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Re: Games for IndyBrit ~ Mentor Review

Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 4:54 am
by BashUgood
ok..

Been really crappy lately.. 6 straight losses and lost a little over 100 points.

here's another loss...

Re: Games for IndyBrit ~ Mentor Review

Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 8:38 am
by IndyBrit
K Bash - review of the last one. I will check the other two when I get time, I just had a minute so I looked at one.

Notes: 1) I don't think your troubles here are that deep, they are easily fixed, see below. 2) I stopped review at 13:00 b/c I don't think anything that happened after is of as much value.

Here we go:
1) He starts his rax at 7:07 and first engagement is at 8:05. You are in an all-out rush and he is doing some shrine-boom thing. You need to engage him earlier. If you had hit him 30-40 seconds earlier he would have been in deep trouble. Remember how precious those first age 2 seconds are.
2) Your raiding focused on shrines. You should focus on villies. Your fully loaded shrines were about 1/2 villie equivalent, his boosted shrines were just under 1 villie equivalent. It takes your guys a million shots and maybe 30 seconds to kill a shrine, it takes ten or so shots to kill a villie, and merely showing up to send his villies into the town center. If you hole up 15 villies for 30 seconds for the same effort as burning one shrine, that's 450 villies seconds or up to 900 shrine seconds you have wasted of his. When you burned a shrine down at 7:30, 450 seconds later is 15:00 - essentially after the game is decided. Not to mention that you would have seen his town sooner and realized he had no guys.
3) scout - or at least go look at his town if you're in all-out rush like you were
4) good mixed forces. look at the 10:20 battle then consider how that goes if you have all ashi.
5) you had a 15-20 second problem getting your aging going after you got 800 food. that translates to 15-20 precious post-age 2 seconds. you beat him aging b/c you used 4 and he used 1 on aging. That was consistent with the strats for each of you - you need to get to age 2 quicker and he's booming so he'd rather those 3 guys were working. However, i doubt his pays out b/c he can throw those higher age 2 cards earlier, so i think a few villie seconds of resources is irrelevant. You should stick with 4 on your strat in any case.
6) I think you had a problem getting your rax up right after age 2 as i didn't see it right away. If you did get it up right away, nvm.
7) At 8:45, he has the dutch consulate gold trickle, 5 villie lead, and 5-ish shrine lead (his are boosted, hard to say). he paid for this with an unready military, but you let him off the hook (go bears. lol). IMO you are behind from this point, as your strat is designed to peak around 7:00 or just before, while his is more like a 10 min thing.
8) there was an 8:05 battle where you had more guys, but due to a crossfire he was able to better focus fire. You retreated, but probably should have done so a little earlier. This contributed to his inferior army surviving.
9) you had 2 guardian battles going early and you lost both (but weren't killed). that didn't help but it's hard to say the exact effect.

OK - those were the notes. The things I think you should take away from this game:
1) make sure you're paying close attention at those critical moments (nearing 800 F, hitting age 2, getting rax built and first guy building from rax, etc.)
2) focus on the biggest bang for the buck with your raid/rush. This is decidedly villies and not shrines. If you get a decent siege unit later you can knock out a shrine, or use a spare couple of guys later.
3) if you are doing the super-fast rush (which you are using a build order consistent with) then make sure you scout and that you engage as early and effectively as possible. don't let any of your guys get killed needlessly or while fighting from an inferior position - this is especially true early

Re: Games for IndyBrit ~ Mentor Review

Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 9:19 am
by IndyBrit
Blayz - this is for your Dutch v. empororal2 german game

