100 days of ladder

Day 5 (April 30th): Another two games, another two defeats. Another two learning opportunities.

My first game (replay #16923479) started out really well, taking down multiple engies with Labs, however I lost an incredible amount of stuff to bombers. I kept thinking I had everything under control with a bit of aa, however it was never in the right spot and in enough quantity. To make things worse, I had built power far outside of my base as that was where I had engies at the time, so I couldn't protect it. I should have made an air factory a lot earlier.

My second game took place on fields of ISIS (replay #16923681). Not used to maps like these and it shows. Better that I learn now than have to later I guess. Bombers were an issue again here. I got air up to deal with them, however it delayed my expansion and I lost interceptors to him, and never regained air control. This came from building my second air and third land at the same time, in different places, which delayed both, which came from me not wanting one of the engis to spend the travel time to move to the other.

Both ACU's went to one of the reclaim fields. I made a serious mistake here which is to reclaim everything immediately, much faster than I could spend it. I knowingly did this, and I think this comes from me instinctually expecting a fight for early mid reclaim. However my opponent was at the other field, ingrained from games on other maps. I should have instead have waited until I had spent the mass. I made further mistakes in the game getting my ACU caught by an opposing guncom and lost a lot of units and territory to save it, which eventually snowballed into defeat (I also accidentally upgraded 2 mexes to T3).

My main takeaway here is that I'm trying to rush things out of urgency instead of doing them correctly. Building stuff right next to where one of my engis is, rather than where it should be, was a serious problem in both games. Reclaiming before I could use it was also an example. This habit is going to be tough to kick but I am aware of it now. I also need to get more practice with maps like Isis and Regor, where the ACU's go to different spots and do not directly fight each other.

Overall this was a pretty constructive day. I like that I can still learn interesting things about the game and how I play.

Evan, forgive me if I should not give detailed feedback here on your replays, but wanted to give you some insight on your first game on the 30th on the map gen:

First and foremost, I think the biggest thing I noticed was that your opponent (Cascade) kept his ACU in base longer, utilizing the build power to get factories up and running. Your raids were good, but they did not do enough damage to cause him to stall on mass nor energy, allowing him to get more units up. At the 2:50 mark of the game:

As stated, your raids were good and took out a good amount of his engineers, but if you zoom out and do a reclaim view (ctrl+shift default, if you did not know) you can see there is 4k+ reclaim on the map in large concentrations. His lone, surviving engineer provided enough income to keep operations smooth. With this, he has 2 land factories + air up while you are working on your 3rd land factory:

On that note, you did not send an engineer to the corner where there is - what appears to be - 5+ factories (~200 each) worth of reclaim or 25+ tanks .

At around 6-7 minutes in your ACU and his have exchanged fire to the point where his has ~3k hp and yours has ~4.6k hp: ALWAYS bully a Cybran ACU, especially as Sera/UEF where you have a big hp advantage. I personally would have sent my army to that side to put pressure on him and possibly end the game there and then.

In addition, you never got any air presence as he kept 1 t1 bomber attacking your air fact, destroying the unit in production. A bit after he sends 2 more bombers and they get dozens of passes without any interruption: keep at least 1 t1 maa back in your base without moving it to prevent this as it certainly was a huge factor in costing the game:

Around 10 mins (not much game after this) you can see that after a major fight Cascade "won the reclaim field" and was able to simply overwhelm you:

So, main lesson for this game in my opinion:

GET THAT RECLAIM

It does not matter if the map is 5x5, 10x10, 15x15, 20x20, etc; the player(s) whom get more reclaim tend to WIN the games. Going forward, especially on map gen, zoom out while teleporting in, and hold ctrl+shift so you can pre-plan how you will go about playing the map.

Hope this helps and adds to your success! If you want me to remove this post let me know.

Morax is a bully

Thanks for the advice @Morax I really appreciate it (and the pictures help me see as well). I didn't even realise how much reclaim there was until you pointed it out, and as you said the maa placement was pretty bad.

