Some time ago System Lords went on a campaign for relics and turned against their allies ALPHA and Prophets of the Revolution. Because of this sneak attack we won quite a fame and alliances started to dislike us, but the truth is: war is profitable. At this time System Lords have 8 relics under their possession. System Lords spent a lot of time earning income from +6 relics, and that was really profitable.

As expected, we got some enemies. We got some shy attacks from ALPHA and the Prophets, and we also were under attack by Corsários. The only friend we had left was Death Squadron…. until today. Today, on an expected move, Death Squadron declared war on System Lords and attacked one relic. We don’t know much about this attack, but we do know that it was carefully planned and that it is just the beginning… We also don’t know what kind of pacts DS made with our current enemies. But having 8 relics, it’s normal to have DS turn on us.

I sense that there is going to be a lot of blood shead on the times to come. System Lords armies got some time to rest, and now they’re mobilizing again for battle. And they’re anxious for it!

I’ve just won a very complicated match against Firiten. It was for the Kill the King Tournament and I was sure to have lost until Firiten made a mistake that cost him the match. This match is a great show case for some battle tactics. For example, on a previous post I talked about a tactic to take advantage on the game using zone control. This game shows another tactic: the idea is to make the opponent spend his movement points defending, and never let him take a rest. If he spends his movement points defending, you have the advantage.

You can see me using this at turn 38. I started to attack this light units near the flag. And he didn’t defend there I’d destroy his flag. This siege took some time but Firiten managed to break the deadlock. After a lot of unit trading we got to a situation where I only had lights and Firiten only had medium/heavy. On a Total Annihilation match I’d loose for sure. But on Regicide matches anything can happen. My last hope where 100 Interceptor that could destroy the Flag. I put them in position and hoped that Firiten didn’t see it. Lucky for me he had that distraction and I got the win.

Now I’m at the final. For some nice trivia, maybe you’d like to know that I’ve never reached a tournament final before.

From my point of view, the player that has the advantage is the one that better controls a specific zone. And for that to happen he needs to create viable threats to the adversary. In my opinion the best units to use for zone control are Vector, Fenix, Doomer and Eagle. In fact, I find these to be the most valuable units on the game.

I’ve just won a match against Amazing Kazoo, one of the best players of the game. This match is very interesting because it shows the relative power of the Vector and the Doomer. You can see that on almost the entire game, the Vector and the Doomer didn’t do anything. They just stayed there, and didn’t made any significant damage.

But they both had a huge importance on the victory. Kazoo had to consider them on all of his moves, and that gave me the advantage, because without great effort, I was targeting him with Vector/Doomer and making moves with other units.

You can see how his Spider were useless against my Vector. The Spider is a hell of a unit, but for zone control it isn’t that interesting. However, on the end game and on 1on1, it owns.

I was having a look at the ELO standings, saw that Ikkie was still on a no lost streak. Before I say how many wins without ANY losses, I want to point two things out.

-First the last person to hold the record, for most matches without any defeats was at 33/0, (i forget who it was be he is very handsome) good yea. but Ikkie has topped that, and is still going! I made 33 and 0 before alot of my opponents knew how to play well, that is not to say that i didn’t have any hard fights but it was more easy ones than hard ones, that brings me to my second point.

-Players like Reborned (current number #1 in ladder) Nunos, Mawhrin-Skel, Firiten, and myself(to name a few) have been playing this battle system for a long time. Nunos has been playing it for years! and Ikkie just for 126 days… He may not have played all the top level players yet but he has played some them (and alot of other players) and have not lost to anyone!!

So what is Ikkie’s record for ELO games without any losses? 38 and 0… Great Job Ikkie. I hope you keep this undefeated recorded going… that is until we fight in tournament play.

I’m creating a new Hall of Fame category to write about players that made a difference on Orion’s Belt. The first one of the list is funnynovato. Few of the current players of the game may know him, because he has stopped playing a long time ago. Funny started to play the game at 17 Dec 2005… Almost four years ago!

I still remember the first fight I had with him. It was a universe battle and I tought about attacking him. At that time there weren’t a lot of proficient players on the board, and the administrators and some beta testers ruled the battle system. I attacked him, bearing in mind that he’d be an easy prey.

But I lost big time… he already played well and caught me off guard. The fact is, after that I faced him on several tournaments and I never could win against him. He left the game before I could achieve that. Funny was also the first regular player to win a regicide tournament! At that time we didn’t archive battles, so all that history is gone.

