I love the contrast between Marshall cackling, then accepting that they're going to lose immediately after. Very sad.
We knew we'd lost the moment the T2 air spam came in....terrible spawns but I guess there are differences that could've been made. Why should we change our entire play style while the others only had to t2 air turtle? Very disappointed in Zaphod and Meta in that regard...
I agree there can be a lot of debate on spawns and fairness however your strategy was very poor, why didn't you go all air and early-invade with 4 simultaneous factory builds on the better island?
We didn't go air as we wanted to make sure we had the continent. Plus going hard air would force us to use horribly inefficient fabbers while the other team only needed land and static defences in order to hold what they were already given on a plate. Don't forget to factor in geography in spawn equality as well, our north spawn was surrounded with rocks etc limiting our building capacity even more. In short we had an uphill struggle from the beginning regardless if we colonised or not as we would be behind anyway. The other team only needed to defend their coms as they turtled t2 air and nukes. I feel as though colonising the other continent, while viable would not have increased our chances, only delayed defeat.
Spawn Equality Factors - Proximal Metal [The only one present in this engagement] - Expansion Metal - Expansion Direction / Options - Geography - Forced Choices (Relative to Opponent's Spawn) - Perceived Progression of the game with respect to relative spawns ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Proximal metal counts were equal enough (Those within spawn circle - Expansion metal sites for us included one patch (including your commander wreckage) which was also quite a walk from either of our bases thus hard to defend early game though not impossible, plus it being between us at such a distance also meant the other player on our continent could control it / contest it with ease. We could however have launched an offensive to the other continent though this starts to impinge on the forced choices aspect whereby in order to have later game expansion metal we would HAVE to go air, but that is a later point. The opposing team however had lots of expansions on their own continent yet had VERY limited expansion sites on the ours, though with metal being cheap and easy tips the balance in their favour as a result (the only needed to defend hard on our island which really isn't hard with t1 defences they way they are at the moment. - I think I've covered directions and options by this point, but to clarify, our team had to either move up to the middle patch or fly over, the other team had to defend and expand in lots of directions or whichever thye saw fit and then defend with a couple of static defences. This again factors into forced choices. But given they had enough attention left over they could both manage the main island after setting defensive queues. - Geography was very thin and narrow for us and Super's spawn was even more so given those rock formations around the place, yes gives him defensive chokes, but also means he can't really get energy / fatory expansion without going to the other island (again impinging on forced choice) The other team had a lot of open space on their continent and a fair bit of space just outside their other spawn also. - Perceived progression really relates to all the above factors, weighing them up against each other, seeing what each team / player is required to do in order to give them a good chance of success. - Forced choices I think is the crux of the issue certainly in this case. Starting with our spawns. Once we scouted (taking time off our landings options) we realised we would be heavily contested on our continent from t1 land and progressively into t2 so there we HAD to defend ourselves especially given geography etc. We also were basically required to expand to the other island in order to establish economy viability long term, but in doing so taking out our early eco for defences against the spawn on our island hence even if we had expanded it wouldn't have been of any great impact to the other team who already had had the chance to establish their initial spawn / first expansions on the other continent thus t2 air turtle was already on the cards. Thus our expansions wouldn't have put enough pressure on their continent (Especially with t1 defences the way they air), the only thing that it would have provided us with was a little more eco. It was easy to see in the game that our attempt at expanding there was thwarted by attention spans being required on defences / positions on our continent. The other team however was not 'required' to do any particular play per se. For instance with relative spawns taken into account and turtle on the main, they could steadily tech up on our continent while keeping pressure on (notice this is just a regular game play style while expanding to multiple continents from the get go is not). On their main, they also only needed to defend, expand and go air (again a regular play) regardless as to whether we put pressure on them or not as t2 turtling is SO VIABLE with the direction the balance is going that this only compounded the difference between spawns. This is only a synopsis per se of the game rather than a rant as despite it being blatantly dodgy we did have 'fun' and go out with a bang *refers to thread title and new meta*. But I remain baffled that given your position you failed to consider the majority of these points, especially with the whole stream saying it was blatantly dodgy as I have been told by many folks who were following it. Furthermore, we could have pulled a win with a couple of minor changes, for instances going insta-double astraeus rather than trying to get orbital fabber - wasting time that was needed for the other drop to reach the base etc.
Hopefully we're going to lookinto some sort of quality control for systems for future PACE tournaments.
