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.

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.

There are several players making friendly matches with the intergalactic units to prepare for the intergalactic tournament. The administrators are always a common choice for a practice match. We play well and we accept all friendly matches.

Now, about the match. It’s a challenging fleet to deploy. Normally there are some combat units that we choose to put on the front. This fleet has several of them: Fenix, Taurus and Vector. And there isn’t much space for them. All this units are great for zone control and normally they have to move a square to make a threat. Now, we can’t forget about the Kamikaze. Players usually put something strong on front of the Kamis to protect them. Usually that protection isn’t supposed to move. So, what should we choose for protection? Maybe Taurus?

The match itself was a blood shead! With so many powerful units defense isn’t really an option and players need to focus on destroying more units than the adversary, instead of just defending. I’m guessing that this fleet will provide great zone control challenges.

The big Intergalactic Tournament is two months away and preparations are in order. There are 2000€ in prizes for distribution and I bet that the majority of players will battle for the biggest prize.  But how can you compete with the best players? It’s easy to prepare yourself. On Orion’s Belt there aren’t many top players yet, because the game is still young.

The tournament is now open for subscriptions and the tournament’s fleet is already known. It’s a fleet with almost all top combat units on the game, all units have special abilities, so the matches will be very interesting. On this gazette will analyze each unit one by one, deploy tactics and general considerations, so stay tunned.

Meanwhile, you can start preparing by:

• Creating friendly matches with other players with the tournament’s fleet. There’s nothing better than to feel the fleet’s power before hand
• Review the common battle tactics, mainly cannon fodder and kamikaze menace
• Participate on mini tournaments
• Review commented battles and learn from the experienced players

Don’t forget, it’s all about strategy and knowing your adversary!

After a great battle on the semifinal, I have just lost the Regicide final to nunos. He is now the first player to win a Regicide tournament on the new version of the game. Congrats to him!

It was a great match. I had the advantage and used the same tactic that I did with the match against Firiten. But at turn 27 I did a major error and lost on the following turn 100 Interceptor, 29 Doomer and an Egg, that was about to transform into a Maggot. After that I still put up a fight, but nunos controlled the game and got a deserved win.

You can see the match here:

At the end I was quite annoying and made him play the match for additional 30 turns, before he could get the win!

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.

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.

The first Orion’s Belt 2.0 Tournament has reached its final stage. It was a long hard fought tournament and I’m very pleased to say that there aren’t administrators on this final. The finalists are Morf and AD420, and they won against Mawhrin-Skel and Pyro on the semifinals.

The final is being very interesting and you can follow it here. Note that both Morf and AD420 had to make some excellent matched against Pyro and Mawhrin-Skel to reach the finals. They fully deserve it!

I’m very curious to know who’s going to be the first Orion’s Belt TA tournament’s champion… what do you think? AD420 is leading, but that really doesn’t mean anything as we know.

I’d wish good luck to them, but luck is for beginners…