Imperial Conquest Adventures

You might recall that last month, I bemoaned the way conquest has made me reluctant to play any character or participate in any activity that doesn't contribute to my guild's score, with my Imperial alts being affected the most. Now, one solution to this might have been to just try and not worry about conquest as much... but I instead opted to bring it to the other faction instead.

Twin Suns Squadron has had an Imperial alt guild pretty much for as long as I can remember. It just hasn't really served any purpose other than as "alt storage" so to speak. Every few months we'd organise a little event on Imp side, but that's about as far as any activity on that side ever went. We did spring for a guild ship at one point though, and you know what that means... (Guild ships are required to invade a planet for conquest.)

One of the perks of being an officer in your guild is that sometimes you can make things happen just the way you want them to be, and so - after carefully looking at the maths - I proposed that we could try to go for a small yield target on Imp side some time. Provided we weren't trying to win first place on a planet with TSS, and given that we were regularly earning more points than we needed to achieve even the large target anyway, I figured there would be no harm in shearing off some of the "excess" and transplanting it to Imp side. Sure, rewards for small yield would be less per character than for large yield, but it would give us the opportunity to do something slightly different.

I considered that the small yield target only requires the guild to hit 200k points to be rewarded, so with a personal target of 15k, that would only require 14 characters to hit their individual targets. (As a bonus, the small yield was then lowered to 170k in the next patch, reducing the participation requirement to 12.) Considering that we have more than fifty members contributing to conquest on Republic side, many of whom regularly hit their target on multiple characters, siphoning off just that number seemed very doable.

Even so I remained only cautiously optimistic after the other officers approved of my idea, because only half a dozen people had expressed interest in the public forum thread on the subject. Then again, how many people even still read guild forums these days?

Apparently not that many, because once things actually got going, interest exploded, and far beyond simply achieving our small guild target, we actually ended up winning first place on the small planet that week, presumably leaving some of our competitors baffled by this completely unknown guild coming out of nowhere to conquer Section X.

We almost repeated the same feat the week after, though we ended up being pushed back into second place during the last few hours of the very last day. Can't beat competition that has time to play while most of us are at work! (Though in fairness, we could have tried much harder earlier in the week to increase our lead - we'd just become too sure of ourselves.)

Even though the content we were doing and the classes we were playing were essentially the same, it's still been great fun just to bring some different characters out for air. I was particularly pleased by the chance to do Imperial operations with my guildies and to earn some social points. Despite of how long I've had some of those alts, their social levels tend to be low due to me rarely playing them except to see a new bit of story from a different perspective, so it was nice to take them out for some grouping.