Game analysis - Replay #14886292
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@zokora said in Game analysis - Replay #14886292:
I would not invest too much time into those game analyses until you hit 1200+. Time would be better invested for the next game until you have some basic routines in your blood. Your mindset is good and you have a certain solid BO, you just need to get more game experience.
This is completely incorrect. You need to do analysis of your replays regardless of your current level, and I would argue it's especially important at low levels (0-1000), where there are likely large amounts of low hanging fruit, ripe for improvement. Getting "basic routines in your blood" and not analyzing your own gameplay while you are at 0 ladder rating will serve only to ingrain the bad habits you currently have.
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@zokora said in Game analysis - Replay #14886292:
I would not invest too much time into those game analyses until you hit 1200+. Time would be better invested for the next game until you have some basic routines in your blood. Your mindset is good and you have a certain solid BO, you just need to get more game experience.
How do you want to check if you actually improved on the basics as you aim to improve on? Apart from finding new issues/new tactics in replays, watching replays can also just serve as a check how well your doing on your objectives e.g. how much e/mass did you actually stall/overflow and for how long? how many factories were idle and for how long? how fast did you actually expand? how good was your agression really? how good was your scouting/intel? how many tanks did you suicide for no reason?
While playing you will likely not notice how much you failed/not failed to fullfill your improvement goals. -
Putting in the effort to analyse your games is already a show of promise that the majority of newer (or, bad) players lack, so i'll try to give you some good advice here. I've watched your game and read your analysis, and there are two major points of interest that I felt needed commenting on.
First:
zappazapper said in Game analysis - Replay #14886292:
because it's another good price to pay for attention/APM. It's not something a 2k player is ever going to do, and I realize that air combat is something I will have to get better at going forward.
zappazapper said in Game analysis - Replay #14886292:
at some point, we all will need to figure out how to upgrade to higher tech levels to compete
zappazapper said in Game analysis - Replay #14886292:
At this point in my "career", I don't have the attention/APM to be that exacting with such things
I'm not sure if it's a good idea to justify bad play to yourself in a developmental stage. I don't think it's a good idea to justify anything to yourself at all, you're trying to learn and thus you must accept your mistakes so you can correct them.
Higher rated players are not doing anything particularly different that is out of your reach, they've just committed the correct things into muscle memory. If you allow yourself to continue to do something badly by justifying it with talk about your APM level and your current skill, you'll form a bad habit that will take a long time to revert; If reverting it is even possible to begin with.
After all, you'll default to your training under any form of pressure, and you'll be stuck doing something terrible like the air patrol when a higher rated player appears, or you get a new map you don't know.
I've trained new players for many years here now, and I would be confident in claiming that most of that training was beating bad habits out of people. It doesnt matter if you spend some time now doing the right thing poorly, it's much faster than trying to un-learn something later after you create a habit.The very basic of air micro is that planes cannot shoot backwards, so it's all based around getting behind your enemy and shooting him down for free. Don't you think that would be a bit easy to do if your enemy is flying his planes around in a preset path and not reacting to you? Air patrol has negative consequences from something as small as no fuel to something as large as a complete wipe. You were not punished here because your enemy didn't even bother to make any planes to try and fight you, but be careful to not draw conclusions. You WILL be punished for doing this before you get as high as a paltry 600 rating. Learn the correct basics now.
zappazapper said in Game analysis - Replay #14886292:
There's a lot here, but if I can give any advice from one noob to another... you don't need Tech2, and you certainly don't need Tech3
You've drawn this conculsion without looking at any of the factors that might have caused him to lose here. This is a game focused around macromanagement, and it seems you've only looked at micromanagement related issues.
There is more behind why he died while he made tech, and why you've made an incorrect conclusion.
- Your enemy is playing aeon, who historically have a very powerful T1 phase but a weaker T2 phase.
- Your enemy made blazes, which are weaker tanks on comparison, quite possibly still the worst.
- Your enemy was behind you on total mass by roughly 20k, which is roughly the price of a T4 Spiderbot.
- Your enemy was overflowing mass, which made that disparity even more drastic.
- Your enemy had no buildpower, so even if he stayed at t1, he could only make tanks at under half the rate.
- Your enemy suicided 2 T3 bots into an army of 200 tanks, where he should be kiting you.
When you look at your games, there are a couple things for you to pay attention to in order to get the most out of it. First would be your factory counts, because if you make the same number every game, you'll win/lose depending on how much your enemy makes.
Second is your total mass collected, which you might need the Supreme Scoreboard mod to see. It's not the end all mark of why you win/lose games, but it's a stat that will help you diagnose your games in 99 percent of cases.
Third would be your reclaim count. You'll progress faster if you can quickly learn to suck up all the reclaim you possibly can and then spend it. Compare your total reclaim to the reclaim of your enemy and you can figure out why you beat/get beat by people.
