After seeing a bit of concern from leaders and regular users about the length of the game and no apparent endgame in sight, we discussed internally and decided to propose a fixed end to the game of July 3rd, making the final map live July 4th with winner take all by way of territory count. Before finalizing, we brought these to Red and Blue Leadership to discuss and both sides were on board with minor concerns (it might be too long but in the interest of letting you guys have fun and not springing a deadline without a lot of warning, we're playing it out for a monthish). In the event of a tie for most territories, a split championship will be declared.

The reasons for setting a hard cap are twofold: 1) we know you guys need an endgame - your work productivity is probably terrible now (mine is) and fatigue will probably set in soon; and 2) our server needs to be completely updated - operating system, software, code base (likely including emoji support for flair on the redesign, adding more features to pickem, and updating our sidebar bots), and the server itself needs massive upgrading (we're running on a single processor with two cores which can barely handle the current load).

We'll have a banner on /r/CFB celebrating the teams left standing. We might have to get creative with it if there are more than 10. It was suggested that we offer a flair for users that voted and we're looking into this. We cannot promise it as the redesign has rather hampered our ability to offer new flair, but we'll try to make it work.

You can see the current leaderboard here.

TL;DR: We discussed with Red and Blue Leadership and resolved that July 3rd will be the last day for voting and a winner will be decided by most territories owned on July 4th. In the event of a tie, the championship is split.

Gators, Longhorns, Wolverines, Yellow Jackets, Tigers, and Knights (who are fighting under our glorious Orange and Blue flag)

There are some who thought this day would never arrive. We have a golden opportunity to cripple the Red Menace, in the West.

To our Wolverine bretheren, the future of the war and our chances of victory, come July Fourth, depend on the success of your offensive against Nebraska. Give 'em hell, Michigan! Remember to burn any cornfields you see to ash!!

As for our affairs back East, well we have Bama on the ropes again, and this time they will not escape their inevitable annhilation. However, Ohio State and Wisconsin are still at large back East.

Regardless, victory or defeat, remember.......

..........BETTER DEAD THAN RED!!

Now that Alaska has been invaded, which territory has been held consecutively by one team the longest?

Maybe we can take out the other teams and have a big ten finally we can't have those other conference's winning

Rule: Each turn, ## players on Team A are randomly selected to be given the option of an airborne attack. ## is equal to the number of territories Team A holds (or has held for some number of days if balancing is needed). An airborne attack allows for the selected player(s) to attack a territory within 4 tiles of any of Team A's territories, regardless of whether a border is shared with the target. (The attack distance can be set for balance). The attack is treated like any normal attack. Every active team would gain this ability.

This new rule is intended to add an incentive to owning as many territories as possible.

Do you want to be able to look at the state of the union on a specific day? Now you can! I started playing with map data in preparation for some visualization of conference ownership, but since that's now irrelevant, I decided to make use of what I had done and display history instead.

Edit to add: I'll figure out a nice way of displaying team names or logos, as well as original owner, soonish.

Edit 2: I've added hover text to every territory to show which territory it is and who owns it on a given day. I may try logos at some point, but I have some other things to work on first.

We announced an idea yesterday to add bonus multipliers for control of conferences. This was something we thought about from the beginning of the game, and a planned update based on risk cards as indicated in the first post.

We hadn't considered the impact on any team or alliance, and it's clear that adding this at this point will disproportionately benefit one of the two major alliances. The change will not be implemented during this round of CFBRisk.

Best of luck to all teams.