Total Galactic Victory

I've mentioned in the past that Total Galactic War is my favourite Conquest event by far, as it really opens up the planetary scoreboard and gives guilds other than the usual top three a chance to conquer a planet.

In the past my guild has been pretty good at planning ahead for these, as we often used to hear through the grapevine when the next event was planned according to a datamined schedule, or there would be a situation like last Christmas, where Bioware made a point of telling us that they were giving us three Total Galactic Wars in short succession to give us something to do after they delayed the much-anticipated launch of Legacy of the Sith.

This time around though, we were taken almost completely by surprise. It was literally only on the Sunday the week before that a guildie pointed out that he'd just noticed that the next week would be Total Galactic War (the Conquest tab always shows both the current and following week's events), and we all kind of went: "Wait, what?" However, most of us were also pleased as we had not had a Total Galactic War yet since Legacy of the Sith's launch, so it had been a while.

On Tuesday night, the deliberations about where to invade lasted less long than usual. In the past I had a whole list of guilds to avoid, but 7.0 had changed Conquest yet again and I honestly had no real clue how these changes had affected the overall competitive landscape. We just knew to avoid the current "big three" that were winning Conquest all the time when only three planets were up for grabs, but other than that, who knew?

Unfortunately the two large yield planets that we've still never won as a guild over the course of almost a decade were definitely out, so it was a matter of picking one of the other targets that members of the guild still needed for their personal achievements. After a bit of deliberation we settled on challenging a guild called ChissMyHutt for Iokath.

I remembered seeing their name in the top ten for large yield before, so I knew that they would require some effort to beat, but they seemed to be off to a very slow start, which made me hopeful that maybe they hadn't weathered the transition to 7.0 that well.

And indeed, for the first two days or so, things looked good. We quickly claimed first place and our lead slowly increased until we were about 3.5 million points ahead. I was already quietly patting myself on the back for my accurate assessment of their performance, while not stressing too much about my own contribution as we seemed to be winning with ease anyway.

But then, on the Thursday, they suddenly surged ahead, catching up with us within a matter of hours and soon acquiring a lead of almost six million points as well. I've said in the past that competitive Conquest involves a certain degree of psychological warfare, and seeing such a complete turnaround within less than 24 hours was certainly a blow. Had they just been toying with us? Did we even stand a chance if they could outclass us like that in such a short period of time?

However, with years of experience we were not that quick to give up and continued pushing, and in fact redoubled our efforts. I went into maximum grind mode to a degree that I hadn't done since September last year. Back then it was still possible to "prepare" partially completed weeklies and then finish them off quickly during the actual Conquest week, which is no longer possible now, but since the completion requirements for warzone and GSF weeklies were also lowered, I still managed to complete both of them every day, while rounding out my contribution with a bunch of daily zones and other activities.

Still, throughout the next couple of days it wasn't easy to stay motivated, as we consistently remained behind. However, the gap between our scores began to ebb and flow over the course of each night and day, and each time it shrunk we gained a little more ground.

There was also talk in guild about making strategic use of Conquest requisitions. These are an item that instantly completes a character's personal Conquest and were added when login rewards were first introduced as something that comes out of the final box of a specific calendar week. You can't really farm them as it's randomised which reward week will appear in your personal calendar, but if you log in consistently over long periods of time, you can save up a lot of them, and you can pop as many of them at once as you like. With 7.0 increasing personal Conquest targets from 50k to 100k, the tokens also doubled in power.

Since it had been so long since the last Total Galactic War, a lot of members had a lot of tokens saved up. I was one of the people who had popped all of theirs early in the contest, but others hadn't even touched their reserves, and a plan was hatched to "ambush" the opposition on Tuesday morning with a bunch of token pops. Considering that we had several million points worth of tokens saved up, we could potentially beat them even if we remained in second place until then, as long as we didn't allow the gap between us to grow any larger in the meantime.

However, as it turned out... we didn't even need that. After fighting us tooth and nail for several days, ChissMyHutt's activity just kind of seemed to fizzle out on Monday. I mean, Mondays are always a bit of a wild card as you never know how many members of a given guild will be prevented from playing due to work commitments, but the fight just seemed to have completely gone out of them all of a sudden, and we ended up closing the gap and overtaking them organically anyway. We still ended up popping a few tokens on Tuesday morning to be on the safe side (there had been a previous instance where we'd felt secure in victory just for the enemy guild to suddenly overtake us in a last-minute push), but our lead Conquest contributor made sure to save some for next time. I hope we won't have to wait another eight months for a similar opportunity.

All in all, I really enjoyed this round of Total Galactic War not just because we won, but also because it provided us with a good fight. You wouldn't necessarily know about all the stuff going on behind the scenes just from looking at the scoreboard, but those numbers can hide considerable tales of adventure.