You shouldn't focus on your army movements or stuff like that so early on, and its also why strange stuff like adding engineers to your army or whatever also don't matter. The bigger picture stuff is more important.
I'll stop there, one last thing though, our learning content is all made by individuals and thus I can't assure you the quality of information in each post. I could go over Arma's post you linked and point out about 100 different things I think are wrong, but someone could come to anything I make and easily do the same. Don't treat any one material as gospel; not only will you be a blasphemer, but you'll hinder your learning.
I have more I could rip you on but it's best if you don't try to internalise everything at once. Incorporate new things into your play and then come back after you do, and make sure not to force yourself into bad habits. Good luck,
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@biass thank you for devoting some of your time and brain power to commenting on my post. This is a huge part of what I love about this game, that the better players also love this game so much that they're willing to help their potential competition improve, just because they also want to still be challenged by this game.
I have a few comments responses to a few of the things I said, and I want to make sure that you know that it's not out of a lack of appreciation for the insights you've provided to me. Despite all the talk about attention/APM, this is a very cerebral game and I think that you'll appreciate that I almost enjoy thinking and talking about the game as much as I enjoy playing (at this point, maybe more, because playing is still often quite frustrating). So when I say "ya but", please don't assume that I'm being dismissive and not considering your arguments: I'm only trying to continue having the discussion because it's both enjoyable and helpful.
On the subject of air patrols / attention / APM... I've said in previous posts how this game in some ways reminds me of another passion of mine: music. In the sense that there is a skill component (APM) and a theoretical component. What's different about playing this game and playing a musical instrument is that playing this game for the first time is a little like picking up a guitar for the very first time and trying to learn "Flight of the Bumblebee". You really should just try and learn "Louie Louie" first or some other dumb schlockey song that you'll never want to be caught dead playing in front of humans (I would) because you're not ready to attempt "Flight of the Bumblebee", just like I'm not really ready to learn how to micro Inties at this point. You're right, patrolling Inties is the wrong way to play, but if I want an opportunity to learn the things that are critically important for me to learn at this early stage, I have to put something out there because otherwise I'll get stepped on, and if I focus on microing Inties right now, I won't be focusing on what I should be focusing on, which is paying for them in the first place. And yes, I understand that all things in this game are related, that proper air play IS a critical component of an economy, in the sense that I'm not concerned with acquiring mass so I can build big shiny things, I'm concerned with acquiring MORE mass than my opponent so that I can beat him with whatever I do have, even if it's just LABs. So I do get it, and I'm not saying that you're wrong. I'm only saying that in order for me to learn, I have to get in a game, and it's unrealistic to expect to be able to improve on every aspect of my game, in every game, so I'm focusing on the things that I think are more important, like building T1 mex's and spending my mass. I think I'm getting pretty good at that, and the more I commit that to muscle memory, the more I'll have time to do things like micro air.
Concerning my comments on tech levels... I think I was making the point that it's a mistake to assume that higher tech means "better", and that if you're losing battles at T1, the solution is to upgrade to T2. It often is, but it's often not. Like you said, he had no build power and was overflowing mass even when he was behind me by 20k. Maybe if he had built more T1 factories and found out how to hit me where I was weakest, he might have been able to catch up with me on mass acquisition, or even surpass me and build a T2 or T3 army that would make short work of my T1 spam. Acquiring mass via map control and spending it on T1 units has been the single biggest change to my game from my days of playing vanilla SupCom vs AI, addicted to the pause button and turtling on 4 mex's until I could afford to build a few T3 units. So again, you're not wrong that I'M wrong, I'm just trying to relate something to new players that really helped me to correct an approach to the game that I had that was just absolutely wrong, and that I see all the time among the low-rated players I play.
Factory count - Arma's "bible" says a 2:1 factory to mex ratio is a good place to start. I don't just blindly try and build factories to satisfy that as a rule, but at the same time it did introduce me to the idea of spending my mass.
Supreme Scoreboard - the problem with Supreme Scoreboard is that the unit count and unit limit seem to be broken. I've inquired and whoever I spoke to seems to agree that it's not working properly. Maybe I need to look into that more. There is clearly some very useful information there.
Yes, reclaim is definitely one of those things I'm trying to figure out. I don't think I'm doing it right. Part of it is the mechanics of factory attack-move orders, the speed at which engineers come out of the factories, the fact that I get distracted by something else and then before you know it I have 15 engineers all going to the same place that doesn't have that much mass to reclaim. And as I said, I hadn't played this map in a little while, since I really started to reclaim more, and so I kind of panicked when there didn't seem to be a ton of mass reclaim around. I can honestly say that reclaim is at the very top of the list of things I would like to improve on.