Day 6 (May 2nd): I think I'm starting to get better although today's game (Replay 16945374) did not end well. It was a mapgen game on an interesting water map, so it gave me some experience with an area I need more of. After the game, I reviewed the replay and then ran into Swkoll, who watched the replay and mentioned things I had missed completely. I'll try and compare what our different thoughts were to illustrate the difference in mindset.

Things were going well at first, I had secured the naval reclaim due to having more mass in frigates, but I lost (suicided) air and my comm was killed by torps. I need to strike a balance between using my acu to reclaim and keeping it safe. I'm getting better at spamming less factories than I really need but I still overbuilt on frigates and torps. I've often had trouble recognizing when I have more than enough navy to win, usually it is the opposite, so in this game I wound up with more than I needed before I realised. This game will help me figure out when I have made too much of something even if it isn't causing me to stall.

I also was late on getting some of the reclaim and let my opponent take some from my side. I also really underestimated how much power T2 and T3 air would use. I think mass stalling for a while blinded me to having not enough energy. As soon as I was finally able to use the mass I didn't have the energy.

Swkoll mainly highlighted bad trades with navy, idle units/ACU, missed reclaim, and spending mass andpower on stuff I didn't need (extra factories, T3 before I could spend it, too many mex at the same time, etc). Another thing Swkoll mentioned was adding in T1 bombers into my air queue. This would give me bombers before I need them, which would be helpful on larger maps in saving apm and attention, especially against Zthuees. He gave a lot of good advice, too much to give more than a brief summary of. He also predicted how the game would go as it went. A big difference is that Swkoll doesn't see my biases or rationalising so he stays completely objective, and is also much more experienced. Going forward I will try to view my games as an outsider, while also figuring out why I do the things I do. As an example, I think I realised why I miss so much reclaim in certain games. Aside from ignoring many of the smaller rocks, I also am used to all the mass being gone after the first few minutes, so I stop looking for it and trying to go for it except where there are fights.

There's a new map pool out, and with it new adventures! Also noticed a lot of people like Femboy, Techhousenoob, Grimplex and Harzer making useful ladder content. I'm still planning to train with Tagada as well. so the next few weeks will be quite eventful.

Day 7 (May 3rd): I played some more ladder today and looked at all the content people have been putting out. Tagada's post on advanced build-orders in particular has been interesting, although I need to focus on the fundamentals first.

Unfortunately I did not win today's game. You may have noticed that my win-loss rate has not been very good since I started. I accepted when I started this that it would take a while to show results. But I will get to 1800, even if I have to get to 800 first.

It takes a while to kick bad habits and this game (replay 16949513) was a good example. The map (Zeuthea valley) has a lot of resources to grab and many different lanes. I think I misread how open the map was at first (having a lot of terrain barriers does not mean less aggressive). I wasn't as suicidal with units but lost a lot of engineers to labs and wasted my bombers/air. I also did not attack on my opponents side of the map as much as I should have, often focusing entirely on defense while my opponent got large parts of the map for free.

Fortunately I think the game shows some slight signs of improvement. I had enough buildpower in the base and didn't suffer any serious stalls. I also made more of an attempt to rebuild mexes I had lost. For a while I was even slightly ahead on the ratio of units killed, although my opponent was always ahead in score. I had Morax's advice to try harder to get the reclaim as well, although I often without realising found myself taking my reclaiming engis and using them for something else like a drop.

This leads into the next point. I've uncovered yet another issue of mine that has gone unnoticed until now: Move overriding. I will give a move order to a unit and then give another order to override it. An example of this is when I put an attack order on a lab that had slipped through, only to change it into a move order for some reason, which caused the lab to escape and continue to cause trouble. I would also retreat units when I shouldn't, select way more units than I need to in order to deal with a runby, and so on, wasting time and resulting in worse outcomes than if I had left the order. A big part of this is me trying to play faster when I think I'm not keeping up. On maps like this, it often feels as if you are perpetually behind, as even if you get everything important on your side of the map it can look as if you only control a small portion of it. I need to strike a balance between always thinking I am losing and thinking that I need to keep playing as hard as I can to win.

