FTA Bonus on Highlevel Games means nearly Autowin

[awpertunity]

(08-13-2012 07:35 PM)QuantumApocalypse Wrote:  Honestly, almost none of the high level matches use FTA rushes, as there are ways to foil them, and once stopped, leave the attacker very vulnerable. It's hardly autowin.

Actually, this is exactly what the problem has become. Lots of meta-gaming going on in my opinion in the high levels. You are correct, that FTA rushes can quite easily stopped by P2 if P2 knows what he is doing, but this is exactly the issue now. In most games I play as P2 now, P1 does not even do a rush. This means P1 can very obviously build a larger army than P2, and basically there seems to be about a one-turn window in which P2 can attack to be able to win. This is the turn right before P1 tries to attack. Unfortunately, this is a complete guessing game for P2. I can scout for this by building a runner, but if my guess was wrong (i.e., I scout and notice that P1 is still building up an army), it's over. I'm not not behind only the FTA, but an additional turn I took to try to scout this information.


P1 will always have the advantage. There was a period where it seemed even, and that was because (in the high levels) there were only a set number of P1 openings that a majority of the players used. Knowing this, P2 was able to effectively prepare for these. Now that we have all had a lot more time playing the game, there are tons more openings I see, and a lot of them are now adapted to the fact that P2 has a certain set of openings to counter the original set of P1 openings, hence the meta-gaming.


This is just speaking in the most general sense, and I could definitely go into details for each specific map, but I don't think that is necessary... yet.

To sum up, the P2 openings that used to be considered the best possible openings a month ago are no longer useful. Unfortunately, this has made the FTA even larger now in my opinion because P1 has so many more options at the start of the game, and P2 is forced to guess and play reactively as best as possible.