"You shouldn't focus on your army movements or stuff like that so early on"
Mmm, that's a little bit of a contradiction there. If I don't need to focus on army movements at this point, why do I have to focus on micro'ing air?"and its also why strange stuff like adding engineers to your army or whatever also don't matter"
I admit that the exact ratio of tanks to anything else could be refined, but I would argue that, in the right proportions, spending mass on things other than tanks really is just like spending mass on tanks. Scout bikes increase range, which will theoretically cause me to lose less tanks. MAA softens up bombers and gunships while my Inties are on their way to deal with them, which will theoretically cause me to lose less tanks. Artillery adds range and DPS, which will theoretically cause me to lose less tanks. LABs add speed, which allows me to quickly raid unprotected mex's, reducing the amount of mass my opponent can spend on tanks, which will theoretically cause me to lose less tanks. And engineers can reclaim mass, build defensive structures, and will likely be closer to a recently raided mex or a good place to build some forward unit production, which will all theoretically cause me to lose less tanks. A tank that didn't die because another type of unit gave me a slight advantage in one aspect over an opposing force of pure tanks is a tank that I don't have to build again."Don't treat any one material as gospel" - oh, for sure, I read lots of things. It's just that Arma's guide is kind of written like a religious text. It's long and it's the kind of thing you can go over certain things over and over to kind of cement them in your mind.
Anyway, like I said, I hope you don't take these comments to mean anything other than I just want to keep having these discussions and learning. Thanks again for taking the time to watch my replay, read my post, and offer your own insights.
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@cheeseberry said in Game analysis - Replay #14886292:
Very intriguing read, love it!
I don't quite agree with some of your analysis but you already knew that it's not perfect, so who cares.
As long as you keep going at it with a mindset like this, you are bound to improve. So keep up the good work!
Well, I care!! I'd love to hear your thoughts on specific things you disagreed with, even if I still don't agree with you
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@zokora said in Game analysis - Replay #14886292:
I would not invest too much time into those game analyses until you hit 1200+. Time would be better invested for the next game until you have some basic routines in your blood. Your mindset is good and you have a certain solid BO, you just need to get more game experience.
That's a fair point, but also, I'm a 41 year old man with a job in heavy construction and I often don't have the energy or mental stamina to play this game properly, while I certainly can watch a replay and organize my thoughts on it, and try and learn that way. Not only that, I think analyzing games is also a skill to be learned and if it's that important when I hit 1200 (not holding my breath), I want to already know how to do it.
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@archsimkat
This is completely incorrect. You need to do analysis of your replays regardless of your current level, and I would argue it's especially important at low levels (0-1000), where there are likely large amounts of low hanging fruit, ripe for improvement. Getting "basic routines in your blood" and not analyzing your own gameplay while you are at 0 ladder rating will serve only to ingrain the bad habits you currently have.I'm going to agree with Zokora on this one and say that especially considering how inconvenient it is to go through FAF replays compared to SC2, in particular being incapable of rewinding or skipping through to specific parts you are interested in, it's probably more valuable for a sub-1k player to just play more games and try to focus on important things in each game. You're obviously going to make mistakes, and vitally, should notice that you made IN GAME.
How does the noob even know what they are doing well and what they need to try to improve? IF they already DO know those things, they should easily notice them in game and not even need to watch the replay. "Holy cow I'm currently stalling -300 power in this game 5 minutes in, I should adjust my build order and make more power next time!" If you know stalling is bad, you realize the mistake IN GAME and watching it again in the replay is a waste. If you never pay attention to your resources, that's an even more important mistake that also ought to be realized IN GAME. "Hmmm, all of a sudden I have 10000 mass in the bank, last time I checked I was stalling -50. I should probably glance at my resources a lot more often!" I mean this is probably the most important thing to tell noobs. Besides learning a better build order, trying to manage eco better is something you should just know is vital, and don't need to watch a replay for.
E.g. It's better to cap t2 mexes then upgrade them to t3, than to just upgrade them to t3 without capping them. How does the noob realize this when watching the replay, without being able to notice it in game? If they don't know, watching the replay won't even reveal the mistake to them!
"Basic routines" are basically acquired from copying better players. I think that's an order of magnitude more beneficial to a noob than watching their own replays. Sure, you probably won't get too much benefit from trying to copy a 2k player's bo, but just look at someone a few hundred points above and that should be easily attainable.
The only reason you might benefit from watching your own replays is if you have almost zero awareness of what is even going on in the game, both economy-wise and with your units. You can become more aware from just learning the game better and getting more familiar with it, which I think happens a lot faster from actually doing it and seeing what better players do.@Turinturambar
How do you want to check if you actually improved on the basics as you aim to improve on? Apart from finding new issues/new tactics in replays, watching replays can also just serve as a check how well your doing on your objectives e.g. how much e/mass did you actually stall/overflow and for how long? how many factories were idle and for how long? how fast did you actually expand? how good was your agression really? how good was your scouting/intel? how many tanks did you suicide for no reason?
