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

[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!