I had hopes that I would be able to write something about the first phase of the Global Agenda Patch 1.3 by now, but since Hi-Rez thinks it would be best not to start the Testserver and have all the people wait for hours instead, its just another AvA roundup of Echelon AvA.

Echelon map before opening on May, 4th

The first half of the week wasn’t that interesting to be honest. The daily Echelon AvA portion consisted mostly of Mpire and RebeL bashing each other, desperately trying to get the upper hand over the other one while Stahl was sitting in their corner, observing and producing whatever tech they got currently running.

In fact they actually weren’t obliged in any way to pay attention to other hexes since the space between Mercenerys and RebeL swaps its owner almost daily while the last constant part of the map, STEALTH, is ghosting some of the bonus hexes to the east of their territory.

Things were about to change when Mpire suddenly withdrew all their HQs from Echelon to Obelisk and shortly after placed their very own forge on Obelisk. There wasn’t any resistance despite JL on the map, so people in Europe may have already seen a secured mapwin for Mpire. But it shouldn’t have been, at least not when the Americans are around. With support of two Golden Vandals, they brought the Forge down, right before the Vandal nerf was patched in.

The day after we saw said nerf, making the Golden and the Black Lance Vandals just useless for any AvA match due to the massive weight increase. A bit too late for Mpire but since the Blueprint and the Ressources are completely refunded when the forge hex is conquered by the enemy, they are free to test the might of the americans once again.

Mpire Forge on Obelisk

With the forge down on Obelisk, Mpire switched their focus back to Echelon, eventually capturing the whole bonus cluster - obviously with the goal to put a forge on Echelon now. And if it wasn’t enough, they even managed to contest the RebeL base in the east. With such a big hole in the territory and the defense of RebeL, Mpire truly thrusted a spear right into the heart of their enemy, putting the pressure on the blue forces to respond and hinder the pink behemoth on putting the forge up.

We will see if they are able to.

Echelon map after closing on Thursday, May, 6th