2012 Community War

[SEAL]

I dropped by Onteora Lake a few hours ago. I could not find anything saying that you can't camp overnight in an RV, but I got a ranger's phone number and I'll probably call her tomorrow and ask. Personally, I don't see why it would be illegal, since you have to park overnight when you're camping anyway, and you could just as easily sleep in a car. There are some rules when it comes to camping; you can't pitch your tent closer than 150 feet from any road, trail, or water source, and you need a permit if you're staying for more than 4 days with 10+ people, which we don't have to worry about. Aside from that, nothing!

Oh by the way, they now have a porta-potty in the parking lot, so nobody has to bring a shovel, unless someone wants to dig a pitfall trap and fill it with water or something.

[Radiodad]

Thanks, Seal!
I would say that we will probably use the minivan for this trip, and reduce our projected gasoline bill from $600 down to something more reasonable.
The porta-potty is a great thing - much appreciation to the N.Y. state parks dept!
If we manage to leave by noon on Friday, we would hope to be there by ~ 6:30pm.

[SEAL]

If you're not going to bring the camper then I probably won't give the ranger a call. If you have a minivan, then you could probably sleep in that if you don't want to stay in a tent, though I would think that it would be even less comfortable.

Going to have to start thinking about packing today. I just realized that everyone arrives tomorrow! Seems like it was only yesterday when we were getting ready for our first war last year... Hopefully we can make this a good one, even though we probably won't have as many people. It turns out that none of my friends can make it on Saturday, so we'll only have 6 (but at least that's enough for even teams.), but on Sunday, we should have from 8 to possibly 11 if my cousins can make it (their mom said that she'd think about it.).

[Radiodad]

Sounds good. Scott & I checked out both of our tents, and they have all of their pieces. : )
He is planning to bring a bunch of pre-filled water bottles, which will give us fresh water for the camping site.
See you in about 32 hours...

[SEAL]

Sounds good.

It looks like my cousins will not be coming, so we'll have 8 people on Sunday. That's about the same as last year, but we won't have one extra person, so at least the teams will be even.

[marauder]

Wow, it's already upon us. It's a shame that your cousins can't come. How old are they? It will be nice when everyone is old enough to drive themselves. I encourage everyone to not let the lack of numbers get you down, 3 vs 3 is still a lot of fun at night. It might be good to experiment with different game types. I don't think 1hk will be as good with just 3 on 3.

[SEAL]

My cousins' age range is from 15 to 10 (I think.), so they're younger than a lot of us, but they aren't really annoying or anything. I'm probably going to drive myself to this, but my parents are coming by every once in a while to resupply us with food, haha. It will still be fun with 6 people, I'm not really discouraged about that; just the lack of interest in the community.

I actually prefer OHK with less people, and OHS with more people. If you do OHK with an assload of people, those who are eliminated early on might have to wait for a long time and get bored, whereas in OHS, they can just keep fighting. For small battles though, such as when I fight with my brothers, I almost always use OHK, just because OHS isn't a lot of fun with small groups for some reason (I've tried it.).

[marauder]

I've a bit of the opposite opinion, but thats cuz we never had that problem in the Vermin Wars. People would go hang out on my deck or someone else's deck and we had tons of snacks. Or they'd watch/take pics. Too bad we couldnt film.

[DX]

I'm with M4 on this one, I prefer OHS with a small amount of people. Then again, I prefer OHS with any amount of people.

I got Friday off of work, so now I can arrive whenever.

[scottthewaterwarrior]

I hope to leave by 12:00 tomorrow, so if you got any last minute things to say before I get there best say them before around 11:00 am because that will be the last time I can check it. See you all soon!

[SEAL]

Iiiiiiiit's game day (well, not exactly, but we'll still have a few battles tonight.)! Don't really have any updates though, other than that I'm working on packing everything, and I got another 500-pack of water balloons, because I can't find my other ones (might have left them in DX's car, in which case he should bring them.). I'm thinking we'll only have one or two rounds with water balloons anyway.

DX: A good time to be here would be around 6:00-6:30, since that's when Scott's dad said that they'd probably arrive. I'm going to get there around 5:30 to look for a good campsite and to set everything up. I will see you all when you arrive. Looking forward to it!

[DX]

Ok, I will be there around 6ish then. BTW, bring the Electrostorm because I want to duel it with my HH Dream.

The porta-potty is welcome news. But, don't let anyone see you head to it, or bring a CPS when you go (evil laugh).

[marauder]

I will be living vicariously through y'all this weekend, and look forward to reading your war stories, seeing the pictures, and watching the videos.

