How to become good at Outwitters and Life part 1

[Alvendor]

1. Introduction
I have been fascinated for a long time about the process of becoming really good at something. We have a lot of posts on the forum about tips and specific tactics in Outwitters, but in this I want to take a look at the whole process from a wider perspective. If we don’t look at specific strategies but instead try to see what would it take to go from a complete beginner to one of the very best Outwitter players in the world. What would the process look like? What kind of effort is needed? What roadblocks would you run into?

This will be a three part series on how to become good at Outwitters. This is not the exact path I have taken but rather my thoughts on what a new aspiring player would do to improve as quickly as possible. This first part will assume a completely new player who has never played Outwitters before and taking that person to become fairly confident in the game's basic strategies and concepts. The second part will incorporate more advanced strategies and how to learn them. The final part will be very advanced strategies and some abstract concepts that is useful to compete at the nose bleed levels at the top of the rankings.It might not be obvious from this post so much, but from the coming ones I will argue that things will start to feel more like work than play the further you follow this path. The better you are the more effort will be needed to improve. Some might ask: what’s the point? After all, don’t we play games just to have fun?

Those are fair questions and I’ll dwell on them later on. For me the short answer is: we are all different and it is perfectly fine to play just because it’s fun. It is also not all or nothing. The feeling of progress is enjoyable, it doesn’t matter if its one step or ten steps in the right direction. There is also a science to the madness of getting really good. And it doesn’t change that much if you want to apply it to other areas of life.

With that said, let’s get started!

2. Learning to walk
The complete beginner doesn’t need much in terms of goals or process. Play around with any race you wan’t, as long as you are playing you are doing things right (avoid 2v2 though!). There is no need to spend too much time thinking about moves. Just learn all the units, their wit cost and what the different maps look like. No need to try too hard, just play and see if you enjoy it. A complete beginner should follow the Nike slogan and just do it! The question then becomes if Outwitters is something you enjoy and want to spend time and energy pursuing. If you already are an Outwitter veteran and got your priorities straight then please continue to the next section.

When you start to know the mechanics of the game you need to start playing ranked if you haven’t already done so. It is important to start getting matched against people who are similar to your level. We learn best if we are faced with tasks that are challenging but not too challenging.

3. Do not care about your ranking. I repeat, DO NOT CARE ABOUT YOUR RANKING
This is the first and probably also the biggest mistake you will do. Notice I said “you will do” not “you can do”. The question is not if you will do this but how often you will do it and how much it will hinder you. Not only now but it will continue to hunt you for the rest of your life. Psychology researchers call this being either result or process oriented.

Result oriented - wants to reach number 1 on ladder ranking. Wants to achieve something and doesn’t really care how he gets there. Not achieving it is associated with a lot of pain. Don’t want to look bad.

Process oriented - wants to improve, the process is the goal. A lost game in which you learned something is a success. A won game you didn’t learn anything from is a failure. You don’t mind looking bad (eh… don’t mind that much, we are all human after all).

This kind of result vs process orientation occurs in many areas of life. The result oriented shy introvert that is so afraid of looking bad in a social situation he doesn’t take any chances and therefore doesn’t improve his social skills. This only cause him to be in the same situation the next time, never improving. The process oriented person on the other hand would take the chance, acknowledging that things could get messy, but would feel good afterwards whatever the outcome. He might have screwed up but is a better person because of it.

Hm, sorry, back to Outwitters… Yeah result orientation is bad. Your current ranking has nothing to do with your skill development. You are better off spending your time worrying about something else.

4. A little bit of focus
Now you know how the units work, what the maps look like and that your ultimate goal should not be to become a super titan but to get better. Now we need some commitment on your part. You need to choose a race!
It doesn’t matter too much what you choose but I don’t recommend veggies as they play so differently to the other races. Scallywags will probably make you rise in ranking the quickest, but that doesn’t matter for the long term (remember process orientation!).

When learning a new skill it is important to focus on one specific task at a time. You want as few moving parts as possible. Your brain has a much easier job to figure out how something works by playing around with one specific thing instead of having several parts that all move and interact with each other at the same time. This is why you chose one race and try to learn that well first.

