The PAG debacle

So as not to derail the Clan Wars thread again, continued from these two posts of mine: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/clan-wars-4v4-clan-league.63162/page-27#post-1057540

Basically, even forgetting about me for a moment, I believe PAG could have won that epic game against BRN if they had had even one NON top 10 player in their team (and clan roster). Just a single dude who knows how to handle planet lockdowns and planet invasions, as well as how PA's superweapons work, would have sufficed to win them the match. He wouldn't even have to be that good: pretty much any intermediate player with team experience would have done.

So how about we try this. Let's do a rematch between BRN and PAG on the same system, only with me included in PAG's roster, and three other PAG players who don't dislike me and this idea (I wouldn't want anyone to be FORCED to play with me and listen to my suggestions if he has a personal problem with me, on the one hand because it wouldn't be fun for either of us, and on the other hand because he would probably play worse and jeopardize the results of the experiment).

This would be a friendly exhibition game, casted or not, depending on whether a caster would enjoying casting it.

I am super pumped with the idea and have an awesome strategy in my head already. Who's up for this? Let's do it!

Could be interesting, my money would still be on brn. Those guys are turning out to be some of pa's finest team players

I say no. The PAGs strategy for PA is a kind of monopolization. They invite top 10 ladder players into their team to create a kind of "controlled market", an environment where only their team combined of top 1v1 players can win. However there is a hole in their strategy and this game exposed it greatly: they are too specialised in 1v1 games and lack the experience and knowledge of how to deal with a multi planet games and orbital as those are the assets that never come into play in 1v1 and they have payed for that. There is always a price for min-maxing.

Regardless of how pag played which was pretty excellent.
Cult were the real underdog, They played Different strats which was entertaining to watch.
Knowing your not all that experienced at the game and then still showing up and playing your best.
Much respect to you guys I love an underdog. Grats on your first com kill.
look forward to seeing you guys smash many more.
How good did it feel when you smashed BRN off the moon bet that felt awesome ....
Ignore the school yard bullying mentality of the chat room.

I and The Nosebreaker both like this post

I agree with zweistein000, they are called PA Gods for a reason. Most people would probably be honored to be in the clan but they are formed up of the elite players, according a friend they also choose people upon personality compatibility to their clan (apparently). Although they could learn from other clans in terms of team work, lets not stir the pot with a rematch. =P Maybe you should try to get into PAG and then train with them to build up teamwork before the next clan wars if you so desire to be in PAG and they so desire you.
Edit: I'd also like to argue that PAG did well because in my opinion, they were pretty much 1v1'ing in each of their opponents as opposed to the cult tactics of dividing up to jobs to building and microing so perhaps they would encourage you to play more 1v1's if you joined them. Haha but this is all in my opinion =) Everyone has something to learn

Wow I'm not sure if I should be doing this... but +1 to the Nosebreaker

PAG is a bunch of mates first. There is no skill requirement to join the clan. I hadn't played a single game since October, I'm sure there are many players who would have performed better than me, but because we all love each other so much they would rather I played.

*EDIT* <Censored by clopse>

To be honest, if we knew you could nuke the units on the gas plant (still unsure on that one as think we tried during the game) then we wouldnt have lost. Either way i feel, if you have 3x the units of the enemy team that can't do anything because planets are so easy to lock down then there is something wrong with the game. 2000k unis just hanging about having a chat. while the enemy takes 50 minutes to try build soemthing to kill them. Not fun for me. But that is just my view. People though that was game of the tournament, and well looking back on it a lot happened so probably was, but them games are 0 fun to play in. Most people agree, and well they the people we want to play.

I don't see why PAG and BRN shouldn't give this a shot, win or lose it'll be a fun and interesting match.

That's not how it works, of course the good players are invited, started off as a joke with myself and matiz for the uber tournament, then elodea joined for fun. Then when clan wars came about we needed some new players so I asked guys I had talked to a lot. 1v1 players tend to talk a lot with 1v1 players so I knew most of the guys well so was easy enough to set up. so invited them if there are clanless and want a clan and the rest agree they are cool blokes.

