N-Day⁷ - September 24-25 2022 - A Walk in the Park faction

To say the least, SINGER was not a strategic masterclass. I was focused on hogging production in the early stages, and when I used it, I attempted to specialise early on between nukes and shields - which did not end well when I was pummeled with thousands of missiles from the Potato Alliance. three hours into the event. I enrolled 70 nations into A Walk in the Park, another Go West-based faction which stole its name from an incredibly boring conversation I had with Aynia Moreaux on the Thursday before N-Day⁷ began. All seventy of those nations were focused on making shields for the first two hours or so; with 2,800 created by midnight the seventh-most at the time, it had become a multiversal powerhouse of shields. And for good reason.

At midnight BST, Star Hold - the successor to last year's Verchy Defense Coalition - decided that it would once again plant more than 100 targets on Finlarvat. While these were defended easily, this was also the cue for my Military and Intel Specialists to start making nukes. Star Hold's five members had been completely destroyed by 1:30am BST, at which point Grishahakkaverchynot decided that targetting Finlarvat was no longer worth his time. Over the course of the morning, these two Specialist types would destroy factions which had already been near-fully radiated, before annihilating larger, mostly-dormant factions such as Z JD KSK and Sceniverse SDF. After Kerachia of Combined Defense Network was destroyed at 6:06am BST, giving AWITP 1,431 strikes without a single unit of radiation, nothing happened for four-and-a-half long, long hours.

Having just annihilated the much larger Canopy faction (although its successor, Cannopy Command Bunker, was the only faction this N-Day to accrue 1,000 strikes with zero radiation), the Horsemen of the Apocalpyse must have fancied their chances against AWITP when the Honor for all 1 puppet series started to target the faction at 10:15am BST. But astonishingly, and perhaps in thanks to the fact that my 26 Strategic Specialists had stockpiled about 275 shields each (and I had a grand total of 11,200 shields), only 1,345 of the 9,797 missiles hit the faction. Just two members (Pro Lancastria Mori and Totes not a puppet bruv) were destroyed, leaving it with a positive score and keeping much, if not all, of its dignity intact. Nine of the surviving members, which had themselves gathered an inordinately large number of nukes, decided to use them to wipe out the 34 surviving member states of the conglomerate. Admittedly smaller factions such as Alliance of Republics Atomic Security Fo, United Abelezara States and United Island Nations followed.

By the time the Screams of Agony 1 puppet set rolled up just before 3pm BST, A Walk in the Park was in fourth with over 11,000 points, just ahead of the destroyed faction of The Minotaurs and, no matter how hard I tried, always a couple of hundred points behind the Based People Faction (doing business as The Communist Bloc). It hadn't gotten any radiation beyond the Honor for All onslaught, either, although Clante and New fern were surprisingly fond of targetting nukes towards my nations; LandiaColoria even joined the party for a while before giving up after I gave into his demand to unban his first Discord account from the Sophia server. (It was for a spam offence we still like joking about to this day.)

Depleting my Strategic Specialists' stockpile of shields when defending against Honor for All was exciting. My focus on producing nukes after the event was exciting. Only having 4,000 shields to defend against 8,500 nukes was also exciting... by which I mean the same sort of excitement I feel when I'm something like three minutes away from missing a big deadline. About three-quarters of them were used anyway, but at the loss of far more nations than I can recall here. I would have tried to make more shields last year, but this time, I racked up something like 500 strikes after Screams of Agony ran rampant, helping out in efforts to destroy the Artificially Intelligent Cats and Ruthenium-Lanthanum factions, while exterminating the last members of The Orwell's Animal Revolution, The Ascended, and 35i11i33i11i43i24i11i33i45i33i24i34i33.

The few survivors in AWITP were fair game for members of all factions after I decided to stop paying attention around 5pm BST, and perhaps even before then but it was Wisconsin commonwealth - another Horseman - whose nineteen strikes on Greater Hastings eradicated the faction at 6:15pm BST on the dot. (Funnily enough, Wisconsin CommonWealth also eradicated Hill Islace, the last nation I attempted to destroy; I could only get 75% of the way there. Although I did wipe out the other member of SREC Security Council.)

A Walk in the Park on the whole was, much as I described its defence from the Honor for All puppet silo at the time, "A RESOUNDING SUCCESS!!!!!!" - so much so that it was mentioned twice in the news post on N-Day⁷, once for having a score of 6,601 (the seventh-highest in the world, out of 833 factions) and again for scoring 94.3 points per faction member (the sixth-most of the 146 factions with ten or more members). It landed 13,601 strikes, the eighth-most in the world (and the first faction with fewer than 100 members ever to record more than 13,000 strikes), while its defence from the two waves of Horsemen got it 12,681 intercepts, the seventh-most in the world. With more big factions operating compared to last year, my 70 puppets took the faction to 28th-largest in the world - and their 7,000 units of radiation, another sign of absolute defensive anti-dominance, made it the 24th-most irradiated.

You would imagine that AWITP's sixth-place finish would make it the most successful single-person faction in history, more so than even Pencil Sharpeners 2's Dangerous Stationery. In fact, it wasn't even the most successful single-person faction of N-Day⁷: that honour would go to not austria?!?, a puppet faction of Not Austria which racked up much of its score by destroying the faction of Nuking Myself, also a puppet faction of Not Austria. It got 6,969 points. Nice.

Nuclear armageddon is, to say the least, not fun. Even Duran Duran said so. But what if it was simple? What if it was something you could do - or avoid - with minimal fuss, effort or worry? What if you could organise seventy of your own nations under one nuclear umbrella with the goal of freedom and self-determination?

What if... it was [b]A Walk in the Park[/b]?

[list][*][u][b]Current orders[/b]:[/u] Farm the strike: defending will get you nowhere except 45 minutes late.
[*][color=red][b][u]Latest update:[/u][/b][/color] Faction peaks at #4 before second attack by Horsemen of the Apocalypse
[*][u][b]Non-aggression pacts:[/b][/u] [url=https://www.nationstates.net/page=faction/fid=91]The Melon Curtain[/url], [url=https://www.nationstates.net/page=faction/fid=132]RAILGUN[/url], [url=https://www.nationstates.net/page=faction/fid=203]Radioactive Desert[/url], [url=https://www.nationstates.net/page=faction/fid=227]Loradioactive Desert[/url]
[*][u][b]Point of contact:[/b][/u] Telegram [nation=Tinhampton], or DM Tinhampton#7402 on Discord. Do not contact the members of this faction; I may not respond.
[*][color=#399][u][b]A reminder:[/b][/u] If you are reading this, you are a fair-minded, decent and honest human being. I wish you good health, both mental and physical, a good life and a good day.[/color][/list]

[i]Our flag is white and teal to honour [nation=Aynia Moreaux], a friend of Tinhampton's.[/i]