Take my word for it.
The first 6 hours are pretty relaxed, you get your cards, cash in when you have a set for ten or 5 cards on hand, make sure you're not killed, try to position yourself well and see if you can't eliminate someone every now and then. Life is good and the chat lighthearted.
The seventh hour is a little harder, but still ok, there aren't so many people around any more and killing others is expensive compared to the gains, luckily some people will be getting frustrated and deadbeat, others will kindly kill themselves by running headifrst into the new neutrals and others yet will suicide on the first person to attack them.
The eigth hour is tough, your stamina is draining rapidly, there are only 4 people left in the game and noone is likely to make a mistake, an agreement is reached that all players attack with their bonuses so the game will end in the foreseeable future and noone will suffer permanent mental or physical harm. Things are going smoothly until one player has to choose between the game and his marriage. He uses all he has to attack equally and spreads himself thinly over the map, two spots are blocked by different players and 15 minutes later his cards are but a memory.
The final hours, only three players remain, one has already organized a babysitter. No matter how much you wish for the game to end, you know you will not deadbeat or suicide and that the same is true of the others. Unless one of you collapses in front of your pc, of course. Both of the others are using clickable maps and you're at a severe disadvantage without it and begin to regret never having bothered with Greasemonkey and additional scripts.
You are desperate enough to threaten suicide, it works, the opponent withdraws and you don't lose your biggest continent bonus for the next three rounds. The disadvantages of not using CM are becoming glaringly obvious, though. You have missed your cards several times already, deployed on the wrong country twice and failed over a dozen fortifications, only one of them because an opponent attacked when there were only 10 seconds left and broke the path your armies had to take.
Everyone is still attacking and the number of armies on the map only increases slowly.
One of the others makes a remark about a big stack of the third player, you point out that he has a bigger one right next to it, estimated chance that anything will result of this conversation: 0.0723784%
You notice that the big stacks that used to be in the middle of the map are gone. Upon checking the gamelog you notice that the player did attack the stack he complained about a minute earlier. A rough estimate tells you that you have half the armies on the map, however, almost half of them are away from the frontlines. You decide to go for it.
The endgame. It feels like days, but probably doesn't take more than 30 minutes. You try to attack both opponents equally, the last thing you want to do is to hand the game to one of them, 70 armies to their 100 after a few rounds, you keep pushing. Your opponents must be getting tired as well, despite not having CM you manage to foil most of their counterattacks with the armies you have in the hinterlands and to attack where they deploy and contain the damage they can cause.
There are no big stacks left, some 3s and 4s and whatever you and your opponents deploy, you have managed to break both other players' bonuses but the map is a mess, single armies block most paths you need for your attacks, the colours of the players keep changing and it feels like half the time all players have the same or extremely similar colours.
When you eliminate one of the players and can cash in two sets for a total of 20 armies you know you've won, the other has 4 cards and if he had had a set he would probably have taken the three you just got, then you'd have had to trust the dice gods. You attack his last remaining stacks and for once the colours work in your favour, black and orange, you easily see which territories are yours and which aren't, your last opponent only has 3 left, you fortify one stack next to one and end your turn. You take the other two with your final deployment.
After ten hours and more than 100 rounds you are finally victorious, you have never played this game against longer odds nor for higher stakes, and feel like you never want to do it again, it's just too much stress, and unless you could plan for the occasion in advance or have absolutely no life at all whatsoever you will neglect all sorts of things and duties in RL that you will regret later. You are shivering, because it's the middle of the night and you're feeling cold as well as because of the adrenaline. You only calm down slowly.
Now imagine you'd gone through all that and lost. After 10 hours of gameplay you get nothing, instead you have to watch as someone else gains the hundreds of points you were already thinking of as yours and shoots up through the ranks of the scoreboard. Unless you are prepared to face that disappointment, don't join a Realtime Battle Royale. I'm lucky that didn't happen to me, I had never thought these things would be so nerve-wracking.
