Legion, an international and experienced realm
So Hi, my name is Morten, 36 years old from Norway and played as Tore Hund on Carby as 1 of the leaders there.
First I want to thank you for congratulating us on our victory. We fought hard and long as a team to get this score, a goal we set up to reach before the server started.
Legion, as I see it, was formed for s17 (last carby server) were we gathered a group of different players from around the world with different game experiences. Yct has been the one who always gathered people and created the discord server for us to use.
On that server we learnt a few things about our group; different languages and levels of English communication causes a lot of problems. This issue is something that we worked hard on there.
For this server Yct gathered again up a lot of players, the core from Legion last server merging with other players from the official discord realm finders. Experienced and good players that are both known in the community and with their merits; like Aiwin, Manuel and Golbert. As a realm we finished with 14 out of 15 players gathered from before the server started. A testament to the power of premade realms and to have the stamina to keep together, even when people are in disagreement.
Rough start
We did have a rough start, for me the server started to early for me to commit to the leadership role i had on other servers.
Personally I had already given Yct my word to follow him as leader in this server, trust in each other is very important for our realm to keep going.
Being international we had drawbacks but we had a major benefit; online presence almost 24/7 7 days a week.
Depending on what war situation we were in at the time, we had huge advantages from this.
Several wars were in essence won overnight and then we could just use the tactical advantage of defending from the other realms when they try to catch up.
While we succeeded like we did, we did have some really problematic times. When we ended up ascending into a sandwiched position between our 2 biggest rivals; Velko and FRogs, we were in the end forced to relocate after being eaten up from both sides.
While on the surface this looked like a loss for us, it was the opposite and the deciding factor for our server victory.
As I knew from the game mechanics, the experience ratio for each fight is the key to get the strongest benefit in the game; a level superiority.
From sadness and depressing times to victory
Even through a very depressing time for many players, we pushed for full focus on our opponent with the worst ratio, giving us effectively a 4x experience difference for each fight against them. In essence that means that we could be perfectly countered (all warlords all slots 100% effective counter) and still would end with equal experience gained. In essence we cannot lose and therefor the units produced has an extremely high resource/experience ratio. When we moved Ark we had already secured more or less 13 out of top 15 players on the server and some of us with huge gaps that was never possible to regain without us actively trying to give them beneficial experience ratios.
The mentality is extremely important here, we need to view any attack on our towers as a chance to earn good experience. Getting demoralized is more destructive than any tower lost to the realm.
A major factor for our victory was Yct always pushing members to upgrade their resource fields as first priority. There is a lot of autonomy in Legion, as long as we follow the long-term plans and do their best in that regard, there isn't much to complain about. All realms need a «whip» and Yct made sure to whip us all into the strongest possible way. This allowed us to donate effectively to supplies after our private production was at decent levels.
A very effective strategy to keep the exponential rise as the game demands of top realms.
Military strategies and main opponents
When it comes to military strategies we had 2 very distinct different opponents in Velko and FRogs.
Velko has a tendency to do large singular attacks with varied troops and some runner-strategies like moving warlords to an advanced tower and then start a conquer with a 100+ speed warlord so they can add onto. Or just steal with runners.
However from last server Forisil and others have been extremely experienced in defending against «spray attacks» sending defenses to countless towers. So on this server we really didn't have any true losses from attacks like that.
Velko was most effective with their large conquers, especially with several personal mistakes on i2 and early i3. However, after I took over any large-scale defenses, we didn't lose any map objective, unless I was directly told so by Yct.
Yct and Khater like to use portals as bait for attacks and it worked several times for us. Both against Velko and FRogs; as most of the time we had wars where both were involved at the same time
Defensive Velko is very strong, they produce very effective counters and grind down our warlords stuck in towers. This was the reason we stopped to attack in our last official war when we already had the upper hand in war objectives. But I couldn't tell them that, never show your own weakness and never inform your enemy about their effective strength.
FRogs was different, they do attacks in a different way, some large attacks to help out with portal destructions or some 10ish warlord attacks on several towers. I think their strategy would be pretty effective if we did not have our clear level superiority. It is also a very good way for lesser experienced military commanders to practice and see how effective their counter setup was. Many people play games like this for military reasons; to try out strategies and get benefits for the realms from thought-out effective actions like a nightly conquer, stealing orbs or taking over goblin forts overnight to get benefits.
FRogs defenses was also effective but not in the same way as Velko; they seemed to prefer to somewhat counter the first 5-10 warlords and then send a full defensive wave and let the die fall where they fall.
This did however seem to change deeper into i4 where their defensive play got far better and more effective. Maybe Alakhai from Velko gave them some tips 
Investment in time and availability
But these 2 opponents were nothing compared to my true problem for this server; my girlfriend hehe. When there is war of some seriousness, we need to have 24/7 watch for incoming attacks to deal with them. This unfortunately led to several arguments between her and me, several times Velko made attacks at the worst times for me and I had to find some excuses to prepare defenses. In the end we came to an understanding; it is better I spend my time playing my game challenging my intelligence than going out partying 
But in all seriousness, some playstyles of this game takes up a lot of time that cannot extend over many servers in a row. I like the server aspect where there is a time limit of the server. At least I can give my girlfriend a clear date where i am not playing anymore.
Who are the heroes of your Realm, any special mentions?
You asked me about heroes and I think that is a little difficult, but I want to mention 1 player, Ibonsai, who I understand to be 70 years old. I love that we have a realm where we spread not only on the global map but also in age brackets. As well to Forisil who was with me in defensive duties. Especially for his calming words when I had 4+ fail-sent defenses in a row eating in on our time
How did you organize communications and coordination within the Realm?
Talking about communication we have our Discord server, but we also use in-game communication in many ways. Active leaders pin players in-game when they log on for taking over tower, joining attacks or placing warlords on watch. Tower planners are very active with towers, preparing paths and confirming permanent towers, diplomats pin places were we are not touching due to talks to other realms while military we pin towers were enemy is gathering, giving us extra time to prepare counters against them.
Announcements are somewhat crucial but mostly in very specific times of the game. Like what to do during long-stretching wars, how to deal with ascension and saving resources etc. But the benefit of being in realms with veterans is that most have a advanced understanding of the game and therefor do not need to be told constantly what to do. Trusting your fellow members to not do things the way you want, but in their best way and that this will benefit the realm as a whole will give us all a much better night sleep
Some announcements I made I used as a fun way to use old Greek rhetoric and speeches from Demosthenes and Cicero. Without making it overt I used their ancient style of writing about military and public situations as inspiration. It is interesting to see how people from such different parts of the world understand and respond positively to such style of writing. For diplomats and announcers I can truly recommend reading these historical speeches to understand how to communicate and spread motivation for your realm.
Conclusion
All members deserve praise and to be proud of what we did together. Had we not won the island a long time before the server finished, we would have finished with all our players safely in the top 20 where we were dominating all server. The placements do not give true credit to some of our strong players.
Let us hope next time Legion will have stronger opponents so we can have even more wars and fights during the entire game server.
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