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Superglucose (GT Sup) vs Nightflame (OH Sup) on Star, 1.0/1.0.



So this game was basically... me, terran, never, tenforward, and firestorm vs nightflame, student, kirov, wizard, and this one other guy who's a sort of newer voob?

Anyways, here's how the game went:

I looked at the money and map and decided I wanted to go GT. Nightflame went OH and so I was a little worried about him going heavy ints and getting on mini3 before I got us to lasers and zeus. I went high and low, and he went high and mid to his side, the right. My plan was to seal off the chokes with large bases that couldn't be galved (or easily bombed) so that Nightflame would have to choose between mining on the inside and mining on the outside, and then I was going to get adv figs to galv him off, and using the newly-liberated helium to fund an end-game.

He pushed a TP to the far left choke, which arrived when my sup did. I looked at the position of the sup rock in comparison to the teleport's location, and noticed it was a long TP. I wish we could have stopped the TP, but we didn't get there in time really. We also lost a miner at this point, and I started worrying because we'd only gotten one OH miner, and Nightflame's team was able to deflect my palisade to the far choke, so I was a little bit worried. I wasn't convinced that I'd be able to get to galvs fast enough to catch up to nightflame's mining.

Then Nightflame showed a bomber while my team was on miner offense, and we caught his miners, and he tried to walk 6k against gat2 seeker2 figs with a single nan, and the game was over.

My next move was to check mid for his miners and try to pop them, so I'm not sure how much of a difference the miners actually made, especially since my memory is that all three were able to drop off. We could have probably left them alone and ended up winning there, but fortunately we had time to kill them AND get back, having our cake and eating it too. I feel like my team had two important points where they could have taken an advantage, but weren't able to. We got a little lucky that the miners fell into our lap there, but we were going to get those miners sooner rather than later.

Superglucose (Giga adv Exp) vs Nightflame (IC adv Sup) on HiHigher, 1.0/1.0.



So this game was basically... me, terran, never, tenforward, wasp, and cashto vs nightflame, student, kirov, win98, and thallium.

Kirov may not have been on Nightflame's team. Dome joined me later. There were an additional smattering of voobs on each side. Anyways,

When the game opened, I decided to go early seeker2 patties because seeker2 patties can fight off ints fairly effectively. Plus Terran was on my team and I gotta figure out how to make him maximally useful But seriously, seeker 2 patties are pretty boss. I also decided, somewhat arbitrarily, to go midhigh and midlow. Nightflame pushed his TP high and his op midlow. I had been planning to go into sup, but the only sup rocks available to me were 1) the midlow suprock that an ungalvable OP was 2k from (not viable), 2) the high sup rock that was behind Nightflame's TP, and 3) a sup rock in the middle. I intended to, after getting an expansion, to push a sup high, but that was the rock nightflame took.

He also had his team in scouts and lt ints trying to destroy my TP. While the TP did eventually fall, after my team cleared up Thall+Student (who were in an int/scout combo trying to harass my mining) we did an admirable job of defending and wasting a bunch of the enemy's time while they were forced to move miners around to deal with some map presence that I built. Eventually, the IC sup came up and we developed into a game where my side had some weak miner offense and their side had some effective miner offense. Unfortunately, I was able to keep a miner alive and dock enough for HTTs. So then we did the mini3 thing where we capped the IC op, then I pushed an expansion past his TP and pressured his garrison, but we weren't able to immediately take it.

I bring this game up because I wanted to point out a couple of things that happened:

1) Terran had a SICK mid-air prox with prox3 in his gat3 seeker2 patty (P1 rewards her most loyal and effective subjects, do not forget!) where he got something like 9 kills.

2) Wasp had a total of 9 kills all game.

3) I need to really do a much better job of planning out my economy. This game it was all over the place and I almost didn't have enough money for everything that I wanted, which is frankly inexcusable.

4) I really, really, really hate giga exp.

