The PAG debacle

Because somebody doesnt know how to play chess it does not make the a bad strategist. We don't know to play orbital well, it does not mean you are better strategists than any of us. It merely means we cant play orbital,. I think our strategy everygame was perfect. Won the three single planet systems, as you said were ahead early game versus burn. Late game knowledge and execution was our downfall.

Going into a multiplanet game without knowing orbital well is a bad strategy. Hence the loss.

It definitely makes them a bad chess strategist.

Strategy even starts before the match begins, at team composition. Which is why I said that one non-top-1v1 player in your clan would be a godsend.

One of us just needs to learn orbital, it's not that hard, there are rules and timings and dos and don't that I could learn in a few games, or with another clan. The thing is, I dont wanna waste time right now, for me there is no incentive. The only thing I would do differently that game would be to go orbital quicker. Then none of the late game messing would be needed.

The fact that you use the word WASTE proves that I am right and you are wrong. You need someone who LOVES orbital and multiplanet play, not someone who sees them as a drudge. For when did anyone become good at something he hated doing? Ergo, you need a different kind of person than you already have in your clan.

And even this is not enough in the long run, because in the long run you will need a coherent command structure just like everyone else, and therefore people who love following and giving orders. But for 4v4 Clan Wars you don't need this, so if you don't plan to play bigger games you are fine with someone who simply loves orbital.

well I feel insulted.

Why can't we just see this as a mistake made by PAG, move on with it as a lesson learned and continue forward?

I truly doubt that these guys would be making this same mistake again for the next match.

While, yes, it is interesting to see BRN win that match, despite the huge eco advantage that PAG had, but its not like PAG CANT Lose.

Lets be honest, PAG was out of their field on this one.

Had it been a series of 1v1 fights on moons or small planets, I promise that this would have turned out entirely different.

I'd like to see a rematch even if I am not included. An exact rematch: same players on both sides, who will have thought about the past match, the casters' commentary, and everything said in this thread in the meantime.

Because we are still not clear on what this lesson is. clopse thinks the lesson is that he needs to force himself to do something he doesn't like to do. I think the lesson is he needs to find someone who loves doing that and add him to the clan. There are also various other lessons regarding synergy and strategy still being discussed in the thread.

I don't think that is fair to Team Burning though.

Now, I'm not going to bash on Team Burning because they definitely have a number of really decent players, but I feel like that they wouldn't get away with another win on that system because PAG would be better prepared for it.

Let Team Burning have this win. PAG doesn't seem sore about it, so why try to rustle their jimmies?

Does "rematch" mean something else to you guys than to me? I am not suggesting that the new result count in Clan Wars, I am merely suggesting an interesting exhibition match for the sake of having a lot of fun. It is generally agreed that it was the most fun game in the last fixture, and perhaps also in all of Clan Wars (though PAG players appear to not generally share this sentiment, which as I am pointing out seems to be the issue here). So all I am asking for is for a little more of that.

@sardaukar666 with dom and Pazoki As well I think

Which strategy? What exactly is this megabase? Is it a base built by 5 players? Apparently not because you state that there are also 2-player megabases. So what exactly is this megabase? And how is this a strategy?

If you spawn on one planet with many people and you grow your bases you will have megabases. So your strategy is basically:

- Grow your bases together.

That is a valid strategy but for Planetary Annihilation it doesn't make sense to call that your strategy. It is like VoW saying that our strategy is: Build many units. (Now the secret is out and everybody can adapt to that and beat the crap out of us!)

You do that anyway (because growing your bases together means you take the mex in well guarded positions between the bases and taking space your enemy can't take) if you play on a decent level. So what is the big secret here? There is no secret and there is no triumph of "your" strategy.

If you spawn 2 times with 5 people and the other teams spawns on 10 different spawns, you will most likely have easy targets near your 5 people spawns (but you have to go for them early, probably with one or more commanders). But you sacrifice the control over all the area around the other spawns. Good luck doing that against players like PAG has. It might work when you have this insane amount of metal like on your home system but that is a very special case and a good strategy should work in more than one special case.

1. There is an entire thread by me about the megabase here: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/team-games-spawning-apart-vs-megabases-cult-strategy.63806/

2. There is now a tournament match in which it is very clearly demonstrated:



3. And there will soon be a 20+ page essay in a published book in which I explain that it is the future of both PA and real-time strategy.

As I explained in the above-linked thread, spawning together is merely a PREREQUISITE for the strategy, but the essence of it is that players take on individual ROLES. I.e. production, economy, raiding, or general offense or air force/naval/orbital roles or whatever, as opposed to trying to manage everything.

I am not aware of any other team or clan which uses this as their default strategy (or which even uses it at all -- Zaphod even had to explain how it works in that video, after I had explained it to him), and certainly no one who has discussed it as much as me and demonstrated it in tournament events. I mean people still have a hard time grasping that the essence of it is the ROLES as opposed to the SPAWNING locations, so I think I have a pretty good claim to have introduced this strategy into PA.

But whoever wants to contest this claim, be my guest. I will still be referring to it as "my" strategy though.

