Soakemore! 2013 DC area water war

[scottthewaterwarrior]

Can someone elaborate on exactly how "super-hot" it gets at DC in the summer? Are we talking 100°+?

It shouldn't get that high, especially in May. The main problem in DC is the humidity, it is almost as bad as it was at Downpour 2012 all the time! (70-80% humidity) One thing I forgot to mention, the bugs are terrible. I've gone outside with long pants, for only 5 minutes in the summer, and ended up with 3 mosquito bites! Bring lots of bug spray because you will need it!

What kind of rounds are we playing?

Kill the SS Liberation Front?
In all seriousness though, I hadn't really giving it too much thought. For all the local wars I have just made it up as I go - I used to make elaborate plans, but they always fell through, so I figured, why bother? For this war though I will probably plan something out though, I'm just not sure what it is yet. I figured one of the days we'd battle at Carderock and the other we'd fight at the island. It really depends on the date chosen since the alternate (Saturday/Sunday) which day you can reserve every weekend.

- Everyone else, please be water-bottle ready this time! Everyone should ideally also have a bag of at least a few dozen unfilled balloons at all times (many balloons cost less than a penny each and I have lots of extra I can bring), unless you only use expensive balloons.

- If it thunderstorms or something crazier and we end up going inside, I have a laptop which I may load movies on before the trip. (I'll also prepare it so I can work on water warfare stuff.) Scott, what N64/Wii games do you have?

I probably have enough water bottles for 20 people to have two 50oz ones and three 20ouncers! I even have a cooler or two, the kind that have spigots on them.

I really hope it doesn't come to that, I'd hate for every one to come so far just to be stuck in side.
As far as games go though, I have a lot, most of them are for PS2. I can list them all if you want, but I have around 40 of them. It is hard to stop buying them when they are like $5 each!
I have some good ones for N64 like Super Smash, Tony Hawk 2, and Vigilante 8, but only 2 controllers. Maybe I will have to invest in a copy of Golden eye and two more remotes for the off chance we get stuck inside!
I don't have many good Wii games.

Doodle Calender: http://www.doodle.com/93turavwetuw5kxc I have also added a link in the first post as well (two of them actually).

[HBWW]

Bargain bin games, I see. I don't blame ya either, it's interesting that the PS2 is still selling games when people even consider it a "classic" console. $5 games are normal on Steam too, but that's another story. =p Still, it's good that you're saving money and getting more value out of things. Any Mario Kart? I'd be very excited for Goldeneye 007 though; haven't touched it in years and last time I had, I couldn't see anything at N64 resolution in split screen. The good old days, as they say. I do want to see if I can own anyone in that game though; I know some of the maps and 007 allows you to use modern FPS controls (D-pad to move, stick to aim), so I'll adapt fine to it. =p

Now, almost off topic, but I managed to fix up the piston seal on an old Stream Machine I got from a garage sale. I'm excited because after spending weeks, and hours at a time in the basement, I haven't gotten anything fixed. The pull valve on XP 150 I got from Marauder (from Season Opener) got busted somehow, and the CPS 1500 I got from DX leaks from the pull valve pin. =\ But anyway, the Stream Machine is almost ready; I just had to clean off the seal on the plunger after sawing open the tube. Next I gotta plug up the front nozzle holes and I'm good to go; ready for the naval wars. =p (The Stream Machine I bought recently was the cheaper, lower capacity one.)

Funny how we're called the SSLF, yet we haven't crashed any Nerf SS wars with proper water weaponry.

Bottles. I'll pack like 4, just in case lol. I too, have a massive cache of bottles, half of which I really need to send to recycling. Still, it's nice to have a little bit of history of how Ice Mountain has changed their bottles.

The Doodle calendar is rather short, though it makes sense since we're limiting to weekends. I wish I could write something on it, but I just can't at this point. Black Six, if you're able to make it, you will need to be designated on one of the teams. Marauder forced me to pick a team for the Season Opener for the official League rivalries, and I presume we'll be doing the same here.