This concludes the first 7 days of the journey. If I try to focus on correcting everything at once I'll probably collapse, so for now I'm just working on better trades, getting reclaim, better unit mix, wasting less resources, and reading the map better. The new pool is a good chance to do this. I want to prepare for it but I also want to go in blind for some of the maps and then compare how I think it plays vs how it actually plays.

If you see me in FAF and are within around 250 points of me, feel free to ask me to ladder.

Day 8 (May 5th): Finally some success again, admittedly against someone lower rated than me. I played two games today. Both were technically victories although the first one was because my opponent ctrl-k'ed really early due to getting his ACU stuck.

In the second game (Replay 16963727) it was a much tougher fight. The map was twin rivers. We both raided each other with labs, delaying eachother's start. Until recently I forgot Mantis now have the square icon so I was a bit alarmed at first. We also bombed each other, with my scorcher probably being the only reason I didn't lose by taking out 4 pgens and 2 engis. Most of the battles took place on my side of the map afterwards. This time I was able to stay much more calm and deal with the raids, as well as rebuild after.

I think my build order could use some work. I didn't queue up much with my ACU at the start, which meant I had to spend more apm and time with it later. I also sent my ACU to what I think is the wrong spot, and had to spend time pulling it back. I will watch some better players and see what they do on this map.

Another issue I had was trying to launch attacks that wouldn't work. I have been trying to be a lot more aggressive and take the initiative but I launched multiple incursions that just wasted units. Strikers are never really going to be able to raid against Mantis unless there are a lot more, I'm not blaming my difficulties on faction choice, but it is something I need to keep in mind. If I had just been a bit less hotheaded I would have seen that I had a noticeable lead in eco and that all the wrecks were on my side of the map. My opponent delayed his expansion and mex upgrades to get more attacking units. Having not scuted I assumed he had the eco that I had but with a unit lead, and so I tried to make risky attacks that didn't pay off. This led to my opponent destroying much more of my tanks than I did his, keeping him in the game.

Getting reclaim was once again an issue for me as I constantly found myself losing my own engis. Forget the natural reclaim, I couldn't even get the wrecks most of the time. I had engineers, but many were in the wrong spot, and I issued orders to assist a nearby factory rather than having them take the time to wander over and reclaim. I atleast managed to get one island and contest the other, although it was very late for both of us.

In the end my opponent suicided his Gun ACU into My Gun ACU and units. I'm not sure what would have happened if he had not, as I was just beginning to stabilize at T2 and get the reclaim, but my opponent still had a large lead in land and air units and had almost caught up on eco, as well as having more map control.

How have you guys been finding these reports? Does anyone relate to the issues I am trying to fix with my playstyle? Anyone feel inspired to try and get better with me?

I burned out from faf for a bit after doing far too much grinding, and the only reason I'm playing the odd ladder game right now is because I got some motivation from your posts. I might start doing something similar to this myself and work on slowly improving instead of sweaty grind.

I am about the same rating as you on ladder currently, if I'm ever around when you are I'll queue with you.

@evan_ said in 100 days of ladder:

I've uncovered yet another issue of mine that has gone unnoticed until now: Move overriding.

I do this a lot too, something that I found that helps is the unit lock function from I believe the UI party mod. There's a hotkey you can set and if you press it while having some units selected it'll lock them from being selected by anything other than a shift click. Super nice to use on inties/asf that are split from your main air unit group to kill bombers, and same for tanks and labs hunting down enemy tanks and labs. I currently have it set to F3 for me. That's about all the details I can remember off the top of my head away from my pc with FAF on it, hopefully it's accurate enough that you can figure out how to set that up yourself if you're interested.

Edit: It's a little buggy, you'll want to hit the hotkey and wait half a second or whatever to make sure the unit lock icon actually shows up before moving on. Still very worth it imo, I use it frequently now.