As for suggestions for nightflame: first, I am not lying when I say your team was close. Actually, I walked the full miner that I needed for HTTs from midlow next to your home to low where your team was galving my bases back to MY home. Second, if I buy bbrs to take out your op, as IC that's kind of a win for you. You can push a second TP that I can't ever deal with (literally) that you can cover with gat2 df2 figs. Or you can plant a TP short, then dis2 the TP in sector, and then put a TP there. Basically, as IC, you have a lot of options and me throwing $10k (and the time it takes to organize a bomb run, etc.) to take out a $5k op is way in your favor. If I had been a little more clever, I would have sent TWO miners high and taken all of the rocks and left you with an empty sector while my carrier went straight on through to deny you some mining.

Also, the reason your 1.5k run on my sup didn't work was because prox3 and mini3 are a helluva drug. But I also want to caution against thinking the sup was important at that point: it certainly made the subsequent capturing of that outpost easier, but your team was basically all flying around with 10kb while mine was cruising with damage2 mini3 and KBs in the 30s. This was an intentional choice on my part, I had my team pull a page from the Thallium book and just go ahead and PK everyone on the assumption they'd boost back in and give us more KB. When you were looking at the kill totals in the end, what you saw was a team of reasonably competent int pilots having free reign to pop galv figs over and over and over again. I sincerely believe that we could have found a way to cap something important, the op was just a target of convenience.

I'm not 100% what IC's plan is against mini3 giga in terms of offense tbh. But I will say that when you got 3/4ths of my miners you were very close to winning the game on the spot. But I was able to let your guys finish galving and then walk through an empty sector that your team was convinced it owned. Sometimes it's the tiniest bits that make the difference in a game. For my part, I was a little disappointed with the lack of gusto with which my team pursued miner offense, but I firmly place the blame for that on the tech we went. If our team had gone full sup, I would have been able to spend a lot more funtimes pushing arbitrary bases to arbitrary places and we'd have had the teeth necessary to take on the ripping IC miners. As it is, killing those suckers with ints is paaaaaaaaaaaaaainful.

I enjoy commanding against you very much! One thing I have noticed is that you tend to tilt a little hard. There's an old joke here I find relevant: A man falls in a hole, and calls out for help. A priest comes by and says a prayer before moving on. A doctor comes by and writes a perscription for a ladder and tosses it in the whole. A police officer shoots a random unarmed minority in the vicinity. Finally, the man's friend comes by and jumps in the hole. "What'd you do that for?!" He cries, "now we're both in the hole!" "Yeah," she says, "but I've been here before and I know the way out." When things are starting to feel overwhelming, take a deep breath and ask yourself what your outs are. If you can't take the sup with a figbee run, consider looking for a TP2 drop, or even just placing a TP closer to the aleph so that your team can use some misdirection to get in. And sometimes the answer is as simple as a heavy bbr with AC3 and nan3. I think that use of an aleph resonator would have made it very difficult for my team to effectively defend our expansion.

Also, consider stopping at sup, df2, gat2, dis2 against giga. Maybe boost2. Then switch into expansion. Suddenly you're in a massive advantage because I can't hold sectors we BOTH have bases in and your ints are just superior to mine. Win98 has become a helluva int pilot over the past year or two, and Student's got some chops too. Finishing off your 3peat of whores with Thallium would put you in a position where I actually have to get out of base and fly an int, and you're a fair shakes int pilot yourself. If I can't go into mini3, then we're looking at mini2 hvies vs hvies, a matchup that SINCERELY favors the IC team (whose miners get to rip and also they have +pwdam and +hull) over the giga team.

Can't wait to see you Saturday!

Nice recaps. I wish we had stat screens too!

I always forget, sorry I'll try to make sure to grab some this week. Bonus: I'll also try to give some more highlights of what each player I noticed do something well do.