To say PAG have a strategy is probably the biggest joke I have read, we are here just for fun. Never practice as a team or nothing, we love 1v1's as we think they are the most fun. Thats why we didn't care about losing. I probably came across as being salty, but it was because I was fed up playing one hour doing nothing waiting to lose a game.

I'm not sure I agree with you on that argument. In the latest built there are *so many* ways you can invade. I mean put it another way. Say you were playing on a planet 50% water 50% land, and you build 200 t1 naval factories producing orcas whilst your opponent sat out of range in the middle of the land mass.. would you criticize the game because the orcas cant cross the land?!

If they've dug in and land units aren't currently useful, you pause production and throw all your resources into orbital / unit cannons (that can bypass the need for gates) / nukes and unleash hell on them. Once you have a foothold *then* all those land units are useful again.

clopse, even without the nukes, you could have easily won in several ways. There were huge chunks of time during which you could have straight-up invaded the gas giant because you were sitting on twice BRN's eco and omg still not building huge rows of orbital factories pumping out 10x times as many avengers as them.

Or you could have invaded their planet by sending 20 nukes in one spot and following it up straight after with 20 orbital fabbers covered by 50 avengers. I was shocked to see that not even BRN knows how to do this -- and both sides more than had the eco for it (and you had none of the defenses to counter it). Our player Qpo invented this for us, and here's how to do it:

Once the 20 orbital fabs arrive, you pick two or three of them in turn, and drag out an entire line of teleporters. Not just one at a time, but an entire line of them. So you end up with half a dozen separate lines of teleporters being built one after another, while back on your home planet you have amassed a ton of spinners and doxes behind your other teleporter. And then you link up two of them, and start streaming in the spinners and doxes. Once a teleporter on the enemy planet is taken down by their bombers you just link another of the 12+ you have by this time, while your spinners are cutting down their bombers. As long as your eco is larger than your opponent's and you have set up things right, it is impossible to counter this in the long run. And once the bombers are gone you put the mass of doxes on planet patrol and they fan out in all directions, which looks utterly glorious, and makes the opponent go nuts not knowing in which direction to go to clean everything out, thus leaving your by now 20 or so teleporters alone. And then your huge amount of ground units that were sitting on your home planet idling can be brought in to bear and flatten everything.

And yes, Cult can actually do this in-game against opponents who allow the game to get to that stage with us. I'll find a replay and link it later.

So you guys are not up for a single exhibition match? Or you are discussing it between you? I have a really cool strategy that I think you would enjoy to play, man. Please give me a chance if the idea is not wholly repugnant to you.

PAG would have easily won that game if they did 2 things:

1) Attack the gas planet (small avenger groups at many different positions or nukes)
2) Smash the ice planet

That way there won't be a laser because the other team would have near 0 metal income and it is an easy win. You can't defend the metal planet against unit cannons, orbital and nukes when you don't have the eco lead.

It was cool to watch how PAG tried and failed because they didn't really commit to one strat and they didn't scout. But I can understand clopse, when I have such games I usually get bored, think very slow and at some point just wish for an end, no matter who wins. Just imagine PAG would have secured their planet better. BRN would have needed hours to build up a stronger eco lead and dozens of nukes to get through.

BRN did very well with the scouting and securing that small planet in the late game. Well played!

I don't think that clopse and 2 of his friends would deny my request if we all happened to meet in the MP lobby at some point. And I am 100% sure BRN would have no objections with it too. I guess it is this thread and the "formal" manner of my asking for it that are making them hesitate.

At any rate, think about it guys. What's one match more or less among the countless ones we're already playing? And if we get to another stalemate we just stop playing since there'll be nothing at stake. So you have a dynamic opening, and then either a quick closure, one way or another, due to my specific strategy, or if it gets to another stalemate and you guys get bored of playing, we just call it a day and stop playing. I have a plan that will show the winner within 20 minutes tops.