1) what is the strat you are using? at 8:20 you have 25 xtra housing, 3 banks, no rax, no stable, and no fortress age. let me know what you're trying for here and maybe we can work out a few tweaks. your rax was started at 9:23
2) you got hunts - screwed, pretty badly. one thing i do when that happens is run a bunch of villies off to an odd corner and built an outpost amongst some herds. Often, he won't find it, or he may find it after you've snagged the hunts. You can lose this way b/c if he finds it he can hurt you bad (esp. before the tower is up) but it's probably better than the slow death of hunt-screwed that you had to suffer here. sending 1 villie ahead before sending the group is a good idea.
3) your 9:44 time to start fort is a semi-FF time, that you should have built 20-30 random military in age 2, but you had barely built any. Again - let me know what your plan is (3-bank FF with a 3-hussar raid, for example?) and we can work on tweaking that.
4) lean on that idle villie button, as you have many idles from time to time
5) when you hit the age 2 button, you had just started a guy. You imposed a 30-sec delay on your age 2 - which is huge. Just cancel that guy. Better yet, before queuing him realize how close you are (e.g. i'm over 700 F with a guy queued, 600F with 2 queued, etc) and get aging even sooner. You let him get away with a very late age 2 which should have cost him more.
6) don't move cav and infantry together, especially when you're in a hurry. (you had pikes going around with ruyters) they move as slow as the slowest unit. caveat: meatshield with artillery probably should move together unless you know exactly where the enemy is.
7) keep skirms with your ruyters / anti-cav (see 17:15 for example). where your ruyters have to go somewhere quickly, as they did in that situation, drift your skirms back to where the ruyters are going. That would have saved you a lot of skirms there as the ruyters didn't have to run so far
8 ) your micro is pretty good - at least at the level you are at. I'd have to see you at a higher level to comment further. However, look at the battle at 13:00 where you slaughtered his guys by keeping your pikes in front of your skirms. you did some good hit-and-run there with skirms too. I think you had a couple ruyter hit-and-run opportunities on some uhlans, but you can't be everywhere.
9) you did a good job keeping villies queued up (too good at age 2 time - lol)

OK - I think that's a good start for a few things to look at. I'm not a build-order guy, but I the most glaring thing is that you need a build-order. I'd rather we talk about it a little bit, so you understand why a build-order might be a certain way and then you can know how and why you may vary if you get raided, etc. Some things you can let slip and they cost little while others cost a lot.

Re: Games for IndyBrit ~ Mentor Review

Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 11:30 pm
by BashUgood
Thank you Indy..

I'm goin to try to get back on track..

I look forward to the other reviews when you have time ofcourse.
I didn't know you are a lawyer. Must be hard pressed for time with the job and OP family. ;)

Re: Games for IndyBrit ~ Mentor Review

Posted: Wed Apr 30, 2008 12:35 am
by blayzer13
yeah ill try to get on during the week and this weekend, school comes first

a lot of my errors, just watching my own records is in my opinion being rusty, since im trying to start playing again ive played 3 games, so my game is off a little bit, hopefully as classes begin to wind down as the year goes on ill be able to get more play time in and things like idle units and age times, the basics, will go away.

Re: Games for IndyBrit ~ Mentor Review

Posted: Wed Apr 30, 2008 12:38 am
by 36drew
This thread is really a true sign of how good N3O is. Great clan with members who actually care about bettering the clan.

Re: Games for IndyBrit ~ Mentor Review

Posted: Sat May 03, 2008 10:52 pm
by blayzer13
I figured I would give an update on what I have been doing pertaining to aoe. First off, I checked out rtsprofessional.com...the website and vods are amazing. The vod's are where I'm basing my progress on right now. I've noticed that yes Parfait and the other members involved with the project are trying to help, and they are immensely, the comments about losing ability because it come naturally after a time is what drew me into the program.

Anyways I noticed that the professionals have a huge understanding of the game and it appears where their skill comes from. there is such an understanding of everything, from treasures on maps, to where hunts are on maps, to enemy build orders based on seeing 5 villies.

this is what i have been working on, just playing the computer on expert learning the maps, while focusing on various things like how fast I can get longbow men out and doing fake espionage (as if it were the real thing same positioning and whatnot) and keeping a keen eye on the idle villager button, using attack move with cav and using the shift-click feature on villies (this is really really kool but it takes getting used to). Ive gotten lucky to have the maps that I keep getting when i hit standard to be painted desert and bayou. I'm going to try and study the treasure and minor natives of the maps so as to get a better idea of the land.

I'm not sure if this is the right direction to go with my learning, but I feel like it would help. With my limited play time it seems the most possible to get a game in with an expert comp, while paying attention to the layout.

Once I feel like I have painted desert and bayou down I'll move to another random pair or triplet until I get them all.