[Radiodad]

Amen to that, M4!

[scottthewaterwarrior]

We are running a little behind, we hope to arrive by 7:30. I'm just glad that the car started having problems only a mile from home! We have switched cars and are leaving now.

[SEAL]

The forecast is now 40% chance of rain today, 50% tomorrow, and 20% on Sunday. I sure hope it holds off. I don't mind rain, but we're supposed to get thunderstorms too. Perhaps I should bring more extra clothes than I already packed. I advise everyone to do the same (although Scott's probably already on the road by now.).

M4: You've ditched the "4" in your username? Now I guess we can't really call you M4 anymore. Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised if you swam across the Atlantic just to participate, haha. I'll try to get as much footage as possible; I haven't been really good at that in past wars, but I will try extra hard this time.

I'm probably going to leave around 5-ish, and I won't really have internet access until I get back, so if anybody needs information, feel free to call me (DX already did though.). Everyone else: See ya! Wish you were here.

Edit: Didn't see Scott's post. That's alright man; we'll probably be up for a long time anyway.

Edit #2: I guess there will be no 'care package' from iSoaker this year, huh? Just realized that.

[HBWW]

For ditching the 4, I will now have to refer to him as M4A1 lol.

I should rename to HBWW lol.

[marauder]

That would be like me changing my username to Hydrowar or RedScorpionCommandos lol. Marauder was always my codename in battles, it become marauder_4 online because Marauder was already taken on yahoo. In the military the numbers following your codename do have significance. In this case, marauder would usually be the platoon name and 4 would signify platoon sergeant. One reflects platoon leader, 2 reflects senior squad leader, and so forth.

My radiocallsign over here is actually Hannibal 1, but now that I'm thinking about it I may actually have people call me Marauder 4. Because we aren't traditional line troops the format we use for our callsigns doesn't have to follow the traditional method.

[SEAL]

Downpour 2012 is over. To be honest, it was actually a bit of a disappointment in many ways, though it was still fun. First of all, it rained and thundered obnoxiously almost all day yesterday, last night, and this morning. Onteora Lake didn't really work out either; it's absolutely amazing for huge, hardcore groups such as DX's Ridgwood Miltia and similar teams, but it's not great for the type of group that we had, and it's pretty bad for camping; the nearest spot is a 5-minute walk in from the parking lot. I'm thinking that for next year, we should either camp at Wilson, or even Dug Hill if we can decide on a date early enough. Finally, one of my friends didn't show up, so we only had 7 people today. It was still fun though (it's water warfare, come on!), and I'll give you guys the usual brief run-down on each battle.

We didn't have any battles on friday, since Scott's group didn't arrive until it was dark out, but we had a round early the next morning. It was a 15-minute OHS game I believe; me and my brothers vs. DX, Scott, and Bela (that's how it's spelled, right?). My team won 2-0, with me getting the only kills in the game.

That round was the only one we had at Onteora Lake; storms were coming and we wanted shelter, something that the lake doesn't really have, so we went to Dug Hill instead. After waiting out the first storm, we had a semi-casual air-pressure-only Hold the Line game, where Keith and Bela tried to attack everyone else who had taken up a defensive position on and around that wooden train that I took some funny pictures with DX at. My team won again; the defenders got 3 lives and nobody lost all 3 before the time ran out; I think I got hit once.

Then we decided to sort of switch sides, except that a bunch of little kids were playing on the train, so we decided to assault the playground instead. This time, I attacked with DX and Bela, but my team lost because we couldn't eliminate everyone within the time limit, although Bela forgot that he only had 3 lives, so he ended up getting killed 5 times before anyone noticed, and that didn't help us.

After another frickin' downpour (why the heck did we have to call this war that!? ), we decided to play a more conventional round, a Thunder Gulch redo, this time with heavy-caliber blasters! Me, Keith, and DX vs. Jon, Scott, and Bela. This round was a LOT different than last year's. Whereas then each team had double-digit scores, this time both teams started out ultra-defensively, and my team ended up winning 1-0. The only kill in the game was a result of awesome teamwork between me and Keith; Bela was hiding under the ledge right below us, my brother drew him out, and I blasted him nearly point-blank in the shoulder with a 5X blast from my 2700.

Then we had more storms. After it was gone, we went to that dumping area that we played a 3HK defense game at last year. This time, my team (same teams as the last round.) defended the ridge behind where the rock piles used to be (most of them are gone now.), playing HTL instead of 3HK. My team won, once again without losing anybody on our side. It was pretty fun, but the terrain up there was pretty hard to dodge on. I think I got killed 1 or 2 times.