You don't need to make elaborate plans to have a say over what games are run. Just throw together a games list; a grab bag if you will. Or we can always pull something from the previous community war's game list if Marauder/DX don't end up completely dictating most of the games we play. =p (Then again, my team leaders probably setup games better than I do, but we don't know that for sure yet. xD)

Now, if we can get a roster soon, we can start thinking about how the rivalry will play out. In the Season Opener, we had the WW and AP only games as specialties, and you may count the assault/defend game as another. (Along with Chaos 1HS which Marauder was nice enough to setup for all of us.) I think it'd be nice to have some specialty games for this war too. Since Scott knows the area best, he'd be the one to figure it out. Like I said earlier, we may not necessarily need a schedule, but it's good to have that list of games we can pull from instead of only playing the same 1HS games over and over again. =p

Here's the list I threw together in the Season Opener thread that we didn't play.
- 1HK Rivalry
- VIP (2 rounds)
- Water Ballon Dodgeball
- Final Stand or Hold the Line Variation, or other game at Under-Construction House
- Homemades/WBL's only (Do we even have enough equipment for this?)
- Symmetrical Objective-Based Game (Non-CTF), such as Soakn' Destroy.
- Asymmetrical Objective-Based Game, such as Onslaught or Assault.
- Breakthrough (Experimental game as listed on HBWW)
- Magic Hammer (As listed on HBWW), if anyone's interested.

In addition, we could really mix things up for the naval wars. Normandy landing? Check. Pure naval warfare? Check. We can setup fancy hit rules for it if no one's come up with anything, for example, boats are 3HK (infinite lives, 3 water balloon hits to kill) and can only be harmed by water balloons. All players are standard 1HK/1HS; water balloons that hit players don't count against the boat. 3 balloon hits on a boat and it's "sunk" and has to respawn behind the team's formation. Alternatively, we can play so that any water balloon hit on any boat/player sinks the entire boat, and streams act as standard 1HK/1HS, but this doesn't sound as fun. The key to this is that every boat has a working WBL that they know how to use.

Also, paddle splashing counts, IMO.

Anyway, just so we're clear, I'm not trying to tell you how to run your own war, but I thought all this could help. Plus, game ideas give people something to look forward to. =p Like I said, doesn't have to be elaborate plans, just stuff we can pick from when we're finally there and ready to play.

[scottthewaterwarrior]

Here's the list I threw together in the Season Opener thread that we didn't play.
- 1HK Rivalry
- VIP (2 rounds)
- Water Ballon Dodgeball
- Final Stand or Hold the Line Variation, or other game at Under-Construction House
- Homemades/WBL's only (Do we even have enough equipment for this?)
- Symmetrical Objective-Based Game (Non-CTF), such as Soakn' Destroy.
- Asymmetrical Objective-Based Game, such as Onslaught or Assault.
- Breakthrough (Experimental game as listed on HBWW)
- Magic Hammer (As listed on HBWW), if anyone's interested.

In addition, we could really mix things up for the naval wars. Normandy landing? Check. Pure naval warfare? Check. We can setup fancy hit rules for it if no one's come up with anything, for example, boats are 3HK (infinite lives, 3 water balloon hits to kill) and can only be harmed by water balloons. All players are standard 1HK/1HS; water balloons that hit players don't count against the boat. 3 balloon hits on a boat and it's "sunk" and has to respawn behind the team's formation. Alternatively, we can play so that any water balloon hit on any boat/player sinks the entire boat, and streams act as standard 1HK/1HS, but this doesn't sound as fun. The key to this is that every boat has a working WBL that they know how to use.

Also, paddle splashing counts, IMO.

Anyway, just so we're clear, I'm not trying to tell you how to run your own war, but I thought all this could help. Plus, game ideas give people something to look forward to. =p Like I said, doesn't have to be elaborate plans, just stuff we can pick from when we're finally there and ready to play.

I think the island would work really well to try Soak and Destroy or maybe a base capture game (like in the Battlefield series). The island is pretty long, but rather narrow so it would keep the action pretty high since it is hard to outflank your enemies (it is still possible, but you don't have that much space compared to more square battlefields).

The island does have a tree house on it so we could do some sort of HLT variation using it. Duxburian thought it might work when he scouted it with me, though I'm not so sure now. After how that round worked when we attacked the bathrooms at MOAB, the tree house seems like it would be much like that except it has a roof and three foot tall walls to hide behind. I might ban the tree house from being used just because it would be really unfair to any team that tried to take it.