Some comments:
The bigger issue in the failed sup run was Thall calling an abort to half the figbees. My rant just after was mostly aimed at himThat run also had a lot of figbees using lt boost because I handed them out earlier and forgot to remind people to upgrade to cruise. Actually I'm not sure if most of the team ever upgraded.Similar issue later when I got hvy boostThe midlow tele kill was never about bombing concerns, I just wanted it clear to mine. My second and third teles were needed for homerip and the midhigh push that killed three miners. Maybe not the greatest decision, but I didn't feel like boosting miner o 2 sectors away in lt ints, so we didn't have a ton to do.I did, in fact, have a tele headed midlow closer to the aleph when my op got capped. Took something else with it instead of getting the team together and pushing. That was probably a mistake.I wasn't so wealthy as you seem to think I was. To some extent because I was constantly out of base instead of microing miner scrapes. Mistake, I guess.The mid sup was a full sector of he3. With that, I could've pulled back and turtled to a second adv tech easily enough. Instead blue got money for another techbase and improvements.Spending 40k on maxing out figs/GAs instead of getting an exp might have been a mistake? I can't remember where all the exp rocks were. Midlow at least was way too close to the op you capped. Better sup tech was also a lot faster than building an exp and upgrading it, and we did need to defend our garr. Also also, half the sup tech supported my foolish use of figbees.People were half a minute to a minute late to so many damn things. The mid-air prox on the exp push? I was calling for figs in the sector when back when the con first left your garr. Two sectors of con walk time and still no one got there on time. Can't complain hard about their perf on defense though.The blue midlow-to-low miner with htt money? Yep. Also called an attack on that. I did make the mistake of telling the group with me low to spend 15s killing the midlow tele first, but the rest of my team managed to be completely useless. From the chatter afterwards, they all plowed terran's prox instead of getting anywhere near the miner. Not sure what else they did, as I still managed to get a fig low to it, but basically no one else did.Also failed to convince the team to commit to killing the midhigh exp instead of putting half on a hopeless garr defense, but that was a bad situation the moment the htt entered without getting eyed.If I had to call my biggest mistake, it might be pushing the first tele high instead of keeping it at the closer sup rock. The extra walk time and needing another homerip cost me tempo I could've used to block low. Less of an issue when I planned to bastard, but the carr prevented that.

Dome wrote:QUOTE (Dome @ Jan 25 2019, 06:54 AM) Nice recaps. I wish we had stat screens too!

Don't have the star one, but:


On the star game, I actually had 8k and a miner cooking at time of resign, plus some money in adv sup. Really should have played it out instead of getting pissed off. But after two miners committing suicide, another two walking back to the wrong base and wrecking my mining chain, and kirov sending my full miner away from my coming nan, I wasn't feeling like it. And that's not counting the mess at our sup.

Oh well. See ya this weekend!

Nightflame wrote:QUOTE (Nightflame @ Jan 25 2019, 01:00 PM) The bigger issue in the failed sup run was Thall calling an abort to half the figbees. My rant just after was mostly aimed at him

I didn't see the sup run. Terran led me to believe it was well defended, then you were like "it's 1500 from the aleph." I wish I had tape so I could look and see what happened lmao.

QUOTE That run also had a lot of figbees using lt boost because I handed them out earlier and forgot to remind people to upgrade to cruise. Actually I'm not sure if most of the team ever upgraded.
Similar issue later when I got hvy boost[/quote]
Weird thing: I think lt boost 1 is about the same as cruise boost on this core I buffed lt boost a lot in terms of its usability and never really got around to updating cruise booster to match. I dunno how much hvy boost would have made a difference, it's harder to use than boost3 and I think only Thall on your team really knew how to use hvy boost.

QUOTE The midlow tele kill was never about bombing concerns, I just wanted it clear to mine. My second and third teles were needed for homerip and the midhigh push that killed three miners. Maybe not the greatest decision, but I didn't feel like boosting miner o 2 sectors away in lt ints, so we didn't have a ton to do.[/quote]
Still suspicious: the TP came in right as my full miner with the last of the helium was leaving.

QUOTE I did, in fact, have a tele headed midlow closer to the aleph when my op got capped. Took something else with it instead of getting the team together and pushing. That was probably a mistake.[/quote]
I think you took low with it? If you took low with it then I think that was correct. I don't know that I ever saw it build, but I do know that I was expecting you to take it. A lot of the time I just assume my opponent is going to put things in places and just wait until I see the thing going there before I decide it's built.

