I had an arena match were I only won because of cannon fodder. At a given time I was only with a 27% chance to win. At that time I focused on destroying my opponent’s light units, and after they were gone, using a lot of lights and 31 Krill, I destroyed all of my adversary units. This also shows that sometimes the victory percentage isn’t everything, you should always have a clear picture of the end game, and save what you need for that time.

Here’s the match:

We all know that every unit destroyed in a battle is stored in points for that battle. But I noticed that few give importance to these points, which count towards the overall ranking in the event of a battle in the universe, and tournaments both TD and regicide, mainly regicide, where the goal is to destroy the opponent’s flag, usually without getting many points.

An example is the group 6 Tournament Training day.
I lost my battle to JBarata and tsousa. But managed to eliminate their strongest units, with the points won at these battles I lost I managed to stay above them in the classification.

About the points of each unit destroyed, they vary from 0 to 100, where stronger units haver greater value than the weaker units.  So a tip: if the battle is lost, try to destroy as many enemy’s heavy units, this may help in the final classification.

Sometimes we put ourselves on a situation where we are getting threats on two sections of the board. Usually, we need to spend more movement points protecting, than our opponent needs to attack. This is a serious disadvantage, and I found myself like that on a battle with Principe Valente. Take a look a the fight, turn 20:

At that time I persisted in defending for about 9 turns, hoping to catch some break to strike my opponent. But he plays well, and didn’t give me much chance.  At turn 29 I was at face of defeat, completely helpless on the two sides of the board. What can we do on these kind of situations? Usually if we have two groups and we can’t save them both, we need to choose one and sacrifice the other. And that’s really the only way, and that’s what I did.

And hopelly for me, my opponent didn’t handle well my aggressive move. Two turns later I knew I had won the match. Even so it wasn’t easy, the battle lasted to turn 90! great skirmish!

Just lost a great battle against vulpecula09. Don’t know were I lost control of the game, but at a certain time I knew I had lost. Great game by my opponent. Interesting is the final part, were I managed to escape my opponent’s threats for many turns.  In tournament matches we have to earn as most points as we can. And even after I knew I had lost, I managed to destroy Doomer and Spider, while  helpless on my corner.

Lesson of the day: never give up. Lesson number 2: watch out for all the excellent players out there!

Just had a great game against cfrag. I had never played him before and I thought he was a rookie, but I was mistaken and he already has good knowledge of the game’s perks. On this game I made a mistake and on his first move I lost my 50 Vector. That’s a huge blow, especially against a good player. I managed to win simply because cfrag didn’t properly choose his priorities!

Here’s the match:

When you see the game, you’ll see that we were on the middle, I with my Scourge and him with the Vector. It was clear to me that the one the one of those units that prevailed would win the match for the owner. And I concentrated on that. But cfrag spent a lot of time and energy focusing on a part of the board that was not important. I’m talking about the place where I had my Taurus and Scarab. They were completely out of play, I wasn’t even thinking on using them, because they were so far away from that hot spot with the Vector and Scourge. Even so cfrag focused on that and that allowed me to take his vector away.

This is a mistake that I see a lot on new players. For example, wasting moves to attack that Crusader on the far end that won’t be any useful for the rest of the game.

Even so, it was a great match. I’ll be on my guard the next time I face him.

For those who doubt the power of the Blinker, just look at the turns 13,23 and 33 of the following battle:

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.

Some time ago I wrote When the numbers and the skill aren’t enough, a battle analysis where I had the bigger power but lost because my opponent was smart and had a greater fleet to strike me down. This battle taught me several things: the Levyr light units aren’t very helpful when the opponent has Raptor and/or Samurai; Worms are a great weapon against Raptors, Samurais, and against light cannon fodder.

I got another match under the same circumstances. I had a lot of raw power (700 Worm), but my opponent had the best zone control units (80 Eagle, 50 Kahuna, Raptors and Samurai). Also, my fleet has just finished a battle and I had very few light units. So I split a lot of worms to use as cannon fodder.

This time I had the Destroyer, and I thought that it would make a difference. But it did not: destroyers are very powerful, but hard to put on the center of the action. And my enemy’s Eagle and Kahuna made sure that the Destroyer would not be a problem. But the Worms did their job, and I was able to take the strategic advantage from my adversary. It took a lot of patience and hard work, but I was able to win, with this new Worm Swarm  strategy.

A player, probably checking finals, wrote me a private message asking why I gave up against reborned on the final of Mini tournament 14. Here is the match, it was my turn to move, we both had the same quantity of Fenix, Stinger and DarkRain. I also had a small amount of Scarab.

I gave up for one reason: Kahuna. I didn’t have any fast units that could make a difference (the Stringer may be very powerful on some situations, but it isn’t useful on this particular one). The movement advantage of the Kahuna would break my Fenix and the rest. If the battle was against other lower ranking player, maybe I’d continue. But I knew I had lost.

As an exercise, what would you do on this situation to get the upper hand? It was my move, I could bring some DarkRain to protect the Fenix, but I’d loose a lot of movement points to make a defense that we’d destroy with little movement points (hence, gaining even more advantage). I can only see defensive moves that would prove useless on a couple of turns. Can you see any good moves?