We should play a OHK round at Carderock, it has a lot of room for mobility but at the same time is still inclosed enough (the river on one side, the canal on the other) that we probably wouldn't spend an hour looking for each other. OHS would work well too.

That chaos round Marauder did was pretty fun, I might try and set something like this up myself. It would have to be at the island though, Carderock has too many hikers and at least at the island, people would have to sneak the guns across on the ferry in order to get them out of there. When you guys get here though, it might be a good idea to remind me to fill the guns. I will probably remember but I can see me packing them all up the night before and not putting any water in them!

We almost certainly wont be able to do a home made only round, I'm not sure there are enough practical home made guns for the community members, let alone the people I invite locally. In fact, most my local friends will probably be armed with lower CPS class guns, and those will all be borrowed from me since most of them have no guns of their own.

I would really like to get the date settled before I really start planning out what games will be played. Other then night wars, we will only be battling on the island one of the days so I need to know the dates as soon as possible so I can make reservations. If you are planning on attending please list the dates you are available on the doodle calender ASAP!

[SEAL]

I should be available on every weekend you have on the calendar except for May 31st to June 2nd, as that is when Duxburian was talking about doing the Waterbridge war, and after getting to see Waterbridge in person, I definitely don't want to miss out on fighting there.

As for rounds, as usual I don't really have any particular preferences, but some things I want to see are OHK rounds, as we haven't done those that much, and I also want to do an XP-only round, which I think would be pretty interesting. I think we'll have plenty of variety on the field, as most mid-sized XP blasters are competitive with one another (it's not like there are only a handful of good XP blasters). And nobody has the exception (the 300).

Lets hope the weather cooperates this time. I really don't want to spend time sitting around or playing video games after driving all day. It would be helpful if we didn't have to go out to get food as well; in my personal opinion, that's the single biggest thing that eats up (er, no pun intended) time that could be spent fighting.

[HBWW]

Personally, I'm not a fan of rules that restrict where players may go (even if certain places allow a unique advantage), if my comments on the Season Opener assault game were any indication. Of course, it's not up to me, but I figured I'd voice my preference on it anyway.

I should've left the homemades only round unlisted. I'm not 100% sure myself if I'll be able to bring them.

Still can't really fill out the Doodle calendar; I should get a job ASAP and figure that out, but that's a whole other thing to deal with.

Scott, you've played Bad Company/BC2 or Battlefield 3 right? Breakthrough is basically a variation of Rush (and Invasion from Halo Reach). I've mentioned the general idea at least a dozen times in various chatrooms: large scale assault game with multiple phases, with one single or set of attackers' objectives (i.e. CTF or the Attack Target(s) used in Soakn' Destroy) at each phase. Switch sides after attackers loose a phase or after defenders loose, etc.

[SEAL]

So what's the deal with this? I need to have a definite date pretty far in advance (at least 3 weeks) for me to start planning. Like I said, late May is preferable. Unlike New Jersey or Connecticut, I can't just go to DC.

There ain't much for me to say about the actual war right now. Just make a good schedule that makes the most of our time, and everybody should try to bring their own food so we don't have to waste time going out for it. Scott, it would be great if you could supply everyone if that's possible. As for gametypes, I just want to see long rounds, OHK rounds, and (an) XP-only round(s).

[HBWW]

At this point, it's fair to say that we need to worry about the date of the event far more than what kind of games we setup. A lot of scheduling questions can be resolved on the spot and still result in a fun war. I see games planning as more of a way to get excited about the event and to stir up discussion.

Based on those who responded to the Doodle, we have two possible weekends that everyone so far can attend: May 24th and June 7th. SEAL seems to prefer the former, and I'm unsure who would prefer the latter. However, we need to get more responses from those who are able to respond. Otherwise, we should wrap things up and pick the date. Having a date picked would also help me schedule my own time, so I know for sure which days I have to set aside and can thus plan accordingly. Doodle does not allow you to place question marks on each day, and doing so wouldn't be of much use so I'll simply not respond to the poll since I don't even have plans laid out that far ahead yet. However, I will definitely weigh in if I find any conflicts later on with the final date picked and myself, taking account for when others can go and how last minute it is that I know of the conflict. (Basically, I'm low on the Doodle priority list due to all the uncertainty.)