Reminds me of a game with Shadowfoxx where he said in voice "well we haven't spotted their TP but we have them boxed in!" when I had a TP mid in blender... literally the game after something similar happened to him against Terran on Star where I warned him that even though it looked like Terran had no map I was confident that Terran had a tp in the middle. Shadowfoxx said "I don't see it" and I didn't have time to go find it so he just acted like the TP was never there. Spoiler alert: we got crushed as a result. Someday people will see me say "they have X in Y sector" and realize that I'm not actually guessing.

According to Wasp, I'm hacking.

QUOTE I wasn't so wealthy as you seem to think I was. To some extent because I was constantly out of base instead of microing miner scrapes. Mistake, I guess.[/quote]
You controlled a lot of sectors but one thing that tripped me up in estimating how much money you had was 1) the money settings and 2) the fact that I mined half of high while you controlled the sector. Here are the sectors I think you mined that game: midhigh next to your home, midhigh next to my exp, high at the sup, and midlow at the op. I don't think you ever ended up taking the 2 rocks high, but I considered them "your" rocks and figured you would eventually be able to mine them. That's 4.5 sectors out of your home, which is plenty for IC to get adv tech, some toys, and an end game. IC gets adv tech off 2 sectors: each rock on 1.0 is between 4-5k for them, so 8 rocks is between $32k-$40k. $40k is their exact adv tech cost. So if you get 1 more sector then you're looking at a minimum of $48k, plus the 2 at home takes us to $56k, which lets us spend $16k, which is (for IC) gat2/gat3 df2/qf2/qf3 boost2. Paydays over 40 minutes or so give you another $20k which is enough for 4 TPs and a second techbase if you grab a couple of cashboxes. This still leaves you with 6 helium rocks controlled that aren't in your home.

(Again, as another reminder, for the non-nightflames looking at this thread and being like "gee, P1 must be hacking because she knows how much money her opponent has" nah I just do the math.)

QUOTE The mid sup was a full sector of he3. With that, I could've pulled back and turtled to a second adv tech easily enough. Instead blue got money for another techbase and improvements.[/quote]
With the mid money I think I bought an expansion con and bombers. I *may* have bought nan2, but I don't know that nan2 mattered. That money wasn't really important in terms of us winning overall. The sup wasn't even that important either, it just happened to be convenient for taking that op, which also wasn't particularly important XD If I can't get that op (say, I lose the sup on the figbee run) I just turtle until I'm able to push a tech con low and take your garr that way. I think the matchup is still heavily favored towards me in that particular case, but we do have to play a LOT more cautiously and can't just fly around the map doing whatever we want.


QUOTE Spending 40k on maxing out figs/GAs instead of getting an exp might have been a mistake? I can't remember where all the exp rocks were. Midlow at least was way too close to the op you capped. Better sup tech was also a lot faster than building an exp and upgrading it, and we did need to defend our garr. Also also, half the sup tech supported my foolish use of figbees.[/quote]
I think you were supposed to get the exp immediately behind that op and match me tech level for tech level and then bully me out of the game.

QUOTE People were half a minute to a minute late to so many damn things. The mid-air prox on the exp push? I was calling for figs in the sector when back when the con first left your garr. Two sectors of con walk time and still no one got there on time. Can't complain hard about their perf on defense though.[/quote]
That mid-air prox was... something else lol. I wouldn't be too mad at your players for that one, I think Terran just made an absolutely brilliant play. I also think your team was about to fly into three mini3 hvy ints flown by myself, cashto, and Wasp while we had a couple of scouts on nan duty, so I dunno how effective the figs would have been even if you remove terran from the game at that point.

