America vs Eurasia Team Match: A Tale of Mobis and Meta-Game

[Mag!cGuy]

Or we could do FvF on war garden, hmm powee?

What is awesome with Fvf on glitch is that it's the best mind-game possible. Expectations and blind guess are the keys to win, of course when both sides are very good, which would be the case in a new match between Eurasia and America. Passionate discussion to know what plan to have or guessing what is the others' plan will be awesome!

[GreatGonzales]

(06-30-2013 08:11 PM)poweewee Wrote:  1. What would America have done if we placed the mobi on the wit space and tele'd the sniper to kill your 2HP runner on our spawn space?

Yes I would like to talk about turn 22 and 23 in some detail. I am pretty proud of turn 22. When I first saw what you guys had done on turn 21 - the all out attack up center - I was despairing that we had lost. We could not hope to defend against that assault, as no units were in position. And I was kicking myself for not having foreseen that response.

But then we saw that we could force you to defend. By arranging our heavy and soldier to block access to our base, we could ensure that you could not win in a single turn. And we could also set ourselves up for a 1 turn win, by advancing mobi and soldier, and squatting your left spawn with a runner. We knew that the only means you had of killing the runner was mobi/sniper, so at the very least this ploy would force you to retreat, and maybe allow us to stop your attack up center. We knew mobi would be on G4 or F3.

But here is when it gets interesting. We would need 8 wits to win in a single turn. But if you watch the replay on OSN, you will see that we only had 7 to start turn 24. Why would we do this? The reason is: meta-game. We knew you guys were smart enough to see that we could potentially win in a single turn, this forcing you to play defense. We could therefor predict your actions to some level of specificity, and we further knew that you did not have all our wits accounted for.

Therefore, we decided to make it SEEM like we were preparing to win in a single turn, to get you to play defense, when actually we were preparing a response to your expected response - we spawned a runner and moved it up. This is, I think, a great and classic application of meta-game.

To answer your question - yes I was surprised (pleasantly surprised) to see that you placed the mobi on F3 rather than the safer G4. If you had done this, I am not sure we could have forced a win. I think we would have responded by killing your sniper with a runner, and maybe kill a soldier in the center with heavy/soldier, and retreat with mobi. But maybe we could have found a way to force a win anyway...seems unlikely though given that you spawned a heavy instead of a soldier. In any case - yes this game probably didn't need to end when it did, and it actually would have been quite interesting... But we had positioned ourselves well to capitalize on the F3 blunder.

[poweewee]

I actually suggested that we could possibly go all in with the attack (killing both your heavy and soldier) but most of us agreed we couldn't just leave the left side open. LOL You were entirely correct that we didn't know how many wits you had; we just assumed that we could have lost in one turn.

[GreatGonzales]

Yes, I was afraid you guys would meta-game our meta-game! but I didn't think you were bold enough to try it.

[burnodrod]

turn 10 was completely crazy!
Gonna look at the forum just to find the explanation for it

[GreatGonzales]

(07-01-2013 07:36 AM)burnodrod Wrote:  turn 10 was completely crazy!
Gonna look at the forum just to find the explanation for it

Haha yeah..that was Gavin's crazy idea, based on the assumption that the heavy had been moved to center wit space. We had planned (if memory serves) to move up mobi and force a win. But, as you can see it didn't work out. that set us back to being about even with Eurasia, since we were ahead after taking their mobi.

[Alvendor]

Great game. By looking at America's forum I feel a bit lazy I found it really hard to get the same overview as a regular game when trying to analyze it. America's way of structuring things is clearly something to copy going forward.

I've only skimmed the forum but quite funny how we at times viewed the game so differently and worried about completely different stuff!

My thoughts on the game:
* Both moves when we in Euroasia lost our mobis weren't great. I think both were due to lack of communication / misunderstandings and could easily have been prevented if we had been more active.
* Americas argument for playing turn 10 (from what I can see) was that it was a "medium risk, high reward" play. That may be true but those kind of moves should be made when you are equal or behind, not when you just killed opponent's mobi for free.
* On the positive side, Eurasia did a good job securing the middle of the map with soldiers which resulted in the attack on turn 21.
* Americas move and reasoning on turn 22:

(07-01-2013 02:00 AM)GreatGonzales Wrote:  Yes I would like to talk about turn 22 and 23 in some detail. I am pretty proud of turn 22. When I first saw what you guys had done on turn 21 - the all out attack up center - I was despairing that we had lost. We could not hope to defend against that assault, as no units were in position. And I was kicking myself for not having foreseen that response.

But then we saw that we could force you to defend. By arranging our heavy and soldier to block access to our base, we could ensure that you could not win in a single turn. And we could also set ourselves up for a 1 turn win, by advancing mobi and soldier, and squatting your left spawn with a runner. We knew that the only means you had of killing the runner was mobi/sniper, so at the very least this ploy would force you to retreat, and maybe allow us to stop your attack up center. We knew mobi would be on G4 or F3.

But here is when it gets interesting. We would need 8 wits to win in a single turn. But if you watch the replay on OSN, you will see that we only had 7 to start turn 24. Why would we do this? The reason is: meta-game. We knew you guys were smart enough to see that we could potentially win in a single turn, this forcing you to play defense. We could therefor predict your actions to some level of specificity, and we further knew that you did not have all our wits accounted for.

I'm quite impressed with this. I think the better the players the more meta game/quessing/bluffing situations you will run into. I've seen many bluffs regarding if you moved this or that unit etc... But I have never seen this varian in which you launch a full scale attack bluffing you have enough wits just to force the opponent to defend. Feel like I learned something new!

In this kind of meta game it becomes important to know exactly what kind of plays your opponent is capable of doing. This game is a good reminder for next that none of the teams are afraid of big plays!

[GreatGonzales]

Yes turn 10 may have been a poor decision in hindsight. That turn was rushed, and also - I accidentally submitted our turn prematurely! We had intended to spawn a soldier on right and move up, instead we banked 3 wits. I was so worried that you guys would be able to kill the mobi, but fortunately you didn't have two runners in position.

[Gavin Wins]

Turn 10 was a crazy idea that I came up with relying on a blind assumption. I was expecting a more reasonable counter proposal from the rest of my team, but it never came! People just wanted to go forward with my idea, despite my multiple caveats, which was a shock to me, ha ha. It did make for a more exciting game and rewarding finish though.

We felt like both of the turns that we were able to kill the mobis were big blunders of Eurasia. We didn't quite understand how Eurasia allowed it to happen twice. But after viewing Eurasia's jumbled forum thread, it made a little more sense

[poweewee]

(07-01-2013 09:40 AM)Alvendor Wrote:  I'm quite impressed with this. I think the better the players the more meta game/quessing/bluffing situations you will run into. I've seen many bluffs regarding if you moved this or that unit etc... But I have never seen this varian in which you launch a full scale attack bluffing you have enough wits just to force the opponent to defend. Feel like I learned something new!

Exactly how I feel as well.

AND I am in the finals against this aforementioned American leader GreatGonzales