[SEAL]

*Coughcoughcoughcough*

It seems like May 24th is the best option, but I'd like to know if we could push it back one weekend. While I can still come on the 24th, that is Memorial Day weekend and I might have to miss a few things to make the war. Also, if DX is hosting a war in Waterbridge on June 1st, that means the wars would only be a week apart. I prefer to have them spread out more. Just something to consider.

Of course, if I don't get a date until like a week beforehand, I probably won't be able to come at all. I need to plan for these types of things.

[HBWW]

^ Your Doodle entry only shows the weekend of May 24 and June 7, which are 2 weeks apart.

Anyway, I'm hoping for an interview soon, but punching my future work schedule about isn't going to do me any good at this point in my career. Unfortunately, I can't fill out anything Doodle unless I can talk to those people first. The uncertainty is really getting to me (of all community wars this summer, not just Soakemore), but it's something I have to deal with.

Scott, on the other hand, seems to be real busy. It looks like it could be a close call here; we're already less than one month in for some of the potential weekends to be picked.

[SEAL]

I fired Scott an email; hopefully he checks that more often than here (unlike me). I told him that he doesn't have to worry about setting up a schedule or something (we can work on that as a group), he just needs to give us a definite date.

^ Your Doodle entry only shows the weekend of May 24 and June 7, which are 2 weeks apart.

Not sure what you mean by that. I can come on that weekend, it's just that I'd rather not if we had the choice. Ultimately though, we should just pick the date where as many people can make it as possible.

[HBWW]

Well good news, I got an interview for the job I'm looking at. Bad news is, it'll probably be too late before I figure out for sure which weekends I can attend. Take my Doodle entry with a grain of salt as I may not be able to attend on the aforementioned dates anyway.

Weekend of May 17th: This may be my best chance actually. I interview on the 9th and can request some time off before I begin working. I assume they'll need a week to tell whether I have the job or not, so it shouldn't be too risky to do this.

Weekend of May 24th: An appealing option because I should get Memorial Day off. However, at best, it will be very, very early in my career and starting off my first big job by asking for days off is really, really not ideal. I probably should not have marked this weekend down but if I make it, it will likely be by air instead of by car. (Meaning I'm at the mercy of DX for supplies as with MOAB.)

Weekend of May 31st: Nothing going for me here, so I didn't mark it.

Weekend of June 7th: If I'm well settled with the job by now, learning fast enough, and they are flexible (i.e. I can make up hours), this weekend might be possible for me.

Like I said, best thing to do is to throw it on the calendar and if I can make it, I do. If I can't, I won't.

Edit: Lots of edits were made in this post initially, just to clarify things. For now, the information I have is the best I can get.

[scottthewaterwarrior]

OK, so I really need to get going on this... School has been really hectic and I haven't had time for much else. To be honest I need to be working on school work now, but I figured if I didn't get a date planned by the end of this weekend it probably wouldn't happen at all.

It looks like the 24-26th of May would work best for most people (depending on how many people can stay we could battle Monday too). Is this too last minute for everyone? If not the 7-9th of June would also work for most people.

If the 24-26 works for everyone, then we can start talking planes (I will make sure I check at least this thread, once a day, from now on). I realized that as fun as having night wars at the island might be, we would have to pack up our tents every morning and hull our stuff back to the cars (which is a bit of a walk). Therefor the new plan is for us to camp out in my backyard/house. It is too small to camp and fight in, but there is a small section of woods we could fight in nearby, along with some utility buildings that might work to fight around. For the naval war the island can only be reserved for a large party on odd numbered days, so the naval war and other island rounds would have to be on Saturday.