QUOTE The blue midlow-to-low miner with htt money? Yep. Also called an attack on that. I did make the mistake of telling the group with me low to spend 15s killing the midlow tele first, but the rest of my team managed to be completely useless. From the chatter afterwards, they all plowed terran's prox instead of getting anywhere near the miner. Not sure what else they did, as I still managed to get a fig low to it, but basically no one else did.[/quote]
I called for D on it and no one showed up so we're even


QUOTE Also failed to convince the team to commit to killing the midhigh exp instead of putting half on a hopeless garr defense, but that was a bad situation the moment the htt entered without getting eyed.[/quote]
To my mind, the game was over when I capped the op next to my sup. I was able to capture things with my team and you didn't have any good threats on bases I cared about. At that point it was just a waiting game for me to get a backup sup. Yes, mining the sup helped me get there, but with a $750/min payday, I was only 14 minutes off from paydaying the thing (less any cashboxes). That's holding off 3-4 figbee runs, and if you try to mine to something with a little more teeth (TP2, etc.) I can just use a couple of guys in lxies to nab your miners.

(I don't know if Pantagruel saw the TP building way off in the boonies in my home lol... I know the con was lining up when he came in. I hoped that one was secret.)

QUOTE If I had to call my biggest mistake, it might be pushing the first tele high instead of keeping it at the closer sup rock. The extra walk time and needing another homerip cost me tempo I could've used to block low. Less of an issue when I planned to bastard, but the carr prevented that.[/quote]
I think the tp high was a fine move actually. One thing you should consider, especially as IC, is getting a second outpost set up as the homerip even when you're sup if you split. It's a little more expensive, but having the homerip a little earlier is nice. I also really like having outposts places because mining at them is a lot safer than mining anywhere else, even if you're sup.

QUOTE On the star game, I actually had 8k and a miner cooking at time of resign, plus some money in adv sup. Really should have played it out instead of getting pissed off. But after two miners committing suicide, another two walking back to the wrong base and wrecking my mining chain, and kirov sending my full miner away from my coming nan, I wasn't feeling like it. And that's not counting the mess at our sup. [/quote]
I think on the Star game we were about to have galvs up and you were going to be in a lot of trouble when we started pushing palis places. I had two full sectors with large bases in them that had full helium which is enough for 2 palis, an R, zeus, lasers, and a carrier for leads/good measure.

phoenix1 wrote:QUOTE (phoenix1 @ Jan 25 2019, 06:13 PM) I called for D on it and no one showed up so we're even

i think i showed up? that was that time when i proxed one aleph and got 2 figs, then boosted to the other aleph and proxed 1 fig down to like 10% hull remaining, then DMed him til we both podded each other, then i bragged about getting 3 adv figs with my patty

needless to say it was a pretty good prox game

Those were my first 2 games in a month and although I joined the first game late, it was fun.

Looking forward to some Saturday & Sunday Allegiance this weekend.

Superglucose (Belters Sup/Tac) vs Nightflame (Giga Adv Tac) on Limited, 1.25/1.25



I can't remember the teams, though Nightflame had Ryu and Thall and I had Kirov and Cashto.

I opened both high and low, since belters scouts to $#@!ing work. Both of our cons planted and we managed to stop their con from planting I think high, I wasn't paying too much attention. Then we pushed a carrier to their miners. Nightflame rushed into a tac and skipped patties and somehow we managed to kill 0 miners. When I saw the tac, I decided I would be very happy to play the tac v tac game where I have belts figs and ab2 and my opponent doesn't. Nightflame then kills most of my miners, and puts a TP into Vel, my middle sector. I plant a TP at his op in Helios, which is covering my sup. Nightflame pushes a TP to my tac, which plants, then bombs it. We stop his bomb run on my garrison, then launch our own bomb run (with AC2! And Nan2! And Adv Scouts! And AB2!). After some cluuuuuutch nanning by myself and vortrog (after an abject failure of crossnanning by Cashto and Vortrog) the tac falls, and we roll and blow up his garrison.

So there's a point that I want to bring up about the game vs tac because this is a bone of contention that I have with a lot of the "conventional wisdom" surrounding this game. There's this idea that somehow tac's counter is bombing. If you've ever flown against Terran's tac games, you know that bombing by itself isn't enough. I think the main issue is that people don't really understand how to play against tac (or as tac for that matter) so I figured I'd take a moment to chart out what tac is trying to do.