He also founded the IUC alliance, an alliance that was very big back then. We don’t know his whereabouts at the moment, but he was really an important community member back then!

The only thing we have left from funnynovato is a picture from a battle for a regicide battle, that we use on Wikipedia.

Each game I have analyzed has had a theme to them. In the first game it was splitting and how it can effect every aspect of the game. Next we looked at knowing our opponent and how it can impact the game. The battle we are going to look at this week is a bit different. It is hard to point out one theme of this battle. While we will be looking the advantage of aggressive play. The main “Theme” will be a study in battling itself.
First lets look at some previous games. Two from group play and he had one game before me(the other was a timeout win):

In Group Play
In Group Play
Second Round of Play Offs

From these games we can’t use too much. He is a solid player, making few mistakes, he takes control of the game and attacks more often than playing defense. In some battle you can see him taking his time to attack while not loseing any units, other times he attacked fearlessly trading alot of units, the whole time staying in control. That being said he did sit back and play defense once or twice when he had no good attacks. Maybe taking control will get him out of his element. The one thing I feel I can take out of his battles, is a good deploy. He does show a pattern and that may allow me to counter.

The Battle

Very Early(1-8) I start out by moving the Taurus into a very strong attack position with nothing being able to attack it next turn it is safe for now, and protect a large group of Rains (thinking about JBarata). I take out alot of his Praetorian. It ends with him taking alot of my eagles and me countering with a triple attack and killing 19 of his.

Early(9-15) The rest of his eagles die and I send in some destroyers to take out a big chunk of his units.

Right now (right after the destroyers take out his black widows) let us look at his position. Eagle on far right not much help, Destroyers with no real targets, same with the Praetorian and nothing they can block. Spiders are in a good position here, protected by the Taurus and can reach the middle. There are two big problems with his position though, first are my units, and the second is that big hole they just made. The destroyers are able to attack almost all of his units. They must be dealt with right away… but that doesn’t solve the defense problem. You only start with 6 movement points and he will be spending ALL of them for the next several turns trying to kill off those units and fix his defense. What he will not be doing is attacking any units that doesn’t threaten him right now… meaning I get to choose what attacks and who gets attacked over the next few turns… and I like that. Even if you only attack with one small unit your opponent will have to kill that unit off, thereby lowering his/her movement points. Over time this can lead to a big change in control of the game.

Next two turns I push my attack taking out what I can before he stops me and takes out my units.

This is where the game changes from early to late most units have been traded off, and the board is much more open. I had control of early game and pushed the attack where and when I wanted, I am sitting good at this point. While I am not as good of position as I would have liked I am sitting better than my opponent.

Beginning of late(18-27) I rush to the middle and try to clear his units out of the way, I made some good attack and get ride of his Destroyers, and some Praetorian while loseing very little. We are both in good position.

Next turn cost me greatly I lose my eagles! He is low in light units and I have alot of strong units left, but not having catapult units while your opponent does, is not a position I want to be in… ever. I must stop my trading and look to win the war, attack his units slowly, breaking him down while not loseing any of my own.

Now I am facing an eagle that could negate my light units… so I will take out the rest of his light units. Like in chess when you are up it is best to go for the light units(or pawns). In chess it is because they can be made into powerful units, but in this game it is for a different reason. Why? well look at it like this. If you attack and kill off all of his light units, and you have
A)more big units you should win,
or
B) less big units but light units to block you should win.
The turn after I killed off his black widows, my destroyers didn’t attack the Praetorian to kill the Praetorian, or to kill destroyers or the Taurus, but for the 30+ samurai.

Turns 30-50: I attack his light units (and large units when I can), while trying to minimize losses.

End Turn (50+): Seeing as he is running out of blockers he starts to split up his spiders to act as blockers. and pins down some spiders of mine. He then makes a bad move by moving the eagles to the edge of the board. As I have said before Diagonal units should almost never be on the far sides of the board, besides lowering their effectiveness it also makes them easy to be blocked. I block them in and move a in a unit to kill them when I want. It is now down to the spiders and my Praetorian. Having more it is not to hard to put this one in the W column.

While I can be matter of fact now, this was the hardest game of the tournament so far. While I did lose some units attacking so hard, it allowed me to have more control of the game. When you face a player as good as Tsousa the last thing you want is for him to be in control.