Here is a basic plan, tomorrow we can add more detail and I will add a full schedule to the first post.
Friday:
Arival?
Depending on time people arrive, tour/battle at Carderock (probably short OHS type games).
Diner at my house
Night wars near my house. (there isn't anywhere to fill, but I can fit a lot of water bottles/coolers in my car)

Saturday:
Breakfast
Go to Sycamore Island
OHK round(s)
Other OHS round(s)
Lunch
Chaos round(?) - I might set one up during lunch, we will see
Naval war (beach landing and/or ship vs. ship)
Conquest (think Battlefield 1942) - do we have an official WW name for this?
HTL with the treehouse(?) I've done this before and it was a slaughter, but DX thought it would work if we had WBLs and 2Ks.
Dinner at the American City Diner
Night war(?) - depends how tired people are

Sunday:
Breakfast
Go to Carderock
OHS AP round
Long OHK round
Lunch
BBT CTF round
More OHS round(s)

This is still a rough plan, I would like some help flushing it out. Then I will update the first post with all this new stuff.

[HBWW]

I listed Conquest/Domination in HBWW's rules listing before, but took it out since I don't really have a means of running the flag objective properly. Perhaps we could get a bunch of 1-minute hourglasses, mark one of the ends in color for the team, and having the sand on the bottom signify that the team owns the control point. Unfortunately, there's no feasible way to count score, simulate ticket bleeding, etc. unless I write some sort of app that'll run on waterproofed devices and network them together. (Can't do this in 3 weeks, maybe 3 months.) A better alternative is to simulate Rush from BF Bad Company 2, or a similar game like Invasion from Halo Reach.

Treehouse HTL sounds fun as hell, as do naval wars. Would definitely like to have both pure naval wars and beach landings.

Will be pretty pissed if I can't make this one, but I don't know what will happen at this point. I guess it's not so bad if you host this again next year. The fact that it's at a private club should help things out in terms of dealing with certain kinds of people who don't like it when others have fun.

[SEAL]

Woohoo! 24-26 works for me. I would've preferred to have it a weekend earlier, but I think it's too late now and I don't know if anyone can do that.

Schedule looks good, though if you have time I would recommend adding times for each round as well. Actually, shouldn't your school year be over soon? I don't know what it's like where you live, but up here my finals are over this Friday. I can probably arrive in the afternoon sometime, hopefully before rush hour. Oh, that reminds me, how's the traffic around your area? Is it anything like DC? I heard that's the #1 worst city for traffic in the US. I don't have a huge amount of experience with heavy traffic, so as much as I'd hate to, I may have to go with someone who does.

As for the rounds, I was thinking of doing a Conquest (I like the Domination name better) round at Downpour, so if we do one here, that could be like a trial run. If it works out well, I'll do it at Downpour, but if it doesn't, I'll do something else. What's the treehouse like? I'm not extremely keen on HTL rounds where the defense is stuck up in a building or something, but if the treehouse is big enough, I guess it might work. I might decide to film that round though. For the naval wars we need to have at least three rounds: boat vs. boat, and two D-Day style rounds (so each team can have a shot at attacking and defending). I'm thinking we should do HTL for the D-Day rounds, because the defenders will likely hold the advantage.

You've given me something to look forward to though. Once I get done with school I will have to start preparing. I have quite a few guns that need fixing...

[HBWW]

I can make the weekend earlier, but as mentioned, it may be too short notice for many people.

My finals ended and I graduated in April. =p

We could have 2 boat vs. boat rounds by switching starting points. Not sure what our rules are with naval wars? Are there any provisions in addition to the standard 1H rule? (i.e. Set number of water balloon impacts counts as a hit on a boat even if the balloons don't hit anyone, just the boat itself.)

[SEAL]

Well we only had like one naval round, which was D-Day style and OHS I think. We never counted hits on boats. If someone on the attacking team got hit, they had to go back into the boat and go a hundred or so feet away from the shore to respawn. At least that's what I remember; I never got hit so I'm not 100% sure.

Congrats on graduating, by the way.

[HBWW]

Thanks man. Time to get out to the real world and make $$$ to repay student loans and build water guns.

Anyway, sounds like we may need to tinker around a bit with the naval warfare rules for hits. Should be fun doing that though. =p

[scottthewaterwarrior]

I have now updated the first post with all the new information, take a look.

Also, I plan to PM everyone my address soon, but if I don't, someone PM me a reminder! I'd hate for this thing not to happen because people couldn't find my house!

[Poseidon2000]

I'm in.

[HBWW]

SSLF is vastly outnumbered in the rivalries, especially if Black Six and/or I don't show. Ruh oh.