I will not do a great analysis, just notice the last movements. When you attack don’t see just if the opponent can hit you in the next turn, but what he can do to hold your units in the same place. This is particularly important if your unit is in the limits of the board or if you are playing against units with paralyze.

In order to prepare for the Intergalactic Tournament, I created a friendly battle with Ashis and it turned out to be a great battle.

Deploy: Easily the most important part of the battle, do it well and it will give you an edge, but deploy poorly and you will be fighting yourself and your opponent the entire game. As you can see we took pretty similar approaches to the Deploy. While my units were focused on the middle, Ashis took a more aggressive approach. He can easily make use of both Eagle Strike and Kamikaze Menace.

Early Game 0-10: In turn 2 Ashis made a great move to take out my Kamikazes, and then followed it up with a strong attack to knock out 40 panthers both on the far right. I counter by taking out some of his panthers in the middle, and thanks to the triple attack from the Taurus, i can take out 25 Eagles. I keep the heat on by taking out his Taurus with my Kamikazes to end the early stage of the game.

At the end of turn 10; I have lost the most units, but have great Position in the middle of the board. Ashis has suffered losses to his medium, and heavy units. Ashis also is in a weak position, he is spread out, and has high movement cost units against the side of the board.

Middle game 10-32: I am able to use my panthers to take out his Kamikazes, and other light units. While I do this, moves his heavy hitters to the middle. I am forced to move away. I then focus my attention to the left side of the board, and try to sneak in some quick kills while I am up on material… it doesn’t work and I end up in very bad position.

Turn 32 positions: While i still have material advantage, I have very bad board position. Ashis has less units, but they are split up into more groups, and position is weak, but that will soon change.

I wanted to stop here to show you what not to do. It is a rule in chess never to move a knight to a boarder of the game board. This is because you will be limiting it movement, making it easy to kill and you limit its attacking power. The same concept can be taken and used in Orion’s Belt. You should not place high movement cost units on the outside of the game board, this should be avoided at all cost.

Turn 32-41: I spend the next 10 turns trying to save my units. While Ashis spends the next 10 turns hunting me down and getting into good position. I do escape but it was unnecessary and cost me units. I do still have more units, but they are still all together I need to split out my light units if I want to use them.

Late Game 42-End: There are still 80 turns left, after a strike with my Eagles, it is a game of cat and mouse. I keep him at bay with my Spiders, and Vectors, while I split up my Raptors and hunt down his light units. Not overly exciting but it does show great use of Cannon Fodder. Cannon Fodder is used to stop attacks and block your opponent in position, and it is illustrated perfectly here by both me and Ashis.

This was a close game, much closer than it should have been. I got greedy and moved into bad position for a chance to kill some units… this was not smart and almost cost me the game. While I still won I did give my opponent a lot more units than I should have. In the real Tournament this would net him more points, and that could be the difference between advancing to the next round and going home empty handed.