How I learned to stop worrying and love inactivity

Well, there really isn't much to tell. I came, I played, I stopped playing, I spammed the forums...and then I kept spamming. Well, there's a bit more to it.

I first came to Fun Authority because I was investigating online games for an assignment I was planning for a couple of trainees at work. They were supposed to design a simple game to demonstrate their programming skills. Anyway, they wound up building a completely different type of game, but something about the strategy/simulation of conquest and the sense of community on the site made it seem interesting. One of the trainees later told me he got into Earth 2025 because I'd pointed him to the FA site. Then he ridiculed the smaller FA site. I think that the size of FA has been one of its strengths. The earth site didn't interest me because I got lost in the crowd.

After starting an account I decided to join a clan. TNSF looked as good as any and I joined them. After a week, I had no idea who was in my clan, or who my clan leader was. The clan forum had no activity, so I left and looked for another clan. Precision Tool was my next choice - but after about 2-3 days...they disbanded! I suddenly found myself unclanned without any warning. I wrote to Milkman and asked him what was going on. He didn't know I'd been in PT but said...oh well you might as well join AoE. So I joined up and started to use strats that Milk showed me. Things were going quite well there, and there were quite a few interesting people. Among them: flacky, Dunner, Anraulevan Emperor and Chronic Wolf (Later to become Timberwolf). We were a merry little clan. Then after a couple of sets where we kept getting into minor fights with little clans because we would LG them...Milk decided to take on Dogz...just before his computer went down for a couple of months.

AoE started getting caned both in the game and in the forums. Milk sent a message telling me to lead the clan, but we didn't actually need leading we just kept building and rebuilding (with tBr providing moral support and slings) fighting a losing battle against a far superior force. Randy gave us the ultimatum - they would fight us until we disbanded the clan. Milk sent a second message to say that we should do as Randy suggested. To our credit we all stuck it out - not one AoE member left the clan to avoid the constant beatings. I was offered a position in tBr and I decided to take it up, but only once the conflict with Dogz was resolved. Funnily enough, I was also offered a position in Dogz - MarcoPro wanted to train me.

Once I joined tBr I started learning the thief strat. Back in those days you could attack or scout your own countries which made it possible to shift wealth from a number of treasure producing countries to a single scouting country. Within a couple of sets that strat was eliminated by PB making it impossible to scout anyone in your own clan. I think I suggested that we should make an alliance with another clan and then just scout each other OR split the clan into two temporarily and have a planned 'just for fun' war between the tBr members. Unfortunately that never happened - partly through inactivity and partly through being attacked by other clans.

It was about that time that I got a bit bored with the game. I now tend to do a fair bit of recruiting for tBr. I've only played a few sets since that time. Instead I spam the forums...battling the forces of evil with words instead of nukes. :) I've visited a couple of other clans including Reese/Smile as Bwa mentioned...but I really didn't do much to help. I joined Dogz for a set too (just for fun) - but inactivity meant that Randy kicked me out just before the end of round clan standings were recorded.