I think the team meta is just lagging way behind the 1v1 meta. In 1v1 we're still discovering new ways to play despite a near continuous running of top level games. There's nothing like that at the top level of team games, so I find it hard to assess whether it's a problem with the game or just that we're not very good at utilising the tools. Certainly PAG's attacks on the gas giant showed their inexperience and I feel that it was a game they lost through poor play rather than the unfairness of orbital. But it was a slow loss, and certainly I'd like to see orbital improved so it's not so grindy.

One change that the game could do with is a unification of space travel speeds. Nukes landed and cleared safe landing zones for teleporters and unit cannons, but I think it's impossible to make use of that because you've no idea when each unit will arrive relative to every other type of unit so can't time the nuke strike against the sending of other troops. I believe this a is a big factor in why it's so hard for a large eco to overwhelm the smaller one.

With unified speeds you could use nukes, or SXX to clear out zones, and have fabbers or drop pods following close behind. You'd have a means by which you could plan to crack a planet. Without unified speeds that's never going to happen.

There's no "team meta", man. 2v2 strategies on a single small planet would be different to 4v4 strategies in half a dozen planets with a gas giant and a metal planet, would be different to 3v3v3 strategies on a huge single planet plus smashable moon, would be different to 2v2v2v2v2 strategies on a water planet start with half a dozen other planets to move to. The possibilities are far too many, and as the game expands in terms of available planet and team sizes and system configurations, it's only going to get more crazy. That's why I prefer to play on randomly generated systems. There's just no "meta" to them, so I don't have the disadvantage that I usually have in that I don't like watching YouTube videos or reading forum posts for strategies. I don't even want to know how many planets a system has before I am in the spawn selection screen. It is a HUGE rush to me to have to come up with a viable strategy for 4 or 5 people within 2 minutes flat, or lose the game due to a bad strat. No other strategy game has ever done this for me: no RTS, and certainly no turn-based game, where there is no such rush at any point. You really need to know the game inside-out, and have perfect coordination with your teammates to make this work against similar skilled opponents. There's no time for a disagreement or for a vote when you have 2 minutes to create a strategy. Any delay means you will be spawning randomly, and you can forget about strats. So everyone has to simply listen to what the leader is saying, or play pretty much without a strat. Which if the opponent is similar skilled and HAS one, means almost certain defeat.

As someone who doesn't mind grinding for hours against a brick wall I will say that it is too easy to ride off late gameplay as just boring gridlocks. Every single player knows early game strats a hell of a lot better than late game strats. A lot less people know what moves you can do in the late game to pull a head that games often do become a stalemate.

In the late game it is a case of closing time windows. You have to find the weakness of your enemy and exploit it before they eventually cover that hole in their defenses. If you let it drag out to the point that they have no possible holes in their defenses then you have no other choose then to throw ridiculous amounts of firepower at them till you make a hole. You can also exploit the fact that so much is happening and just constantly pressure what your opponent has to focus on. It is an entirely different game style and mindset.

If everyone played more longer games(I am not saying people should), then the understanding of later game orbital would be better and probably more exciting and fun to play. There is only a very loose meta to the late game.

I do think orbital does need tweaking(which would happen if it wasn't for all the damn 1v1 fanatics complaining about boring 1v1 balance). The way gas giants currently work is stupid. Jigs are stupid. They shouldn't explode like that.

#showorbitalsomelove

We tried and thought about a lot of what you were saying, but their is no way to time the orbital flights of nukes and units to time it to perfection. at one stage we sent 5 nukes, then 60 avengers then 5 fabbers, and even had unit cannons ready with units, but the avengers went and died before the nukes got there, of course this is all down to experience and timings, but doesnt each system have differnet tiings depending on the distance etc.

Our reason we lost the first game was communication, I just assumed the guys on the moon would have rushed orbital when they had won it, they had't and we gave team burnin too much time to be able to defend their planets. Anyhows all this is rich coming from yourself, as you said it's easier for viewers to sit back and be armchair critics, and I'm sure he people you play against won't be as well versed as a top team at defending such planets.

Dude lol. I am offering to put my money where my mouth is. I am even begging and gagging for it. How does that make me an "armchair critic"?