Team games: Spawning apart vs. Megabases + Cult Strategy

cdrkf's suggestion may work, but not squishy's. squishy, and several other people, do not pay attention to what I am saying. My friend Masahiro literally does not know what the buildings do. Building into each other from different spawn points will not work for us unless we stop playing team games right now, and we all start playing 1v1s alone for 8 hours a day 6 days a week until the 22nd of November when we face Promethean. For obvious reasons, we can't do that.

Well that's not really a good thing in any situation, as that means if you designated army guy dies, nobody will know what to do. Your economy guy? Well nobody will know how to manage it correctly.

Nobody can "die". Have you ever used the "shared armies" option before?

Totally forgot we were talking about shared, my bad.

And yes, I have, in fact back in alpha that's the only team game type we could play.

That's an interesting trivia bit. Props to Uber for having their priorities straight.

I modified the thread title to reflect that people are also discussing the general play style and strategies of my clan. By the way, I have carefully read every suggestion people have made in here. The only reason I am not responding to each and every one of them is because the post would be gigantic, and I am not sure if people would want to read it. Suffice it to say that half of the stuff you are suggesting has already been tried, and the other half hasn't and will, so thanks for taking the time to examine what we do and offer suggestions.

Also, stuart's and lapsepacifist's offers to help us practice have been noted. The main reasons we are not pursuing them very much is because we believe stomping us again and again and again will be boring to them. Seriously, that's the only reason. On the other hand, mot and a bunch of other clan members occasionally join our lobbies, so we do get clan vs. clan practice now and then. The problem is that we rarely have our complete A-team in the MP lobby. So when they play against us, they play against 1 or 2 of our A players, while the rest of the players only have 10 or 20 hours of play time, so the opposing clan is not even getting our best efforts. It's extremely frustrating facing The Realm's onslaught while at the same time having to instruct a player who has 10 hours into the game to hold down the Shift key to chain building commands, or to hit N to reorient the planet to face north...

Well a lot has been said about the advantages and disadvantages of spawning together. So I want to talk about the games and my point of view. I want to object that we just play 1v1s and then play the team games like that, we just dont have a designated captain, we adjust our roles more on the fly. However we have people that are more likely to control the troops and others who are responsible for orbital for example.


First game:

We choose our spawns that way because we had no option for a triangle or something like that (where the middle is safe; this leads to a real megabase by the way). So we choose this line and had 2 players in the middle, to have a stronger base there which could help out the two proxies. So we approached this game more like a 1v1 with everyone doing their thing. However after scouting I switched to air to have a better chance of getting rid of the huge dox armies. We were surprised that they were just standing there and not attacking. We expected an attack towards the northern or southern base at any time and I dont know if we could have stopped it. However we had radar vision and some bombers, just in case. Then we harassed you with some dox. This worked because you sent large armies to deal with just few dox. We used this to move your armies around until we had an opening. I guess you were a bit nervous and cautious as you described, because you could have easily stopped us with little armies and used the large armies against us. We had no real upfront strategy like rushing, so we just played a more macro oriented game like we usually do. It worked out well because there was not enough harrassing us.


Second game:

We had a strategy for this one: One player on the moon building factories only to overcome the other players there and 3 players on the starting planet to create a strong presence there (I build less factories and more eco to support our com on the moon). Our player on the moon was alone, so he switched to building up eco and just sent the units to the starting planet. It is these backup strategies that seem to be a weakpoint of your strategy. On multiple planets, what do you do when someone spawns on the moon? With your megabase there is no backup plan for this event, so there is a huge disadvantage. So even spreading out into the galaxy (which was good and we did it too late) couldn't fix this. Because even if you colonize one planet fast, we already had 1 planet plus more than half of the starting planet (because you sacrifized it). You can apply this to your planet too. Say the other team has one player on the other side of the planet and as soon as they scout you this player rushes for something you have to stop (T2 or later a nuke). You can't get to him because there are 3 other players in your way.



I have 294 hours on steam, so 70 more than Masahiro. This is also my first RTS I play competitevly (3 of our 4 players yesterday are new in VoW and didn't play supcom). Ok I'm used to the streaming economy because I played TA (single player only). And I had a time in PA when I played 1v1s but I mostly just copy strats and make little adjustment (for example I am not a rusher, so I can't just copy heavy dox builds). I think you should get to know all the buildings and watch other people. Even if you just copy some things, it improves what you already have. I think with a bit more experience you can put up good fights in the next matches.

Finally I have a good suggestion for you: You have a big player rooster. So play internal 4v4s and mix up the teams. After a game give feedback: The winners tell the losing team where there were opportunities to turn the game around. And the players in the team can give hints to each other. We play 2v2s sometimes and it really helps to improve. Games against randoms are nice to train the communication between players or polish the build order, test some things. But I think you don't learn enough, because like you said you always win.

