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

[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.