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.

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.

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.

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.

Over the Next several weeks I be posting each battle I faced in the “playoffs” of “The First” tournament. I hope to show all the new (and some old) players how torment are played out and the level of play that they must be at in order to get to the playoffs. The Analysis of the battles will get more and more in-depth as time goes on, but for now we will mostly be looking at the fundamentals of the battles.

This battle show us just how important it is to split units and make the most out each and every single one.

By turn 13 he had lost most of his attackers, and was in the process of loseing 2 more groups. While I did lose several groups of attackers the important thing to see here was that my groups were split up. Fodaze very first turn is a good example of this. He used 50 eagles to attack and kill 25 of mine. It is overkill, but more importantly he lost 35 due to my counter attack. In this game you must “trade” units, that is attack and be attacked. You can not protect all of your units all of the time… you will lose units. When splitting up your units you give your opponent less targets to attack. He attacked me just as much as i attacked him (in the early rounds) but each time i attack i got the maximum amount of kills while he could only kill what i had in the group.

There is another reason having many groups is a good plan. Go to the very end >>| then go 15 turns back <<. We can see here that he has 4 groups of Attackers while I have 8. Now look at all the squares he can attack, then look at how many i can attack… There is no question my units can reach almost any square on the board, while he is very limited. While i do have more units that really doesn’t matter as much as the position i am in. My units can control just about anywhere he can go, and i can counter any attack he can throw at me even with the spider’s paralyze attack. While his units are split half on one side of the board and half on the other. I can attack at will in this position, while any attack he does will be meet with a counter attack.

Both of our use of light units was not the best, while mine was worst. Attacking 7 Taurus with 50 Rains is overkill again and even though he was the attacker he lost that “trade”, not only by units but also by spending 5 movement points to move in the Rains. On the Other side I didn’t get any heavy kills off of my Rains, that’s just not playing smart. Again you want to trade in your favor, and killing off heavies while only loseing light units is almost always a good trade. One in witch I failed to do.

Both sides blocked very well. It is important to block, or use cannon fodder. It comes down to trading again while you get to attack your opponent’s good ships you only give them very few light ships in witch they can attack, it is just smart any way you look at it. That is why Eagles, Destroyers, and the Taurus play such a big role in this torment as we will see later.

I hope this battle clearly illustrates just how important it is to constantly be splitting up your units, not only to make the most out of your “trades” but also with board position.

That is all for now. Next time we will be looking at the next battle, VS JBarata.

Battle Viewer and Break down

Before we start looking at battles and analyzing them I think it is a good idea to talking about all the information that can been seen in the battles. Here is a break down of the HUD and how to fight and view battles in Orion’s Belt.

Battles are played out on the battle page of Orion’s Belt, in what is called a HUD. The HUD or Heads Up Display includes the battle field, information about the unit you have selected, a battle calculator, a battle log, and other option to effect the battle. The HUD will play a crucial part in gaining the edge over your opponent.

*Note* The layout, and the display will not change but the information in the display will, most of the information will be unique to each unit. Simply rolling over a unit will change the display and the information it provides.

Left Side We are now going to dissect the HUD, talking about each piece on its own, starting with the left side from top to bottom you will see: Unit Properties, Strong Against, Weaker Against, How to Attack, and How to Move.
	Unit Properties will provide information about the unit you’re mouse is over. By line the information will be: Abilities; These are listed as small black and ornage icons and will show what (if any) the units abilities are. Here is a list of Icons and Abilities Quantity; How many units are in this square Attack; How much damage one of the selected unit will do (the unit group will deal this number multiplied by the quantity to the target) Defense; How much life this unit starts with. Hit Points; How much life the unit has right now. Movement Cost; How many Movement points it takes to move this unit. Range; How far this units can be from it target
	Bonuses; When a unit receives a bonus its’ life or damage will be inceased. In this box will be all the units in witch the selected unit will receive a bonus when attacking.
	This Box will show all of the units that will receive a bonus when attacking the selected unit.
	This will show how the selected unit will attack, there are three different ways a unit can attack: Close; The unit can only fire the square above it. You will see the crosshairs at the bottom of the grid. Far; The unit can attack a target more than one square I.e. 2-6. You Will see the crosshairs at the top of the grid.(As shown) Catapult;The unit can fire more than one square and can fire over other ships. You will see the picture to the left. (a unit at the bottom and the crosshairs at the top)
	This will show how the selected can move, if there is nothing in its way. There are four different ways to move. All; Can move in any direction. Normal; The unit can move up, down, left and right. Diagonal; The unit can move forwards or backwards in a diagonal square.(as shown) Front; Can only move to the front. Each Square the unit can move to, will have a green arrow in it.

Center In the center column, we will look at only three items but the most important of the HUD display; the battle field, Battle Calculator, and battle log. Your window to the Battle field Movement This is where you will move your units and where you will tell who and when to attack. This will be done by selecting the unit. To do this just click on any unit you want and a green box will appear. Then move the unit by selecting another square they can move to, a green arrow will appear, click and the unit will move. You can move a unit as many times in one turn as you have move points for. Attacking While your unit is move your mouse over an enemy unit, if that unit can be attacked it you will see a red crosshair appear on that unit, simply click and your unit will attack that unit at the end of your turn. Each unit can only attack once per turn, and can not move after it has attacked. *But another unit can move in front of it, to make it harder to hit!* You can undo any action in a turn by pressing the “Undo” or “Reset” button BEFORE the “End Turn” button is pressed.

Whenever you place your mouse over a unit this will automatically show how many unit it can kill. You can change the distance of the attack (as the farther away the target is less damage it will deal) or the number of units attacking to meet your needs.

This is where you can see exactly what has taken place up until now in the battle, your turns or your opponents. You can see only what has happened the last turn (unless there was very little that happened), if you need to see more press Get All at the bottom of the log to view the entire battle. The Icon on the left tells you what type of action took place, and the number on the far right of the log shows what turn it took place on.

Right
	Each turn both players receive 6 “Move Points”. Move Points control the battle, each time you move or turn a ship and every attack uses move points. The amount of this cost depends on the ship that is moving, and each attack cost one move point.
	With a unit selected enter the number of units you wish to move away from the selected one. You will see a min and max number of units you can split. After the desired number of units is entered, then click on the square where you want to move the units.
	Whenever you order a unit to attack an opponents unit this will box will show how many of the opponent units will be destroyed.
	By selecting a unit then clicking on the N,S,E,W the unit will turn in that direction. It cost one move point to turn the unit. If a unit is not facing its target it can not fire on it.
Options In the upper right hand corner of the battle viewer you will see the Option box. The contents of this box will change three times depending on the state of the battle.
	This is the options you will see when it is your turn. Undo; This will undo the last command you gave barring in mind that it is still your turn. Reset; This will reset all of the moves you made for this turn. Give Up; When there is no other option and must quite. You will lose all of your units if you quite. End Turn; This will finalize all moves you have made for this turn. Once you click on this you will not be able to undo or reset.
	The only option you have when it is not your turn is to quite, and again you will lose all of you units.
	This is the controls when you are replaying a battle, it will show you every move that was made during that battle, to see what went wrong or how you dominated.

Hello All my name is Alan, my in game handle is AD420

I have been playing Orions belt since the first version (over a year now), and I have been hooked on the game since the first version. I really like the battle system, and the universe as it is set up now. I am very active in my alliance, The Prophets of the Revolution.

I will be writing about battles and analyzing them. I also enjoy helping new people get the most out of this game, so I will be providing Tips and Tactics, for Rookies and Experienced players… and maybe some in game gossip along the way.