Hey!
First time posting on these new forums.
So, yesterday I just got into playing FAF again after a long-ish break; I eventually broke my anxiety and jumped into ladder. Lost my first de-rusting game, won my second, and then upon my third I faced a guy named derek_bobjack, some roughly 900 ladder rated player. My game against him was on Open Palms, and I ended it after just over 7 minutes as he ctrl-K'd as I had 80% map control and came knocking on his front door with mobile artillery and Mantis. The game played very odd prior to that though, because I faced essentially no combat units at all. Just an endless stream of engineers attempting to expand (out of which I caught the majority of them with lone mantis/mole squads).
I felt intrigued and went looking at the local replay to see it from his point of view. Apparently, he went all out of trying to expand while basically walling his main base in. At his expansions he often prioristised building T1 PD and T1 static AA, going as far as often neglecting both factories and sometimes delaying mexes. Then he goes for an extended turtle, upgrading his ACU to T2 and T3 as soon as possible, neglecting expansion almost entirely unless successful in the early stages and prioritises upgrading his mexes to T3 ASAP, all while filling his base with static defences of all tiers and kinds. The endgame plan then deviates a little bit from game to game, but it generall invovles SACUs heavily point defence/klink hammer creeping, Novax satelites or plain rambo SACU/percivals steamrolling.
Okay, sure. Sometimes you might feel like trying some silly strategy in a game. But, I went through the FAF Replays vault on a number of his games and found that he does this exact thing on almost every single round he plays. Except when an "incompatible" map comes up, in which he ctrl-K's within the first 20 seconds. Sure, okay, some people just aren't that good at the game I guess, right? Well, here it what irks me. A disturbing amount of time it does work for him. 5x5 km maps being dragged out way longer, up towards an hour+.
Now I am hardly a "good" player. I watch a lot of casts and POV games on YouTube though and have a fair bit of an idea how the game is, ahem, supposed to be played. And thus I feel fairly confident to say that:
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This is not exactly normal 1v1 ladder gameplay.
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This flies in the face of what good gameplay should look like. Hard turtling should not beat map control.
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While being aware that this is not high ranking ladder; why does this work as consistently as it seems to do for him? What would a consistent way of beating such a strategy be, if you really are not up for playing an hour of artillery war, if you were to end up in a situation where he manages to secure his main base against more straight forward attacks?