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:

Historically speaking, I don’t know of any empire that lasted for ever. There are always the rich times, filled with richness and glory, and down times, with less resources and defeats. On Orion’s Belt this also happens. Those familiarized with Orion’s Belt History already know that. Even on this new version we can see that. At one time or another there were an alliance that ruled the universe. We can remember CUS and Cosa Nostra from the old days. And on this version Prophets of the Revolution, ALPHA and System Lords have been on front and quite powerful, and have fallen to lesser positions.

This weekend, while the System Lords admirals were not at the command of their fleets, two of the System Lords officers turned against them and joined the Death Squadron and attacked the only System Lords relic left. This is specially interesting because these two traitors were an important rebel force against the Death Squadron. I dare to say that at this moment the Death Squadron alliance is the most powerful ever seen on this version of Orion’s Belt. System Lords can’t really complaint about their members, seen that the alliance has a history of betraying its allies. And now, an alliance that once had 8 relics, now fights for the last one…

The balance of power may seam on Death Squadron’s side. They are a lot, very well organized, and with great zone control. But every time that one alliance becomes two strong, it has to deal with several problems:

• Internal problems: many members means a lot of stuff to handle; it’s hard to keep all the members happy, specially when there’s bounty to share
• Being the first means that all the alliances focus on that one alliance

It may be difficult to reach number one. But it’s even more difficult to stay there for a long time.

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.

After writing Waza’s Journey I went to the database and searched for the fleets that the been trough more battles. When a fleet is destroyed we erase it from the DB, so we have this data but we don’t have the name of the fleet. Here is the information per fleet and the owner, of all fleets that survived ten or more battles:

• Ashis, 21
• Ashis, 17
• Agni, 16
• Dark_Websterr, 16
• LaCrux, 14
• Eladamri, 13
• James, 13
• xpto1051, 13
• edisms, 13
• kulen, 13
• JBarata, 12
• rgcaldas, 12
• dragongr80, 11
• Sasuke, 11
• Mawhrin-Skel, 11
• Ashis, 11
• Yo-kun, 11
• stoneage fan, 10

Waza was a fleet I created a long time ago 3 months ago and it has a great story to tell. She was destroyed yesterday against a mighty Queen, just after an epic victory. Week and without reinforcements, there was nothing left for Waza but to destroy as many of the coward enemies as it could. After the battle ended I went to see the battle history of this fleet. This fleet was created before the Relic Wars and got a pretty nice journey.

• Against Ashis - 07/04/2009 - After leaving System Lords, Ashis started to attack me. He raided many of my planets and I had to create fleets to patrol them. Waza was created at this time to protect my borders and was sent to battle against Ashis minions. It was an average fleet: 810 Worm, 56 Spider, 150 HeavySeeker, 120 Destroyer, 386 Stinger and some lights

• Against Ashis - 07/09/2009 - After destroying the first Ashis fleet, Waza went to the next. Ashis didn’t have strong fleets and he was suffering some losses

• Against Ashis - 07/16/2009 - Easy win

• Against Ashis - 07/16/2009- Another easy win

• Against Ashis - 07/20/2009 - Another easy win… this is getting boring…

• Against Basaf - 07/28/2009 - Another easy win while patrolling my borders

• Against Danceman - 08/03/2009 - Yet another easy win… this will get interesting, I swear!

• Against Danceman - 08/04/2009 - Yet another easy win…

• Against Danceman -  08/05/2009 - Another easy win, all these battles against Danceman were to slow me down to get to their relics. It provide me with many bounty points

• Against Punisher - 08/07/2009 - The battle I described earlier here

• Against Punisher - 09/24/2009 - The final battle… after an epic battle, Punisher cowardly attacked my unprotected Waza and got the win

Humz… When I saw that Waza had a spree of 11 wins, this sounded more interesting. After all many of the battles were very easy. Even so, my brave spartans made a great job against all the thugs on the universe!

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.

On my own personal wars I’m getting a lot of interesting battles.  The other day I was attacked by another player form Death Squadron, with a fleet far greater than mine. He isn’t an experienced player and I got a massive victory. However, I was very afraid to loose the battle when I saw his deploy. He made a great firing squad deploy:

As you can see, he has 6 long range units on the six central squares. And he can easily put into play the kamikaze menace on the sides of the board (as he did). When fighting against a firing squad we are usually left without the front cannon fodder. Having kamikazes heady to strike is a great option for heavy and quick damage.

The other great aspect of this deploy, is the Doomer combo behind the Firing Quad units. Normally, we use medium and fast combat units to break the firing squad. And that types of units have low range, meaning that they could easily become a pray of the Doomer. This was a great Firing Squad deploy and my opponent could easily get the win if he played it well. He could have destroyed my medium units with the Kamikaze or with the Doomer. Luckily for me, I won, and this is just another example of how to break a Firing Squad.

Early today I suffered a devastation on three planets and a fleet. At this moment we don’t provide much information on the messages, so the only thing I knew was that someone fired a devastation somewhere that damaged a fleet and three planets from my empire. This direct attack cost me 50 low level combat units. What a waste.

But that’s not all… a couple of minutes ago I was attacked by several players on several planets and a relic This seams to be the second part of a planned attack against me. I even got attacked by a player that I never saw and that isn’t on any of my enemy alliances! I think it’s just a coincidence.

Spending so much time and resources planning an attack against me isn’t very smart. The only justification is that I could be more fragile after a previous journey. These thugs did a major mobilization to destroy just a couple of combat units. They might raid me, but fortunately for me, I spend all the resources that I need, and those that I don’t, I put yesterday on the alliance’s storehouse. So, all this attack will take time and resources from them, and it won’t do me much harm.

War is mainly about economy. When the System Lords engaged on the Relic Wars the objective was clear: win relics, gain income. This attack’s objective may be to weaken me, but I guess it won’t work as expected. Even so, I’m very proud to make my enemies gather like this just to strike me. I’m the Special One! You mess with my family, I kick!