You are allowed to switch race if you really want to, that’s fine. But you want to avoid playing a few games, switching race, playing a few, switching… That is making things to complicated for your brain so you won’t reach that accelerated learning we are striving for!

5. Getting Strategic
You got the rules, you got a race, time for some devious plans! If you read the forum you know there is a lot of strategies and tactics discussed already. But we are quite ambitious and want to do it quickly.

So the question is how to learn strategies and tactics as efficiently as possible? There is actually a secret for how to do something efficiently. If you promise not to tell, I will let you in on it!

The Secret: There will always be some stuff that are more important than other stuff. To be efficient you find the important stuff and concentrate on that!

Profound, isn’t it? Finding out what is the important stuff can sometimes be a problem. Luckily for you people on the forum have helped each other and already found it for Outwitters:

* Don’t attack unless you will get an advantage from it
This means that before you go for an attack or kill a unit, visualise how the board would look like after your attack. Would you be better or worse off? You will soon realise why you should only attack a unit if you kill it the same turn (otherwise he can attack you with it and don’t even have to move). Your attacks will also become fewer but bigger. You will realise that only attacking with some of your units doesn’t accomplish much.

A special case of this rule is to not attack the base unless you will win the game in the next few turns. If you attack the base and don’t win immediately you are actually worse off as your opponent spend all his wits on units while you spent some attacking the base.

When you are starting to implement this correctly your games will become fairly defensive (especially if you play Scallywags). A good typical game will be: you defend until your opponent attacks. You crush his attack and launch a counterattack that wins the game. The reason it will look like this is that the attacker have to move the units more times than the defender and will therefore spend more wits. It is easier to play a good defensive game than a good offensive game. We will learn how to play a good offensive game as well, just not today.

* Unit composition
This is all about what units to create and if you buff them with a medic. A rule of thumb is boosted soldiers are the bulk of your army, unboosted runners for vision and range, boost snipers and specials, and don’t make new heavies.

There is a lot of special cases you need to figure out for yourself or read about on the forum. Just think about what units you have? What do you need? What does your opponent have?

* Attack paths
As it costs wits to move units, certain paths makes more sense to attack than others. Well, why am I writing about this. Just read this
http://www.onemanleft.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=659
Vivafringe has done an excellent post explaining it.

* Wit management
This is an important but more advanced concept than the others so we won’t say much about it here and wait until next episode to go into further details. But the short summary is that you wanna think about how you can use your wits as efficiently as possible, no unnecessary moving of units for example. You also want to have enough wits saved when you really need it.

These four concepts are enough tools to do a lot of work on your game. After years of playing I’m still thinking about these when playing.

6. Getting down and dirty
So you read about these four strategy concepts, understood them and use them in you games? Ready to move on?

Not so fast! You are not done! In fact, you have barely started! It is now the real work begin!

Step 1: Download EverNote or any other note taking program to your iDevice.
Step 2: Make a note/category for each single player map
Step Repeat until you die: For every game you finish, copy the link to your note for that map. Write one sentence commenting the game. If you lost the game write the major reason why you lost.

Of all the time you spend on Outwitters, writing this sentence will be the best thing you do for your progress. Our brains learn by relating new things to things we already know. By writing a description of the game you are forcing your brain to categorise it and relate it to strategies you already know. Sometimes you can understand a strategy on paper but you still don’t do it when playing. By this writing exercise you force theory and practice to mash together in your brain.

On the games you loose, most of the time you should be able to categorise it under one or more of the four concepts above. If you just don’t know why you lost, post it on the forum and ask what you did wrong. You can also find that new things come up you haven’t thought about before. Maybe you find that you would have managed to defend if you had made a soldier instead of a runner on that last turn. Then you realise you already had one runner and that might be all you need for vision on that map.

The habit of commenting with one sentence each game you play will let you build up a bank of games you can easy review if you ever wanna study a specific map or a specific concept. It is also very interesting to see how your thinking changes about Outwitters as you improve your play.

