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.