After reading your post about not getting your A-team and having problems against good clans: Well try 4v5 or 4v6 games against randoms first. We did this a few times and sometimes the randoms put up a good fight. Or ask the Realm if they play 3v4 against you...

how about split spawns, keep the specialisation routine, but each player keeps rotating base. set fabber to build power at base one, then look to base 2, put a fabber to the front of the build queue, then set it to build power. rinse and repeat. you each stick to your specialisation, so only need to learn that aspect, no-one uses fabberswith orders already, and you gain the benefits of multi-spawn.

as supreme commander you tell people when to switch base. general controls factory rally points. others do eco everywhere. plus it means the eyes are spread out over the beatlefield so you are better informed, SSO can make better strategic decisions.

that said, probably don't need a supreme commander until its seven plus per side.

Cult, If the Promethean team spawn all 4 commanders in the same spawn just like you guys do on your home planet, would that be considered a more equal match, or do they still have an advantage because they play 1v1's 8 hours a day, 6 days a week?

There are no equal matches (that's why you have winners and losers, otherwise every game would end in a draw). Human beings are not equal, and neither are teams of them. You are implying that I am trying to rationalize away our defeats, but that is not who I am. The winners won because they are better at the game -- end of story. It doesn't matter WHY they are better. All that matters is that they are. But since we are discussing things, I am explaining to people the reasons we played like we did, and how I plan to proceed in the future. No one is forcing you to read this thread if you find this discussion distasteful.

Besides, I have been saying throughout this thread that I believe that separate spawns is a WORSE strategy. So by my reckoning, WE are the ones with the strategic advantage, at least on our home system. The reason we lost is due to bad implementation because of inexperience, not to a strategic disadvantage.

I'm pretty sure you just over analyzed a question, which was not meant to be analyzed. I'm basically just asking a hypothetical question, and a straight forward yes or no answer would have sufficed... but holy **** dude, you don't have to go all philosophical on my ***.

I never said that the other players play 1v1's 8 hours a day, 6 days a week. All I said was that, in order to catch up with them in a reasonable time frame, that's what we would have to do.

What I would like to see, though, is two other clans fight on our home system. I want to see The Realm use our strategy against VoW. I think they would obliterate them, and VoW would have to adopt our strategy too to have a decent chance to fight back. Unfortunately Clan Wars does not allow this sort of game. I would love to see it though if the clans were to set it up by themselves.

Ahh, it does matter why they are better than you. you cant win if you don't understand and your supposedly superior strategy that gives you an advantage is just not feasible unless you rush. Don't rehash the fact that you think i don't know what you are doing, I clearly do. It has been explained that many small basses will always crush large ones given enough room to expand. in that first game, you could have won but from the beginning, the odds were still stacked against you. any major offensive against one small base would leave your base undefended and open to counterattack where you would be over whelmed. your opponents Eco will grow faster even if you do expand simply because thy have more map control from the beginning. they don't have to take it. they have it. however, if the planet was much smaller, it could have changed. i see you upped the metal spot count to counteract the extra map control your opponents would have, but that's delays the problem, it doesn't stop it and in the long run, it worsens it.

So, have you guys had the chance to use that strategy i explained? I'd really like to see how it works out.

It's not exactly easy to do with randoms for me.

Sigh.

I was saying that the reasons don't matter to counter his implication that I am trying to rationalize away our defeats. Obviously strategies matter, as can be seen by the fact that I made a huge thread about them and made several huge posts in it.

It has been explained, but I don't believe the explanation. I believe we failed because of lacking execution, not because of lacking strategy. And our execution will take months to reach the level of the other players, if ever. So yes, I am rehashing my previous posts because I believe that many people including you are either not reading them carefully enough, or not fully understanding them.

I believe we grabbed less metal than VoW, not because of an inherent fault in the strategy, but simply because we focused less on metal than we should have. We should have sent more fabbers to grab metal radially outwards. I am thinking of this in terms of geometry. I don't see why four fabbers moving radially inwards should grab more metal than four fabbers moving radially outwards from a single location. I think the reason we are behind in this is psychological. The four players spawning apart see more "empty space" around them and try to grab it, whereas we, after the megabase has reached a certain size, are zoomed in trying to micromanage production, and forget that there is a lot of empty space around it. We are still working on this. New players yadda yadda yadda. You don't abandon a new strategy after trying it only 10 times. You have to try it 200 times before you abandon it. And you have to make sure that the people who are executing it are not useless. Which at the moment we still are. I don't know how much more simply I can put this so that everyone can understand it.

And no, Kiwi, no time to try out your suggestion yet. But it's great, so we will, and I'll let you know about it. I'll give the game ids too so you can watch the games if you want.

Nice! i hope it works

I think it was just easier to program and then they realized it was actually more fun than traditional team games.

Sigh. do you realize that this has been tried and tested over and over again? your disbelief in the explanation has no proof, also, your look on the geometry of it is flawed as is disregards map size and enemy presence, as well as the divide and conquer strategy which has been proven to beat the stay together strategy time and time again. it has been explained. with this strategy against players of equal skill, you will lose unless you are playing on a tiny planet. your stubbornness pains me, but if this is the way you want to go, sure, keep bashing your head against a wall. the wall isn't going to break any time soon and your head will.

My head will not break because there is no wall. Worst case scenario is I will have a ton of fun trying a strategy that cannot win at 4v4, but which will be THE strategy when the larger games that I really want to play arrive (at which point my clan will have a headstart there). Best case scenario is I will win a bunch of matches and make you eat your words. Either way, I will have a ton of fun and you will stay with your resentment.