While playing you will likely not notice how much you failed/not failed to fullfill your improvement goals.You can check to see if you have improved by looking at your rating change over time. Your change after just a few games or a couple days isn't important, because there will be significant variance and noise in the distribution of results, but in the long run it's an excellent, objective indicator.
All of your other points get basically the same response as I gave to arch. Yeah, you might learn some new tactics from the other noob you played that beat you, but watching significantly better players than both of you is probably more valuable. If you're 500 watch the 800-1000s play and try to imitate that, or the best players that you can actually effectively copy (so as to not ingrain bad habits, which I do agree with arch could be a problem). And it can't be that useful to watch replays to see what mistakes you made, if you can't even notice you made those mistakes IN GAME. You won't do a good job of correcting your mistakes in the future if you still haven't learned where to focus your attention and realize where those mistakes are happening in game. E.g. "Oh wow I was stalling power bad, better change my bo." Ok if you notice that in the replay, you might improve your build order, but if you still haven't learned to very closely monitor your resources, when your opponent snipes all your power with an arty drop and you don't notice you have zero power income for 5 minutes, that's an exponentially larger problem that needs to be solved FIRST. And once you have figured out "pay close attention to your resources" you no longer need to look through your replays to see if you were stalling, because you will have learned one of the most important aspects of this game, which is always paying close attention to these crucial factors IN GAME. You see you were stalling, then ALREADY KNOW to make some adjustments for next game. Watching the replay is a waste. Just go have fun and play some more games. Who knows, if you miss that next ladder game by a minute, you might not get another one for 3 hours!Edit: my examples were economy related but the same thing would go for units. "Hmm I sent all these tanks in to this unscouted area and they all died without killing anything. That was bad." Even if you didn't see the fight and just notice the army is gone, if you see point defense where you sent tanks, you realize you might want to micro those units or watch them closer and not suicide them. Even noobs can figure out "suiciding units=bad," but what they might not even understand fully in game, or from watching their own replays, is what types of strategies are most effective. I can imagine a noob thinking, "Oh, I guess I just wasn't at critical mass of tanks, and need to send even more next time!" Where they would instead learn from watching better players that attacking t1 pd with t1 tanks is not a strong tactic.
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why do you assume knowing an issue means you suddenly "magically" dont make that mistake anmore? The whole point in improving is picking 1-3 things in your gameplay you wanna fix and improve your habits on and then concentrate on them ingame for the next XXX games.
Watching your own replays from time to time is a good correction on your ingame perception - since ingame perception can be pretty bad - and serves as additional feedback. Ratingchange in this case is utterly useless since it contains anything and can even mean you improved in other areas than the one you aimed at improving.
In this regard watching replays also doesnt mean in detail analysis on -1 speed from both perspectives, but just e.g. to check stalls watch it at +2 or w/e from your own perspective and only look at ecobar for the entire replay and if there was a real issue slow down/rewatch to check why the issue happened (if even necessary). So you have an objective indicator on how much you actually improved on the thing youre working on.
Same can be true for intel/expansion/reclaim/unit movements etc.
When not improving on things systematically one by one you can run the risk of making all of them kinda mediocre which can still get you somewhat far but not beyond, so its in the long term less efficient. -
@turinturambar said in Game analysis - Replay #14886292:
why do you assume knowing an issue means you suddenly "magically" dont make that mistake anmore?
Please read more carefully, because I never said that. " You're obviously going to make mistakes, and vitally, should notice that you made IN GAME." "You see you were stalling, then ALREADY KNOW to make some adjustments for next game. Watching the replay is a waste." I clearly never said noobs don't make those mistakes, just that they can easily notice them in game. Basically my point is noobs benefit more if they focus on learning general strategies, tactics and simple build orders and learn to execute them fairly well, but don't need to look at the replay to realize what mistakes they made.
I agree focusing on improving things systematically is probably more efficient to improve, but I'm saying watching replays isn't required for that, or the most efficient use of your time to do it. You hit the nail on the head: "picking 1-3 things in your gameplay you wanna fix and improve your habits on and then concentrate on them ingame for the next XXX games."
I would agree watching a replay occasionally is fine, especially when you can't find any games, but I'd probably only analyze less than 10%, probably about 5%. The largest benefit I see is to compare my overall performance to someone else to get an idea of who had a more efficient build order and possibly copy some of the things they were doing. But in that case I'm mostly watching someone else and not so much what I was even doing, just like I said before that they should just watch replays of better players and try to emulate them instead.