No storms interrupted us this time, so we switched sides. I took up a CPS 2000 this time, and I actually did really good with it. I got maybe 4 kills (more than anybody else, I think.), and many more close shots. I found out that I really love the 2000; the one I used in Hydropocalypse had a bad trigger, and was annoying to use, but not the one I used in this round. I really got the hang of how to use it; I would only take a shot if I was sure I could make the kill, and almost all my shots were pretty dead-on. Dispite all this, we still lost, but the defense only had a few lives left; we did much better than the other team did the previous round.

After that, we had a sort of team soakfest on the playground that I filmed, but didn't participate in. Once we were done with that, we went back to Onteora Lake, but nobody really wanted to fight, so we didn't have any night wars, even though I was up for it. We got another storm at like 5:00 in the morning, and more rain at around 8:30 that followed us to Dug Hill, until stopping a little while before my friend Bailey arrived. We hiked across the street to the cliffs that we took pictures of. Once again, we played HTL, I was with Jon and Bela, while everyone else defended the cliffs. Even though my team had two Douchenators, we still lost without getting a single kill. It was the most unbalanced round that I think I've ever played in (much more so than the second defense game at Hydropocalypse.), and it was unfortunate that I had to be on the disadvantaged side. Basically, we picked a spot by the cliffs that looked like it'd be the easiest on the offense, but the terrain absolutley STUNK for us; it was very hard to dodge on, and there were a ton of big trees, rendering the WBLs almost useless, though I did come close to hitting people twice. I don't know if we'll even count the stats for this one, since it was so imbalanced.

Time was already running short for Scott, but we didn't want to finish the day with only one round, so we had a more conventional OHS game, with air-pressure and small CPS blasters. This was defenitely the best round of the war. We did community members vs. non-community members, but we were outnumbered, so it was more fair. We played near the spot where my team was ambushed in the first round of Downpour '11, which was a really great area. The game itself was incredibly intense. The fighting rarely ceased for more than like half a minute. I got 3 kills and 1 death, and in the end, my team won with a score of like 19 to 6. They did have higher numbers, but they weren't as experienced as we were, and they took a lot of risks.

That was the last round of the war. DX has all the scores from every game. We came up with a super-accurate way to keep track of stats and scores. It was built off of M4's idea where you write down who killed you; basically, we put a notebook at each spawn point, and if you were hit, you'd run back and write down who killed you, with your respawn time depending on how fast you could write. It worked extremely well, and as a result, DX has the most accurate stats of any war so far. I was going to keep score, but I left my clipboard in my tent, which then got soaked. I hope DX will post all the stats soon.

This war was fun, but it could have been so much better. Unfortunately, the small numbers and the weather, plus the fact that the only car that I drive had to break down, making it so I had to rely on others to transport our stuff everywhere, all conspired to make this war less fun than it should have been. I seriously hope it's better next year. At the very least, it should have more people. I will try to post the pictures and write a war story soon.

[marauder]

Looks like you really stepped up your game this time and kept Duxburian from raking in the kills. We have a friendly competition to see who will avg more hits made per game, so I owe you my thanks

Try to look at things in a more positive light. Whenever we get new players to show up it's a good thing. Hopefully Bela and Bailey will be back for next years war. Some things always go wrong, it's just something you should come to expect. We are learning a lot about what's good/bad for the community war. Umstead had much better places to battle than Sal's Branch, but we never went there because people who were coming and going would never be able to find us that far into the woods. It sounds like the same is true for Onteora Lake. So, we need a place that has easy access to camping, a shelter, refil locations, and a parking lot so we aren't too far off from new arrivals. I really like Dug Hill and I think that it has a lot of untapped potential. There is a highly overgrown area in the woods behind the crumbling asphault/gravel mound. If you cut a few trails through the brush we could have lots of close quarter ambushes. It reminds me a lot of areas we fought in during the Vermin Wars, or the canebreak (I don't know what y'all call it up north?) that DX showed me at Ridgewood. It wouldn't be too difficult to add a few bunkers in the main battle area, that plateu in the woods. I understand it's a park and people might not want you erecting fortifications with lumber or chopped logs, but you could make some nice natural bunkers out of downed trees, logs, branches with leaves/needles etc. Those 2 things would add a lot to the playing experience at Dug Hill.

I hope everyone else had a fun time. I look forward to seeing the pictures. This November or December I will be up your way visiting my nephews. If it's not snowing I'd be down for meeting up with you and DX.