when our spy told us they were bizarrely swimming towards the island we were hiding out on while waiting for them to ride past us so we could move in behind them. The second battle is the culmination of the two forces finally coming to terms with each other and engaging. There really isn't any fancy maneuvering by our guys in this battle, this is for two reasons. First, they had the high ground and the superior position. I underestimated how quickly they would advance on us. Two, they flanked us with a large cavalry force almost immediately. Three, I was out in front when the cavalry flanked us and I was making contact with the lead elements of their foot soldiers. I spent basically the entire fight in the middle of their infantry running in circles like a retard trying to stay alive.

This was the beginning of the end for us in Darkfall. A few things became apparent. First with the announcement of the NA server, EU1 basically became a ghost town and it remained so until the seatower patch. Two, a frightening trend began to emerge amongst the core TM players. Each time one of us reached 100 in a school of magic, that player's interest in the game became a ticking clock. The rank 50+ nukes were spammy. They did not require the skill of archery and fireballs, and ultimately they would ruin PvP. The simple enjoyment of PvP was lost when we started using these abilities. So sure, by late July and August when we had 10+ people all cycling 2+ schools we were insanely powerful, it wasn't fun. Moreover, this level of character development was reached well after we had basically withdrawn from the game on a serious level. By the end of June we were doing nothing, just sitting around and macroing. Zen was one of the lone holdouts who played religiously beyond July.

There are plenty of no name revisionist retards out there who will tell anyone who will listen we left the server because people were "catching up" and we were "losing battles". We were not losing battles. We had already fought the best alliance out there that rivaled and even exceeded our own character development and they scored a couple of kills per fight if they were lucky. Two things led us to leave. EU1 was a graveyard, and we didn't want to participate in spamfest AoE magic battles. Everyone knows that style of game play is not fun, everyone yearns for a return to archery and rank 50's but you can't because to be competitive you need to use the less skillful, less fun higher ranked magic.

The fact is, our bread and butter was archery and needles. That is what we established our reputation on. That is what we mopped up forces 2 and 3x our number with repeatedly. The evidence is here in this history in the videos. AoE magic was a late comer in our story. It showed up at the very end, did not have a meaningful impact in WW2, and when we had a serious AoE capability the main force we fought had an equally deadly AoE capability. The simple truth is we won in every stage of the game. We won all the fights when it was melee. We won all the fights when it was archery. We won all the fights when it was archery and rank 50's and we won all the fights when higher end magic came into play.

Do we think we will ever return to DF? Not in its current state. We want nothing to do with the magic spamfest the game currently is. If Adventurine removed every single nuke in the game beyond rank 50, Afghanistan would ride again, and really, is there anyone honestly out there that would not rather return to that style of combat?

At the end of the day, we left DF in its prime. Before magic got out of control. Before the servers were ghost towns. We defined how later guilds played the game. The current power guilds of EU1 and NA1 have all followed our blueprint and are still trying, and failing to replicate our command structure, our communication system and our tactical ability. We have no regrets about leaving, only the turn DF took with high end magic. People may read this account and say it is trumped up, they may say it is bullshit. Know that you're just like everyone else we've run over. The reason it seems so unbelievable, is because it is so unbelievable. That doesn't however make this account untrue. This is the history of TheMercs and our alliance Afghanistan in Darkfall.

Members were Osium Woof, Ragin Cajun,.... In September they once again sieged and won a city from SUN.