EDIT: So the TL:DR Conclusion is: basically if you can find a game, just play rather than watch a replay. If you can't find a game, there is no downside to analyzing your replays, but it is probably better to watch replays of better players instead of your own games.
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I found my biggest improvement (moving from c.400 rank to 800) was primarily from watching replays where i got crushed and figuring out what my opponent did. Playing more games instead wouldn’t have taught me that anywhere near as quickly.
I also found sandboxing initial strategies numerous times to both figure out what works and to memorise it was better than just starting a game and trying to think about it on the spot (as I was frequently finding i would be close to overflowing mass despite trying to build more factories early) - sandboxing and replays helped me realise i was sending my acu to the front too early and that i should get it to build more factories first.
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@CorvathraNoob You're essentially telling people to not analyze why they failed an exam, but just to make 10 more. In my opinion as a teacher, you're not learning something if you're not willing to take a step back and understand what you did previously.
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Different people learn differently. There are things you will learn in-game that some other players won't catch unless they watch the replay. And things that you won't learn by playing the game. There are certain mistakes that you could make 100 games in a row without ever having a clue. Maybe for some concepts, the only way for you to learn it is if someone else just tells you. A one-size-fits-all approach doesn't work because people are different from each other. If you are benefiting from watching replays, then keep it up. If you think it's a waste of time, there are other things you can do.
Some chess players can recite their games from memory. They get out of a game and they could tell you a complete list of the moves both sides made. Other people can't do that. Someone who can't do that would benefit a lot more from watching a "replay" of their game, than someone who already accurately remembers everything that happened.
I definitely agree with the approach of picking 1-3 things to work on improving at a time. Zock himself said to pick just 1 thing, but that every time you go into a match, you always have 1 thing you want to test or improve.
And keep an open mind. It really doesn't hurt for ZappaZapper to think T3 land is silly and T1 spam is best. Sooner or later he will learn the value of moving up to T3 land. As long as he keeps an open mind, when his opponents eventually show him the value of T3 land, he can learn and adapt. In a sense, everything you learn from playing against 500-rated players is dubious. If you only watched games where FLOOD rolled 600-rated noobs, you would learn the wrong lessons about what works and what doesn't work.
If Blackheart or Thomas wants to take ZappaZapper under his wing and play 1v1s against him for 6 hours a day and explain the right way to do things and the right way to understand the game, that would be the best way to get Zappa up to 1900 as fast as possible. Anything else and he will develop bad habits on the way up the ladder. It's basically inevitable that people will get bad ideas and bad habits as they move up and part of moving up is not just adding things, but also discarding things.
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@corvathranoob said in Game analysis - Replay #14886292:
EDIT: So the TL:DR Conclusion is: basically if you can find a game, just play rather than watch a replay. If you can't find a game, there is no downside to analyzing your replays, but it is probably better to watch replays of better players instead of your own games.
That is kind of the situation with me, as I often sit for over an hour waiting to get matched, and also like I said before, I often don't really have the energy to actually play because of work, and I'm not just trying to protect my meager rating, it's more that my goal right now is to improve and there's zero chance that I'll improve if I can't even keep my eyes open. But watching replays and writing an analysis can be done at a much slower pace, and just because I don't think I'm in the proper mindset to play doesn't mean I'm not still interested, so it's a better thing to do than nothing. And just so you know, I do watch other players replays, probably more than my own, it's just that I'm not writing analyses of their games.
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zappazapper said in Game analysis - Replay #14886292:
What's different about playing this game and playing a musical instrument is that playing this game for the first time is a little like picking up a guitar for the very first time and trying to learn "Flight of the Bumblebee". You really should just try and learn "Louie Louie" first or some other dumb schlockey song that you'll never want to be caught dead playing in front of humans (I would) because you're not ready to attempt "Flight of the Bumblebee", just like I'm not really ready to learn how to micro Inties at this point.
It's fine to think this way, but let me use another guitar analogy for you here. When you're learning to play a new song, you learn to play it at a very slow speed, but correctly. You don't play the song incorrectly in order to try and match the tempo right away. Once you commit the correct chord/fret/etc changes to your muscle memory, you can work through them faster and faster until you're doing it at speed. If you commit the incorrect notes/etc to memory. You'll definetly know that it's tough to work them back out of your playing when you are doing them subconciously.
If you do the right things now at a poor speed. It will be much more beneficial for you overall.
I'm not expecting you to go into a game and spam out 100 move orders to do perfect circle micro in your game. I only expect basic moves to shoot down threats and fighting enemy planes when you know you're ahead.zappazapper said in Game analysis - Replay #14886292:
I can honestly say that reclaim is at the very top of the list of things I would like to improve on.