I had for a regicide tournament a battle against one of the top players of OB 1.0. Unfortunately he doesn’t have the time to play Orion’s Belt as he used to. Even so, he’s an excellent player on the battle field and I stayed focused. You can see the match here:

He did a very bad deploy. I don’t know if he was aware that the Interceptor only as diagonal movement and that it doesn’t work as cannon fodder, especially when the opponent can put in to play the kamikaze menace. From the beginning I thought about making the most out of that mistake. He also left the flag open… I don’t know if to tease me, but he shouldn’t have done so, and after a distraction from him I ended the match on the third turn.

It was a pity, because I was looking forward to this battle!

Can’t complain about the ELO gained tho.Â

On the last battle we review we looked at the importance of some basic techniques, like blocking, position, material advantage and how splitting plays a role in each one of these. This time we are going to focus on more intangible concepts, like knowing your enemy and some advance tactic.

At this point in the torment each player has faced 9 to 10 people with only 0-2 loses. What does this mean… people you will be facing from here on out are good!! So you can’t just rush in to a fight. Take sometime to gain an edge, your time with be will invested.

So let us look at JBarata as a fighter.

JBarata Vs Morf
JBarata Vs AIR Diogo

In both of these fights we can see two trends that keep repeating themselves, (three if you count he keeps winning). First his use of light units. You can see how much he values his light units. Not only does he get every kill or every block out of his light units. He also hunts down and destroys all of his opponents light units. Simply a great tactic! By the time his opponent knows what has happened they have lost their big units and there light units while he is only down about half of his light. I must try to counter this if I want to win. This leads us to the next trend, attacking. We can see how he gathers early momentum in the battles and rolls with it. Once he has his opponent on the ropes he doesn’t stop and let them catch their breath but rather attacks harder. This aggressive play should be something to watch out for… but I might be able to use it as well. Now for the battle.

The deploy: in an attempt to make some of my light units less attractive I split them up as much as I could. I also placed less attackers and more light units in the front row, I wanted to send them out to attack before he could kill them off, and split up further. The rest of the units were close to each other for counter attacking.
Early Game turns 0-10: The only thing I could do to counter the attack on my light units was to attack his, and use them up. I believe I got the better out of the early trades by taking out all of his rains before any of my heavy units were destroyed. I did take out 9 of his black widows with by rains, samurais were slightly in his favor.
Middle game 10-22: My goal here was to trade off units, I was expecting him to be aggressive and wanted him to feel like it was what he should be doing. I moved up some units with few or no protection in order to bring up some strong counter attacks, I am down on score at this point.
The end 22-on: This is where the game ends. I sent 15 eagles to the far right side to take out 35 samurai. He countered by sending his eagles to the edge as well. This is the opening I was looking for. In turn 25 his units are split, most of them on the left side and a few on the right, and I had easy access to the middle. None of his units were in a good position to attack, most were behind other units that cost a lot to move and/or had weak attack range, and still others were pined up against the wall. We both moved to the middle at this point. He moved and attacked with the eagles from the right side, focusing on material. I moved up my units together working on position. When he started to move his units from the left side on turn 37 the trap was already set. He continued with his aggressive play over the next 17 turns, but the position I set up was too strong, and it was over.

Turns to look at:
14 – He split his spiders in order to keep my Taurus at one unit, taking up that square and stopping a counter attack.
22 and 25 – I sent the eagles to the far right side he followed, the begging of the end.
37 – The trap is set, all I need now is him to come running in with wild disregard.
42 – He is showing very bad position here. His Taurus is unable to join in on the action due to bad deploy, spiders are stuck with no backup, Eagles are blocked in by Destroyers, and the Destroyers are getting out ranged.

If you’re at war for relics, planets, revenge or just fun, never forget to check if you adversary has a bounty on his head. This way, you can grab the bounty and you’ll also earn points or orions when you beat him.

On the other hand, if you’re in possession of a good amount of orions, you can place a bounty on your enemies. This way he’ll have to worry not only about you, but also with other head hunters.

For the first time on the history of the universe an alliance uses the Devastation Attack(not only once, but twice!)! This powerful attack, similar in significance with the atomic bomb, marks the supremacy of the System Lords! The weapon is already on level 6 and it’s being used on the relic wars against Prophets of the Revolution.

All alliances should proceed with extra caution when targeting the mighty System Lords, because they’ll give no mercy to their enemies. All alliances should pay tribute and show proper respect to the great System Lords, and maybe they will be spared.

The System Lords ends this public announcement with a word of hope to all other alliances: Leave your relics to us and you won’t be squashed! Hail the System Lords mercifulness! The empire of the new era is starting now!