Opening moves

[Emuchu]

As a Super-Titan, the truth of opening moves is that the nature of many games are decided based on what you did on the first few turns. I'll just give a few examples, by map:

Sharkfood Island: A common P1 tactic is to spawn a Runner during Turn 1. If P2 also spawns a Runner... there goes their Medic. It's very difficult to make that up, and forces P2 into a passive role, which is why you always see P2 do the same opening here.

Long Nine: Adorables players often send a suicide Runner to bite the base for 1 HP during the opening, before the opponent usually commits to blocking the entrances. This leaves a constant threat of a Runner + Mobi-Sniper sneak attack for the rest of the game, forcing P2 to play very conservatively.

Glitch: P1 can have a Sniper spawned and moved once by Turn 3, but usually has a tell when he does this. There's a bit of a meta-game here as both players have to guess who spawned their Sniper first, with the slower player forced to withdraw from the center bridge quickly. I personally buff the Heavy here, since it makes him annoying to kill without a Sniper.

Foundry: P1 has a few options, but they're all some variant of "attack the Sniper" and "charge the back door". This map has more standardized openings than any other map I've seen... besides P1 Adorables on Reaper, of course.

Peekaboo: Feedback has an incredibly dangerous opening consisting of spawning 3HP unboosted Soldiers in rapid succession, backed up by a Scrambler.

Sweetie Plains: This one, surprisingly enough, has a very dangerous opening for all races: drop everything and storm the Wit side. It's a shockingly aggressive map for its size.

Reaper: The Mobi Rush. Do I really need to talk about this one? P1 Adorables usually win by Turn 9.

Thorn Gully: This is the only map that I don't know any good openings to.

So yeah... most of the maps do have one or two right ways to open the game on either side. It's very important! In the lower tiers, players tend to choose inefficient openings, so it might not feel like the first moves are that important, but in the higher tiers, poor openings get punished very severely!