Reclaim is something you'll be working on thoughout your entire time playing this game. Right now you don't need to make it overly complicated. Ensure you get as much reclaim as possible by any means possible. Lots of people just end up taking engineers and doing attack moves to the other side of the map, for example..
zappazapper said in Game analysis - Replay #14886292:
"You shouldn't focus on your army movements or stuff like that so early on"
Mmm, that's a little bit of a contradiction there. If I don't need to focus on army movements at this point, why do I have to focus on micro'ing air?You should practice it in your games, but you do not need to focus on it in your post game analysis.
zappazapper said in Game analysis - Replay #14886292:
A tank that didn't die because another type of unit gave me a slight advantage in one aspect over an opposing force of pure tanks is a tank that I don't have to build again.
Thinking this way is fine for other units, but a lot of the game and your choices within it often revolve around comparing your "X" to the "X" of the enemy. For example, you might count the number of land factories you have to see if you'll eventually have enough tanks to take map control.
While arty and aa are both:
- Situational units that you might only build if X is present.
- Still somewhat capable of contributing to battles
- Cheaper, and take less time to build (somewhat)
Engineers are something else entirely. When your factories are essentially not making land units one 5th of the time, your ability to scout and make choices in the game become obfuscated.
I would suggest making factories exclusively for engineers if you need them. If you end up not needing the engineers later (it's hard to make "too many" engineers), you can always make more tanks instead. Or just reclaim them.
zappazapper said in Game analysis - Replay #14886292:
Anyway, like I said, I hope you don't take these comments to mean anything other than I just want to keep having these discussions and learning. Thanks again for taking the time to watch my replay, read my post, and offer your own insights.
No problem mate. I'm always around to answer questions
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@zappazapper said in Game analysis - Replay #14886292:
@cheeseberry said in Game analysis - Replay #14886292:
Very intriguing read, love it!
I don't quite agree with some of your analysis but you already knew that it's not perfect, so who cares.
As long as you keep going at it with a mindset like this, you are bound to improve. So keep up the good work!
Well, I care!! I'd love to hear your thoughts on specific things you disagreed with, even if I still don't agree with you
Biass already talked about quite a few points that were on my list as well, the most important one being that Sup Com is indeed a game focused on macro, and not micro.
Or phrased differently: Supreme Commander is a game about getting more stuff.
First and foremost, this means that you need to spend your mass on stuff, because mass in the bank does literally nothing for you.
Just spending your mass is imo by far the most important thing to focus on.
Once your massbar is empty, how do you get more stuff? Well you need to get more mass. As a consequence: Supreme Commander is a game about getting more mass.
Why are mexes and reclaim good?
More mass and hence more stuff.Why is map control good?
Map control leads to more mexes and more reclaim, which leads to more mass. (Also it gives scouting information, but nobody below 1k scouts, so who cares.)Why are armies good?
Not only do they keep you alive, so that you can spend your mass on stuff, armies are also used to take stuff from your opponent and if your opponent has less stuff, you comparatively have more stuff.Why are t2 mexes good?
If you don't sacrifice too much to get them, they will lead to more mass and hence more stuff in the future.The only strategies that fall outside of the "get more stuff" plan are snipes, cheeses and memes. To be clear, all of them are valid strategies sometimes - many tournament games have been won by a well executed snipe after all - they are just not worth focusing on w/o having your fundamentals in order.
Note that I didn't even say what "stuff" you should actually build, because fundamentally it doesn't matter (yet).
If you have twice the total mass of your opponent and you just spend it on something that can attack, it becomes very easy to win the game.In your analysis you are talking about unit movements, army compositions, attacks that did or didn't work, intie micro, tech levels, pgen adjacency, and so on, none of which matters (yet).
Your final bullet points almost hit the nail on the head as they are all different versions of "I failed to get mass when I had the opportunity."
Crucially though, you do have a full mass bar from minute 6 to minute 14 which you mention only once, even though it's the most important of all of them.
In short: This is a game about more stuff and by extension a game about getting and then spending more mass. Everything else is just details.
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@jip said in Game analysis - Replay #14886292:
@CorvathraNoob You're essentially telling people to not analyze why they failed an exam, but just to make 10 more. In my opinion as a teacher, you're not learning something if you're not willing to take a step back and understand what you did previously.
Again, can people please read what I actually wrote? I never said people shouldn't analyze their mistakes. What I ACTUALLY SAID, hopefully for the last time, is that YOU SHOULD REALIZE YOUR MISTAKES IN GAME, AS YOU BECOME AWARE OF THEM. WATCHING THE REPLAY TO SEE IT AGAIN DOESN'T GIVE YOU NEW INFORMATION. If you aren't becoming aware of your mistakes in game, the most important issue is you still haven't learned where to focus your attention.
@maudlin27 "figuring out what my opponent did"
Exactly what I said: analyze what better players do.
