Now that was a fun siege! Alliance versus alliance (with some minor politics involved), jungle fighting, interesting use of terrain, great tactical moves, high participation from both sides, and everyone wearing their Sunday best made last night a truly great time in DarkFall.

As mentioned yesterday, Super Friends dropped a siege on the DR-owned Sunstone hamlet up on Yssam, and on the forums it was stated that SF would like to keep this Alliance vs Alliance, no mercs or temporary allies. Such claims have been made before by other alliances, and for whatever reason it has never worked out, so it was very surprising (and fun) that last night both sides kept their word and just had a slugfest between two powerhouse alliances.

SF won some initial battles, most notably controlling the nearby DR city of Talpec that was being used as a meeting point and place to gear up. They dropped some cannons and disabled the bank (great move), and when they left a third party entered the city to control the stone. Whether this was random or hush-hush planned is debatable, but it did force the main DR groups to head back to Talpec and clean the city up. The bank was repaired and the Zealot alliance was called in to sit in Talpec. At the same time Dark Hand of Valor was also raiding Dagnamyr (another DR city on the mainland) and making it difficult for people to gear up and recall from that location. I believe this group was also countered at some point, but again it caused a disruption and some confusion.

Once Talpec was secured, a small (15 v 15 or so) skirmish broke out in the jungle just south of Sunstone. I and one other member of Inquisition (Hi Hoppy) were involved, and initially the fighting was going well. Lots of tombstones began to pop up, and communication on Vent was overall positive. Things quickly changed when a second enemy force rolled in and crashed into our flanks. The call was given to retreat back to the mountains, but not everyone made it. I escaped with one hit to go on my battlehorn, healed it and my other mount up, and went back to Talpec to regroup with the rest of Inquisition (we had a group of 8 going forward).

The main fighting at the siege was taking place just east of the hamlet, where SF had placed two siege stones. The area itself is a small maze of cliffs, ones that required some clever use of magic to get on top of. From this strategic position, both sides rained down magic and arrows at each other. Both sides were constantly trying to pull each other off the cliffs with knockback spells like Come Hither and Magma Storm. Arrows also move a character slightly and could be used to knock down anyone too close to an edge. Once someone fell off it became a challenge to get back up, and more than a few tombstones could be seen around the cliffs as players fell and were nuked down with vicious focus fire. The entire time it was stressed on vent to keep everyone alive and not let our numbers dwindle while we held position until the stones could be destroyed.

Back to our Inq group, we rode north from Talpec to Sunstone, being cautious not to run directly into the enemy. Eventually we reached a mountain to the south of the cliff maze overlooking the southern jungle of Sunstone. We noticed small groups of enemy riders coming from the south to join their main force, and we set up a little trap to hopefully pick them off. We spotted one player trailing behind and jumped out from behind our tree to down his mount. In short order our swarm of magic and arrows killed the mount, and he ran on foot towards the cliffs. After a short chase, we pinned him in the cliff maze and, while the magic battle raged overhead, cut him down.

We went back to our trap location, but after a short wait and no action decided instead to take up position just east of the cliff maze. We joined a few VAMP members and kept the enemy from advancing too far on the ground while adding some firepower to the magic battle up top. Once the word was given on vent to push north, we had to take only a few steps before we found ourselves in the melee battle. The fight was decidedly one sided as I believe the SF forced had been slowly ground down, and with no quick reinforcement spot (unlike DR with Talpec), they could not replenish their numbers nearly as well as we could.

Our group of eight worked well together, making sure to stay in close proximity to each other and offered support when needed. Many of the enemy players are some of the top guys on the server, and alone we would have made for some easy targets. Working as a group however we not only kept each other alive, but were also able to contribute to the fighting and down a few targets. Once this battle was over the siege was won as the second siege stone was destroyed. No one from our group got decapitated (we were able to rez the two who went down), and I think everyone came away with at least some loot.

The after-battle forum posting so far has been courteous, with both sides agreeing it was a great siege with near-even numbers. Performance from the server was perfect, and those with decent machines had more than playable FPS. I myself never dropped below 40fps with only shadows turned off. Last night was certainly a highlight night for everyone, and hopefully the start of a new trend going forward for sieging.

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