Thanks Exselsior, I'll check it out. I'm glad to hear you're back in the game. Let me know if you ever want to ladder.

@evan_ said in 100 days of ladder:

This leads into the next point. I've uncovered yet another issue of mine that has gone unnoticed until now: Move overriding. I will give a move order to a unit and then give another order to override it. An example of this is when I put an attack order on a lab that had slipped through, only to change it into a move order for some reason, which caused the lab to escape and continue to cause trouble.

Setting up some hotkeys of the form 'select nearest idle [unit type]' (or similar but adding to existing selection) could perhaps be useful here.

@evan_ said in 100 days of ladder:

How have you guys been finding these reports? Does anyone relate to the issues I am trying to fix with my playstyle? Anyone feel inspired to try and get better with me?

As someone who has been playing for a long time, but not frequently enough, and without seeing much in the way rating improvement, it is definitely interesting to follow your progress (and motivating for me to try something similar, or at least play ladder a bit more often). Don't give up!

Day 9 (May 7th): Today was not very eventful for my ladder career. I drew a game (replay 16979785) on Mirage. I have to say that I likely would have lost if not for my opponent's ACU wandering a bit too far forward.

I think I need to readjust how I raid on certain maps. I often go for one or two lab+scout pairs to attack enemy engis. It is not too big a deal if they get destroyed by a defending tank on my opponent's side of the map, however against enemy labs, especially the strong Aeon labs, I am likely to lose my own lab and immediately have to deal with my opponent's raid, at the least having to retreat an engi and in the worst case losing it. I am checking through the vault to see how other players handle this when playing as UEF. For now I think I will swap out a lab for a tank in some cases.

I also think I tried to expand a bit too quickly. I sent my engis out before grabing the rocks around my base and before I had built enough factories. Because Mirage is a small map, enemy labs can get to engis a bit quicker than I am used to, and as you can surmise from the previous paragraph, I lost my lab and then some engis to enemy raids before I could secure things.

The one thing that I have improved on is the lack of useless attacks where I know they won't work (I wrote a section about this on day 8). My opponent opened with multiple labs and a scout before engis, and his labs are a bit more expensive than mine, so even if I lose an engi to raids it can still be even enough to not force me to launch risky attacks like I tried in the last game.

Aside from that, there is not much to speak of. There are other things that I could have done better, but as mentioned before I am trying to focus on the most important things so I don't try to do everything at once . I have noticed there have been a few gaps here and there in the days where I play and update this thread. I absolutely intend to continue and finish this, so I'll try to play whenever I have free time.

Edit: Also wanted to write that I thoroughly enjoyed reading Exselsior and Crispweed's comments, and welcome more feedback and advice.

@tagada said in 100 days of ladder:

If you would be interested I could give you a short training to give you some pointers, we could then repeat that every say 2 weeks and post the training sessions on the FAF's YT and make it into a mini-series. I think it could motivate and help some people that are considering getting into the competitive side of the game by making sure that they know what to focus on and how to improve quickly.

For replays you can just share the replay ID, don't think there is a need for a zipped file.

@Tagada i would be very appreciative if you were to make this into a series im struggling to find a high rated player to learn off of

I like this series a lot. The self reflection is key to improvement IMO. You seem to be catching some of your mistakes and are working on fixing them which is awesome. Wishing you luck as you continue.

If I may offer some unsolicited advice:

I am not sure if this is a misinterpretation due to language use, but something I noticed is a few of your writeups you will say something like "I lost 'x' because my opponent did 'y', or 'I sent too many engis to location 'x' instead of doing 'y' with them. Where the implication is that 'x' was really bad and not to do it again. This is not always so black and white. The first 3-5 minutes of the game can be really dicey in terms of opening builds on certain maps, and fog of war is a thing even in the later stages. You can't always act on perfect intel and calculated risks are a thing from your opening build to what you do at min 15.