Also, sandboxing build orders and analyzing replays are different things. I completely agree that sandboxing starting builds can be very helpful to remember build orders better and make fewer mistakes. -
@corvathranoob
I did read what you wrote. And my metaphor fits. You want people to assess the game while playing. Similarly, it is telling a student to be able to assess a certain mathematical rule exists during an exam while he doesn't know about the rule, but lets get on with the next exam right after.
Inspecting your gameplay (or exam) and comparing it with your direct opponent (or answer sheet) can never hurt, whether you won or lost. It doesn't have to take forever - you can run it at +5 or +10 for all I care. Briefly taking a step back and understanding what you did wrong (or right) is better than just diving in right away again and again.
Talking with a trainer about your replay is like talking with your professor about your exam results
.Back on topic, I think it is great that @zappazapper is looking at his replays and trying to understand by essentially talking to his (graduate) peers right now whether his insights make sense.
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Hmm. @CorvathraNoob I think both sides of this are correct. I'll explain from my own personal experience.
Several months ago I decided to get into playing ladder. I was around ~900 ladder rating at the time iirc, which was massively underrated for me so I was winning basically every game even though each game I knew I was making massive and obvious mistakes. As long as I was able to leave each game knowing the huge mistakes I was making, I didn't bother watching the replay. I'm certainly not at the level of Arch or Turin for instance but my game knowledge and skill is still far better than a 900 rated ladder player's game knowledge, even at this time. I basically was just needing to get my muscle memory up to par with that in a game mode I never really played while coming from being mostly a Setoner.
I very quickly improved and I stopped making as many mistakes that were glaringly obvious to me in game. Up until I got up to about ~1300 ladder I basically didn't lose any games other than some purely cheesy cancer ones where I didn't adapt well or ones where I just completely messed up something basic for whatever reason - usually me first timing a map and not reading it correctly vs someone who played the map a lot.
Around this time I ran into a problem. I was still making glaringly obvious mistakes that I recognized in game, but the issue is that these mistakes were getting harder for me to fix. Things like general map awareness, spending apm on the right things, not over/under ecoing (huge one for me atm, but I digress), and misreading new maps are all mistakes I was easily able to recognize in game but have proven hard for me to fix. These are muscle memory flaws I have and need to address. While I work on these though there are a thousand other flaws in my gameplay that I can address. But at this point I have to watch replays to actually address them.
A lot of those things I mentioned, and the thousand more things plaguing my gameplay, are all things that have a bunch of tiny components that watching replays now all helps me improve on. Yes I know in game I'm making mistakes, I'm actually frustratingly good at recognizing mistakes in game at this point. It's a bit depressing to play knowing I'm playing like pure shit every game but I'm digressing again. The issue is often times these mistakes are things that happened before I recognized them. They often are coming about from different sources than what I realized. Watching replays helps me with this. This long winded rant now brings me to my point.
If you're able to leave the game with an immediate, obvious, and small thing you can do better in the future and quickly improve on, then watching the replay might not be that helpful while you work on that. If the main errors you're seeing are more nebulous and take reworking your muscle memory and a lot of time and effort, then it's important to watch replays so you can keep making the smaller improvements while working on the big stuff that'll take time and experience.
TL;DR: In my opinion people on both sides of this are correct, depending on which stage of ladder experience the player is in. If you can make easy and obvious improvements each game then watching replays might just take time away from making those improvements, if not then watching replays is important.
Edit: I am also coming from the perspective of someone who has played Supcom on and off since the first one came out in 2007. When I got into ladder earlier this year I had far more experience and game knowledge to call on than someone who is relatively new. A new player doesn't have this advantage, and therefore will most likely need to spend more time watching replays earlier on.
Edit part 2: Thought I'd give some more specific examples to illustrate my point using my comment about over/under ecoing. The over ecoing part isn't surprising to either myself or anyone who knows me: I'm a Setoner and ecoing is the name of the game there usually. The under ecoing is the more interesting one. One big reason that it happens is because I know I have a tendency to over eco, so I intentionally just try to make more and more units without ecoing to compensate - often times I'll go overboard there. However, outside of previous tendencies there were some glaring mistakes I was making leading to this happening that I had to use replays to discover. Lots of components here but the two big ones are: my early expansion was far too slow leading to me having less mass than I should early on, and two is that I didn't have enough engineers in the right places to get reclaim. I still have a lot of work to do, but I don't think I would have realized just how pathetically slow my expansion still was and that I was misplacing engineers as quickly as I did without replays. I knew the overall mistake, messing up eco, but couldn't identify all the components of it without replays.
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@jip said in Game analysis - Replay #14886292:
I did read what you wrote. And my metaphor fits. You want people to assess the game while playing. Similarly, it is telling a student to be able to assess a certain mathematical rule exists during an exam while he doesn't know about the rule, but lets get on with the next exam right after.
