Sheep Tag Community

Chapter 5 - Continued (playstyle)

Backbuilding wasn't really possible. If the wolf was close enough to you that you had to backbuild in 7.5, he'd more than likely swing through that farm and kill you anyway. In other words virtually nothing you see in run tag today would work back then. Instead when sheep were taking it easy or goofing around they would have to either manipulate trees and hard farms (like Alex popularized) or...

- "Line tagging". Basically prebuilding a bunch of lines and utilizing terrain to avoid shepherds. Line tagging was actually not totally joking around and was a quite legitimate strategy up to this point. While it was known that golems could jump farms (even known that they could jump 2 farms, though not well understood), most players were not fluent with this, and the sheep in general always played far away from the shepherds.  So instead they'd have to spend a whole 7 hits to kill a farm.

-Hard Farm Massing. Also a thing. A very powerful thing. Hard farms back then were a little bigger visually than they are now, and a lot stronger. Nowadays if we see a sheep nearby build a hard farm, we just attack it quickly and kill it midbuild. This was not possible then. Instead the farm would take a little damage but finish building. Thus it was quite a popular strategy for rich sheep to mass hard farms all over the map late game. Frappachino was very, very fond of this. He would often actually hide the sheep under the top of the hard farm. They were bigger back then, and most modern methods of locating sheep were either not in the game or not well understood. Thus it would be hilarious to see wolves running around literally not knowing where he was.

It also should be noted that Open(Alex) stopped playing at this point. The Godfather of sheep tag had left for good. Brown1430 actually was still on wc3, but only played ST very, very rarely. It was still impressive how quickly he built though. Raptos would also play wolf occasionally still, but he was pretty much a loner and rarely hung out or talked to people. 



Chapter 6 -- Sheep Tag 7.1 Revised III

The most famous and played map in sheep tag history was created by a team of Arxon_Havencroft (lead designer) [JEDI shaman], Gagazet (theorycrafter) [JEDI Chief] and Mitnek (terrain) [Hcs shaman].

This was a very big point of pride for hcs, as despite being an easty clan, one of their members helped make the new map. Mitnek was in short, a very humble hero. In reality he mostly got rid of trees, cheap spots, and smoothed out some of the bumps. But still here he was being chosen to help JEDI make their new map.

This map revolutionized the game. It greatly reduced the range of wolves from 7.5, and increased slightly sheep and wolf speed. Short of a giant lag spike, sheep no longer died 2 farms in their mass. It was even possible to diamond aggressively next to wolves, something that was far too risky in prior maps. It was also practical to backbuild. This revolutionized the game. This threw a lot of wolves off and took major adjustments. "Angling" meaning clicking ahead of the sheep to gain ground faster became very mainstream. It was known before, but not really necessary. A new sword that gave +30 damage and cost 300g (?) called Anti's saber was added. (I thought this was named after Anti-Drug a legendary westy wolf, but Rival says it was named for the whole ANTI clan). This allowed wolves to start dealing serious damage to farms, and for the first time you saw wolves 3 hitting farms towards the end of a round. This map also would really allow run tag to be a thing. Or as Sheepgod would take some weird pleasure in pointing out, it was called "Run st" at that time. Supposedly.
Something else was added that I'm sure most of you will take pleasure in. The stack farm!!!!! A 10g farm that could be built anywhere (model looked a bit bigger than today). This farm was added in the words of Arxon "As a form of anticamp". Of course that same day I asked him why he hated Ultimate and he said "anticamp is noob". Irony not lost on him. Anywhos, stacks on this map were used primarily to force saves in the middle. Gradually they would be used outside of that, but keep in mind wolf range was still high enough in this map where if you could only backbuild a stack farm and not a normal farm, you'd almost certainly get killed through the farm.

This map, while widely praised was not without controversy. Some westies still clung to 7.5. And on East 7.5 was still king. Despite their differences, Frappa, Ydoc, Pure and most of the playerbase still preferred to play 7.5. Thus for a while both maps were accepted as the main pro maps, and despite the differences in gameplay, active pros would have played both to some extent.

Back to clans. I think I can name drop deadass here as having started playing. Although I do get him mixed up with deadoralive, so I'm hesitant. But he was an old player who had played a lot longer than most people realize. Hcs activity had peaked. Both hcs and 13a5 got pretentious and picked up influences from westy clans, particularly Jedi. Instead of recruiting whoever wanted to join, they started having tryouts, consisting of usually a combination of 1v2 or 1v3 play, a diamond 2 minute massing speed and a grid 2 minute massing speed. These were naturally made somewhat out of proportion to what the clans actually accepted. If 13a5 said they accepted a 120 2 min speed, you know hcs would say their limit was 125. So these numbers got inflated pretty quickly. Then the question is what happened if someone couldn't make your speed? The answer was training clans. Clans in west and then east all pretty quickly started having these training clans, ostensibly because their own clan was exclusive, or in some cases it was claimed that the clan was full. In practice even though some clans had reached the 100 member limit, this was due to a lot of akas/inactives and was more of an excuse to be exclusive than anything else.

All good things must come to an end though. Eventually east entered a period of decline. The senior leaders in both hcs and 13a5 started trying out other games, mostly dota, and despite having reasonably large bases, they ended up disbanding.

In an effort to keep everyone from abandoning the game I made my first clan. I actually don't remember its name right now. Fortunately I know somewhere on Alt the name is camouflaged with grass texture. This was mostly a channel. I don't believe I even made any shamans. It was more of just a stopgap, hoping that some of the former SGODers would return.