I really don't think you are doing this because your writeups seem like you are giving your gameplay some good thought, but I just wanted to make sure that you are not jumping to conclusions with cause and effect If you made a decision that is good 80% of the time, I want to make sure you are not discounting it because it failed on that 20%, without trying to understand some more context behind things that go wrong at face value. Remember, a good choice will not always yield a good outcome.

The one main piece of advice I want to give you specific from me is for you to ask yourself when you play the following:

What am I doing?
Why am I doing it?
What is my win condition?

I don't have good APM, I have decent micro, I have passable macro, and my late game is garbage. But I know how to find my win condition and exploit it. I highly recommend you try and remember when you analyze (and play) your games to look at the big picture, and not get lost in the weeds with micro/silly mistakes. Find your win condition and commit to it. But try not to get blinded to what is around you as you do so. Its very general advice, but IMO its the most important thing you can do in this game to win. Don't just play on autopilot. Play for a goal, and make it the right one.

Thanks Tex, this is really good advice actually, a big problem I have been trying to work on is actually figuring out the reason why I lost (or sometimes even the reason why I won), and why a decision was bad, rather than if it was bad or not. As you mentioned, I need to extend this mindset down to the individual decisions I make ingame as well. I have also noticed in certain games that I don't commit to a strategy or win condition, this is another area that I can work on. Many of my wins have simply been my opponent suiciding, but that is starting to change as I face stronger players where I need to take the initiative to win.

Maybe one day if i can find the time I’ll try and link a vod to a replay review of yours if you are fine with it being posted here.

@Tex that would be highly appreciated.

Day 10 (May 9th): Some more success today, although admittedly against a lower rated opponent. Today's game (Replay 17002038) took place on a very mass heavy mapgen map, something I could use a lot more experience on. From the start I was trying to follow the advice about what my strategy/win condition. would be. I decided on running a mix of T2 while I quickly scaled my main factory to T3 (not exactly the most original plan I know). I would use this to secure the corners which is where most of the reclaim would be. In the end my opponent somewhat underbuilt on tanks, and didn't scale as quickly, allowing me to catch and cook his ACU. It took a while to outscale him on land as I prioritized building way more engis to reclaim than he did, but eventually it paid off with the win.

I think I played this better than I would have at the start of this journey. I got most of the reclaim on my side, although there were a few gaps. I made an effort to scale up much quicker, and I made an effort to move engis to new reclaim fields before I stalled mass, rather than after. I mostly stayed somewhat balanced, although I had a brief stall while making my first t2 pgen.

I also made the mistake of not assisting my main factory with engineers. Overall I made too little buildpower in my base. I think I tricked my mind into thinking the buildpower would be used in my base, all while my brain went on autopilot sending them to the rock fields.

Overall though, I wasn't really punished for the mistakes I made, and the game ended before I could see any differences in scale. I have been looking for a replay to specifically ask for a critique. I think this game might be it, as I am not used to games that scale up this quickly and I am not sure how the game would have gone from here. I want to see how my analysis of even a short and simple game is different from other players. Would anyone be willing to watch this game (replay 17002038) and tell me what I could improve?

@evan_ On 17002038 i would say u have a hard time spending your mass early on which is bad like make 1 land fac first engie go reclaim and make like 8 pgens with acu and engies to have enough e to spend all the mass

Day 11 (May 12): Played 2 games today, and lost both. Both games seemed to highlight difficulty in defending against raids, even when I had tanks defending.

In game 1 (replay 17014918), a combination of an early powerstall, losing fights, and and investing in the wrong things cost me the game. I have figured out that I tend to overflow mass or hold large amounts in storage a while after a mass stall, this is often due to overcorrecting. I think I need to do less overcorrecting, even if it means mass stalling for slightly longer by not canceling and pausing every project. In the end, I had to keep my ACU involved in combat instead of upgrading, and investing in t2 mexes and t2 land put me far behind in t1 land, resulting in me getting overrun.