This interaction between playing and then thinking about it cannot be stressed enough. Playing and running into new problems will force you to think about new things. Thinking about new things will make you play better and provide you with new problems to think about. I really like this quote by George Soros, a guy that made a lot of money being good at finance stuff:

"I used to do a lot of philosophical speculation as a young man. I wasted a large part of my youth regurgitating certain ideas. Then I discovered that one can learn a great deal more through action than through contemplation. So I became an active thinker where my thinking played an important role in deciding what actions to take and my actions play an important role in improving my thinking. This two-way interaction between thinking and action became the hallmark of my philosophy and the hallmark of my life."

7. Final thoughts
Puh finally done! That felt good didn’t it!? Tired and refreshed at the same time, like after a good days work! We covered a lot of ground: First to try something out and see if you like it and deciding if you want to spend energy on it. You always want to challenge yourself but not too much. It is important to focus on the process of getting better and not the achieved results. We focus on one thing at a time to help our brain learn quicker. The secret to learn efficiently is to find the most important things and focus on them. The four strategic concepts cover a lot of the problems you run into when playing in the beginning (and later as well!).
The real work started when we began to save and comment each game we played. We do it as we know the important relationship between thinking and doing. How each helps the other in an infinite spiral towards improvement.

In the next episode we will start to play more than one race, strategies for a specific map or race will start to matter. We will talk about the benefits and complications of aggressive play. Wit management will do a comeback in the form of wit efficiency. We will do some serious thinking but also discuss burnout, friends, and motivation.

Until next time,
XOXO

[HuskyPete]

Nice start!! Very well done. I have made the comment of this becoming work many times myself. It makes absolute 100% sense!!

[Chemoeum]

[Flarp55]

Nice guide. I never thought about the philosophical aspect of Outwitters.
What do you have against 2v2? I think 2v2 arranged is fine, but also totally different from 1v1.

[Alvendor]

(06-09-2014 07:01 AM)HuskyPete Wrote:  Nice start!! Very well done. I have made the comment of this becoming work many times myself. It makes absolute 100% sense!!

Thanks, yeah I like much about Outwitters, but the part of concentrating really hard on a move is not really enjoyable in itself. Maybe similar to long distance running or something: a constant pain but feels good when your done!

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(06-09-2014 07:19 AM)Chemoeum Wrote:  [url=http://i.imgur.com/2ntPHQQ.jpg][/url]

Haha nice, perfect match with this post!

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(06-09-2014 07:24 AM)Bbobb555 Wrote:  Nice guide. I never thought about the philosophical aspect of Outwitters.
What do you have against 2v2? I think 2v2 arranged is fine, but also totally different from 1v1.

From a learning perspective I have two issues with 2v2. It is introducing more moving parts, its like 1v1 but with additional things you need to consider. And if you wanna learn you want less moving parts, not more.

Second, you want a tight feedback loop. After you do something you want to see the result of if as soon as possible. With 2v2 games running much longer than 1v1 the loop of (playing - thinking about what good and bad you did - playing again) will be much longer and slowing you down.

I still like to play 2v2 so I'm not against it in general. I just think that even if you wanna get good at 2v2 you are better off getting good at 1v1 and then switching to 2v2 later on.

[Chemoeum]

And it's only Part 1! How many do you think you are going to make?

[Alvendor]

For the moment I think I have material for 3 parts. I plan to make each for a specific stage in the development of a player. So the next one will be for when you already know a fair amount strategy, what problems and issues will you run into at that point...

[Necrocat219]

This sounds like its going to turn out really good, and I don't do quite a few of the things listed here like I don't reflect on why I lost enough (or more how to prevent those losses in future) and I'm a bit too result orientated at the moment. Maybe that's why burnouts seem to happen. Looking forward to future parts!

[Flarp55]

(06-09-2014 07:41 AM)Alvendor Wrote:  

(06-09-2014 07:01 AM)HuskyPete Wrote:  Nice start!! Very well done. I have made the comment of this becoming work many times myself. It makes absolute 100% sense!!

Thanks, yeah I like much about Outwitters, but the part of concentrating really hard on a move is not really enjoyable in itself. Maybe similar to long distance running or something: a constant pain but feels good when your done!

Maybe it's just me, but I enjoy the process of thinking hard about a move. I play outwitters just for fun.

[Chemoeum]

I like switching races, because I am actually mastering them each by equal increments. I discovered I'm very good at Veggienauts, as much as any of the other races.