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.