Game 2 (replay 17015030) was on Emerald craters, which is quite a tough map to play. Emerald craters is quite spread out, making it difficult to defend expanding engineers. In this game I did not attack as much as I should have, and was not able to defend against raids from bombers and labs. This meant a heavy loss of engineers which snowballed into being outscaled. I also underestimated how important land would be in the game. I think I believed land would not be as important as air. I was able to keep up for a while and take back and hold half the map for a while, however I was never able to make lastind damage on my opponent, and was eventually lost on all fronts.

Today's review is fairly short as I am somewhat tired. I have asked Tagada to train me tomorow, and will update you guys on the results.

Day 12 (May 14): Well it has been a couple days now hasn't it? A few days ago I trained with Tagada, and he showed me some problems I had been overlooking (as well as some problems I hadn't been working to fix hard enough).

It is hard to summarize everything in a short post, and I am sure @Tagada can weigh in if I missed anything, but the few of the main points are as follows:

• My rally points are inneficient, often leading units to the wrong parts of the map or even suiciding them into enemy tanks. Tagada mentioned that rally points should typically be just behind the front lines (where your map control ends). This seems obvious in hindsight but I suppose I had been manually correcting where each unit goes all along, wasting precious time and apm.

• My unit queues have also been suboptimal, as I have found myself not removing labs and t1 transports. In most of my factories I have been building a mix of tanks, engineers, etc which can be somewhat difficult to manage. Tagada suggested having some factories for only tanks and scouts, and some producing engineers. I have tried this, and found it quite a bit more convenient. He suggested having factories assist other factories to copy the unit mixes and rally points. This saves time and allows me to change the mix and rally points for all of them at once.

• I react very slowly to things: Quite often when watching replays I see myself stalling for minutes on end without correcting it, or allowing my opponent to take out my expanding engies for free.. There isn't any magic solution to this other than to try and plan out things to be more effective ahead of time. I have been trying to have more game awareness for a while and will update you guys on the results.

• Eco management and decision making needs some work. Often I find my mistakes and bad decisions compounding on each other. For example, making less build power than I need will cause me to spend less mass than I should, building up a large bar of unneeded resources. With nothing else to put it into I absentmindedly put the mass into mex upgrades when I need tanks. Another basic thing Tagada had to explain to me was how to tech transition. T2 units are generally more efficient than t1 and so once you upgrade you generally want to scale back t1. In my games I found myself upgrading to T2 land while also building new t1 factories to spam tanks. This is a somewhat unfocused and conflicted plan. Tagada explained that I should either push for T2 and not make any new t1 spam factories or I should stay on T1 for slightly longer and try to gain an advantage there before heading to T2.

There are many other points he touched on, which will hopefully be displayed in video format soon. As for today's games, I tried to apply the lessons, however they were somewhat anticlimactic. In game 1, (replay 17038956), my opponent raided me and then after a brief fight overextended with his ACU. I made more of an attempt to catch stalls/overflows (I'm also starting to learn when I stall the most and why). I tried to make more of an effort to protect my engis although I still lost 2 of them to a single selen, which is not exactly optimal, but oh well.

In game 2 (replay 17040925) I pretty much doomed myself from the start. It was on a large 20x20 water mapgen. I went for a first transport which was promptly scouted, locked, and shot down. I got 4 engis off and quickly laid down a factory, however, building a mex first combined with a bad powerstall prevented me from completing it in time, and although I tried to spread out my engis, evidently it was not enough as I stll lost them all in one pass, right before the factory was completed. Combined with losing air the game was lost as long as my opponent didn't make a major blunder. I somehow took the main central island back and won a ton of reclaim, but even with that there was pretty much nothing I could do, and in the end I ctrl-k'ed.

I've decided to dedicate some time to practicing and learning some basic build-orders, as well as doing some sandboxing to figure out where and when I make decisions that lead to stalls or overflows. Fortunately there is tons of new interesting content from various other players, so I have a lot of resources to help me. I'll update you guys on how it goes.