Not even close. Critical incorrect assumption: "while he doesn't know about the rule." If you return to my very first post, I said how can watching the replay help the noob understand what they did wrong, if they don't really understand what their mistakes even are? If you don't know power stalling or walking t1 tanks into walled t1 pd is very bad, watching the replay doesn't help. If you know they are bad, you see them in game and learn nothing by watching the replay.
Now you bring up talking with a trainer? Well of course that is useful to teach the noob what they are doing wrong. That's completely outside the discussion of whether a noob should watch their own replays WITHOUT a trainer (which is what I was clearly discussing before). The trainer gives them new knowledge, which is obviously helpful. I never said getting advice from a better player is bad. A noob watching their own replay when they don't know what the optimal strategies are is a far worse way of trying to figure it out. It's obviously a lot easier to learn math than to invent it. Again, this is why I said it's more useful to watch better players to learn from them than watching your own replays.
@Exselsior I understand everything you are saying, and thing only thing I would slightly disagree with is "They often are coming about from different sources than what I realized. Watching replays helps me with this." This would return to my point of just emphasizing that we need to first learn what things to focus on in game (or how much attention to pay to certain things, but you should at least notice when your units die from bad micro/formations and your eco balance). I still don't think replays should be too useful, but in any case I think they're less useful for noobs than players over about 1200 rating. This certainly is the case when you switch to ladder from teamgames and especially from setons. I'm terrible at a lot of things in ladder because there is a lot more to focus on that I'm not used to nor a good bo for most maps, and typically one of the most important takeaways is where to adjust your focus to be more efficient (sometimes you need more or less manual reclaiming and more micro, etc.). But I can typically understand what went wrong and where to adjust focus without watching the replay for my mistakes. And also a HUGE part of it is just learning good build orders for specific maps, which just takes practice and/or copying someone better than you. Also getting used to the ladder style/meta compared to teamgames...I also struggle significantly with the exact same things like over/under ecoing and not building enough spam on the very rare occasions I play ladder.
See, e.g. for laughs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghfY2626wbc&t=664sP.S. Janus OP
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Some interesting comments, and the thread is getting a little off the topic of this specific replay and more into a discussion on the best way to improve, and that's fine, and I think all the points being made are valid. I remember a math teacher saying that the reason we learn math in high school that we probably won't ever use is because we're learning how to learn, so a discussion on the best way to improve my play is at least as important on a discussion of the specific aspects of this specific replay.
I will say one thing, and this kind of relates to some discussions I've seen and participated in on this forum recently, about the struggle for player retention and the possibility that one of the main reasons it might be hard to keep players around is that this is actually an incredibly difficult game and new players often become frustrated and since it's not fun to get gutted, they leave. And this community does make an effort that is rarely seen in gaming to share knowledge and try to improve play in general, but I do think that there are perhaps some assumptions being made by those who feel they have something to offer other players in that attempt to improve, some bias among the high rated players.
@arma473 said in Game analysis - Replay #14886292:
If Blackheart or Thomas wants to take ZappaZapper under his wing and play 1v1s against him for 6 hours a day and explain the right way to do things and the right way to understand the game, that would be the best way to get Zappa up to 1900 as fast as possible.
I think there's assumptions being made that
a) I'm/everybody's capable of being a 1900 rated player
b) It's important for me/everybody to be a 1900 rated player
c) That I want/everbody wants to be a 1900 rated player as fast as possibleI don't care what my rating is. I've been playing vanilla for 10 years and have dipped my toe into the FAF waters a few times over the past 3 or 4 years and have recently decided that I'm really cheating myself out of something special by allowing myself to be so frustrated as to abandon the best aspect of my favorite game - playing against other humans. And so my only goal is to improve so that I can play well enough to have the enthusiasm to keep playing, be continually learning and improving, and if I'm being honest, if I am actually ever capable of being a 1900 rated player, I hope it takes me 20 years to get there, because it will be 20 years of what I think this game really has to offer over most other games - a sense of accomplishment. And I think maybe a part of the overall player retention issue lies in the goals of those who seek to help others improve, versus the goals of those of us who would like to improve. Maybe we're not all trying to be 1900 rated players, and maybe it's not actually important to address every bad habit immediately, or maybe not ever. And maybe part of what frustrates new players is not just the game itself, but the message they're given when they seek advice - "this is what you need to do to become a 1900 rated player as soon as possible". That can be very intimidating.
Anyway, thanks so much to everybody for all the insight into things I need to work on and ways to work on them, and I hope to continue having these discussions into the future. Also, I hope I provided a little insight into the mindset of the low rated player, because I know part of this playing this game is being part of this community, and being part of a community means helping in whatever small ways one can.