Actually, good strategies work only in specific cases. Strategies that "work" in all cases do not really work in any cases, and are hence bad strategies

Y'all need to read some Sun Tzu and Clausewitz!

In the past with both IG and Nova @zombiefan564 and I mainly buddied up for games. Choosing whether or not to spawn together or far apart varies per map and can drastically change how a game plays out. Often Zombie would go military and I would go economy (though of course their would be some mixing as I may require defenses)

When spawing apart the game would still ultimately turn into megabases as zombie and I would choose to expand easily towards eachother as well as away, and if an enemy happened to spawn between the two of us... well that's one down.

But the mega base and your roles is not a good strategy. Your mega base is too easy to squeeze. On your home system with loads of metal it works ok to begin with, but then as mid game approaches you make it much too easy to surround/ raid and squeeze your base in. Building walls is like admitting defeat too. You see how much metal you guys wasted because the economy guy and the building guy didn't have tried and tested builds. 4 perfectly efficient 1v1 builds is much better.

Giving people roles because they have lower apm than others is fine. But the attacking guy would need an apm of about 250 to match the unit control apm of other teams. And that's without the panning around the large map and attacking multiple sides of our bases. No one can do that, but I reckon I could do it to your mega base. Be just like a late game 1v1 against Cola_Colin on a large map.

Honestly, if the system they played on had not had a halleyable planet, (Or at least required more than 1 halley, I think their plan would have would have worked.

What if they managed to kick start their eco back up, and got a single teleporter on the main planet?

They where pumping out enough units to easily spread them out and collapse Team Burnings Eco.

clopse...

I have grown hoarse repeating this...

As long as you cannot separate the strategy from its EXECUTION (and therefore the PEOPLE who are executing it...), it is impossible for me to discuss strategy with you.

Our strategy WORKED against BRN. We just prioritized the gas giant instead of the smashable moon, and failed to get our eco up fast enough BECAUSE WE ARE BAD PLAYERS. If GOOD players had been using my strategy, they could very well have won. Half the time our engineers were sitting around doing nothing. A better team would have just made full boom bots and sniped the two commanders immediately, for example, as Boggles just pointed out to me via PM.

As for the megabase on our home system, it does indeed seem that it would not work there on a 4v4 format. But it would be absolutely unbeatable on a 10v10 format. I just made the mistake of making the planet too big -- Gandalf's suggestion to make it about 750 was much better, but I was still too inexperienced in the game to realize it at the time. Oh well, next season I guess.

Why did we prioritize the gas giant over the smashable moon?

Because we never expected to get as far as kicking BRN off the planet. That was the plan, but I couldn't even DREAM that we would achieve it, given our past performance in the league. Once we achieved it, I didn't really believe it for ages. I kept panning the planet around looking for a huge army we missed somewhere. And once it finally sunk in that we had kicked them out, I almost didn't have a plan of what to do next. I knew we had to get off the planet, and was already making an orbital launcher for that reason, but I hadn't planned which planet to go to. So I said "gas giant" because in games with gas giants whoever holds it for longest generally wins the game (see your game against BRN). And that's where the genius of the BRN system came in: that one tiny icy planet that's so quickly smashable and can turn the whole game around in less than minute.

I was almost glad to be dead when they finally killed us. Hard to explain why, but I was.

And as far as a rematch goes I don't really want to play a game just cause someone wants to watch. Would rather

I just want to point out that I personally was in charge of the gas giant and I spent probably close to an hour just managing that gas giant. I barely looked anywhere else on the map. I was constantly watching for incoming attacks. I put a lot of effort into making sure that gas giant remained ours. There was effort put into keeping control of that it wasn't just a walk in the park.

The jigs exploding does not make it impossible to take over. Before the jigs exploded it was so extremely easy to wipe out so many jigs with very few avengers. The entire reason a gas giant is hard to keep secure is that there is nothing stopping your enemy from just dropping down into the middle of your jigs and destroying some. You guys didn't abuse that fact. So what you lose 5-6 avengers? Just drop groups of 5-6 on top of each of their jigs. The gas giant quickly starts to fall apart if you do that. Once the gas giant is allowed to reach a point where it can self sustain if becomes super difficult to destroy. The gas giant snowballs really hard. The trade off for being able to snowball as hard as it can is that it is very vulnerable. It is very easy to cripple early on by either sniping the fabbers or by chipping away at the jigs as the get built.

The problem I have with jigs exploding is that the person defending can lose equal to greater amounts of avengers if a jig explodes. If a group of avenges drops in and just focus fires the closest jig and nothing else then both players who have avengers there will lose them. This makes defending gas giants with avengers kinda pointless.

You didn't focus nearly enough of your attention onto that gas giant. You let that eco get out of control. That moon as well was not easy to defend. It took three very good players a lot of effort to make sure you didn't get on that planet. This was after we had lost 3 of our comms. Most players would be completely demoralized after that. Which to be honest we were but we didn't give up. We kept playing on the slimmest glimmer of hope that we could still win. Give credit where credit is due.

I can completely understand your frustration with orbital play and how you feel it is imbalanced but it isn't entirely broken.