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,