When you get stealth fighters, you do so to pressure your opponent's miners with a low number of pilots. You want to make it so that the enemy's mining takes a maximal amount of effort, same as any other techpath. But with tac there's something kind of weird that happens: your ships don't get all that much better in groups. The difference between 3 SFs and 10 SFs on a miner is basically nil: the miner is either adequately defended or it is not. Compare that to, say, three ints vs ten ints suddenly boosting into your sector. If you aren't active on D against 3 ints, you usually have plenty of time to get out of base and nan the miner, etc., whereas against 10 ints you do not. If 3 sfs pop up on an undefended miner, it's just toast. GG. Buy a new one.

The flipside is that it's actually easier to defend against SFs: util range is ~800m and they don't move much, so as long as you stay close-ish to the miner the enemy SFs will have a really hard time killing it. If you don't waste your fuel chasing random SFs all over the place, it's pretty easy to solo hold a miner in an int against 2 util2 hunt2 sfs. The only real danger is that their hunters will kill you, but they have to spend so much time shooting at your int that it's almost trivial to get your miner to safety. Compare that to ints, who can circle-boost around the miner making it difficult for you to get a good bead on them. Soloing a miner under D isn't too rough in a fig. Soloing a miner under D is basically impossible for an sf.

So then what's the point of tac? The point of tac is that now I have to have a pilot on that miner at all times. That guy's not going after your miner. In a 10v10, if I want 4 miners active, I need at least 3 people on D at all times, and probably 4-6, if they have a tac. I can't mine in different sectors, because my D has to be able to collapse together. If one miner is hit, all of my miners have to stop mining for the same reason: I need everything that's an enemy target huddled together in a ball where I can protect it.

Bombing does tend to do good things against tac, but notice how it does good things against tac by doing precisely its miner defense techniques: when the scouts roll up into a little ball next to each other, nanning each other, and under the safety of the AC gunners (who ideally are vets and not trying to hit Terran who's at 1499m and sidethrusting), tac suddenly doesn't have a whole lot of options. Of course, if you bomb them and they're mining freely, you haven't really accomplished anything: they get a second base somewhere (maybe a backup tac, maybe an exp) and pursue that to hvy ints, while letting their last 2 SFs or whatever continue to keep up the SF pressure, drawing big portions of your team off to protect an economy.

The goal against tac is to prevent them from getting to sniper2/hunt3 and SBs, because at that point you need your whole team to make @#(! happen and they can kill your techbases with 2 guys and a little luck.

So, when Kirov was like "we shoulda just gone bbrs," first of all, we did end up going bombers, and second of all, what happens if we go bombers and no one xnans and then the bomb run fails? By buying my own tac and getting SFs that game, and in theory by killing miners quickly, I put us in a position where we could conceivably fail continuously at bombing their tac and still find ourselves in a winning position.

And to the people who are like "you need to tell us this stuff while we're playing" I need you guys to understand something: I don't have time. What you should do when flying for me is assume that I'm asking you to do things because I am trying to put you in a position to win the game. But Allegiance is a game of seconds, and exchanges like this one:

Me: "Take a bbr from our low op and bomb his sup."
You: "Do what?"
Me: "Bomb his sup."
You: "From where?"
Me: "The low op."
You: "So the low op?"
Me: "Yes bomb from the low op."
You: "Ok, what are we bombing?"

cost games. Even worse are exchanges that go like this:

"Bomber Sighted"
Me: "Don't defend."
RandomVoob: "DEFEND BASE!"
Me: "Negative! Attack Miners!"
RandomVoob2: "Do we defend?"
RandomVoob3: "Can we defend?"
Me: "Don't defend the base, attack miners."
RandomVoob: "Defend Base! Defend Base! Defend Base!"
Me: "Stop. Just kill his miners."
*voobs 1-3 each launch 1 by 1 when the bbr is in turret range, die, we lose the base*
RandomVoob2: "Omg where is our team wtf are they doing bbq p1 is so bad at commanding."

Also as a general rule of thumb: if you want a tech, I want you to have that tech. If I haven't bought your tech yet it's because I have a higher priority goal in mind for that money.