|
|
Post by awall on Jun 15, 2007 2:56:10 GMT -5
Geshtinana
T#:01234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456
LH:BDPSDFPWPWWCF-DPPPWW-WWPPS-PSDFFCPSFPSFW-DSFWDD
RH:BWWSPSDFFDDCFFFSWW-SWPPSDFFDPSDFFDPPSDPPWWSPFPP
awall
T#:01234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456
LH:BDSFWPSD-SWP S D FFDDPPSDFWPPSF-WWSWWPPWPFPPS-P
RH:BPWPWW>DPSDF P P SDFFSSDDP-DSFFF-SWPPSDFFDWWS-P
{slarty edit -- lined up referenced turn #s}
Overall, I think my problem this game was trying to outthink you too much. Generally, when I play, I tend to start each turn by putting myself in my opponent's shoes and trying to figure out what they'll do. I'll then pick the move that's best against that (or, if I can't decide which of two moves they'll probably do, I'll go for a move that's decent against both of them). With you, I know you're a much better player than me and I've seen you anticipate me in our previous games. This time through, after I figured out the best play for you and what I could do to beat it, I tended to second guess myself - "Waitasec, he's going to expect me to do something like this, so he'll make a move that beats the one I just came up with... so I'd go through and run the process again to try to figure out the new move to beat.
The problems were 1) It's much harder for me to predict this second level thing than just to find the obvious play for an opponent; and 2) You tended to do the obvious play anyway, and punish me for second guessing my original play.
Anyway, now that I'm done making excuses for some of my questionable plays, I'll bring up a few turns that I think deserve special mention.
Turn 1: A bit curious as to how the D/W opening is supposed to work. You wound up turning the DP/WW vs. DS/PW around on me, but I think that opening favored me. I was a bit afraid you'd do something like DS/WP, which I think would have been better against DS/PW but worse against a more traditional DP/PS line.
Turn 4: You had a 100% defense against FoD here, as I couldn't stop your Antispell if I'd continued F/F. Was abandoning the FoD the right play, or would I have been better off continuing and hitting you with WPFD and paralyzing you on the turn of the Antispell to prevent it from continuing to anything scary?
Turn 6: My mistake. Should have done WPFD, hadn't thought it through all the way.
Turn 9: I don't have very much experience defending FoD. I had a 50/50 this turn with the Amnesia, but if that missed I would have been dead with anything but S/S. I saw the possibility of W/D, but my first priority was not dying if you went for FoD. I figured S/S wasn't as good as D/x for stopping the Haste/Bolt, but it wasn't the worst play I could do.
Turn 11: My reasoning here was that you would be afraid of... well, Fear... and so you wouldn't go for the Haste (about the best you could pull out of it would have been CWPW/CPWP). Working under the assumption that no Haste was coming, I looked at your possible spellflow and found more attractive options for you dealing with Fear than dealing with Charm (basically, you had to counter it), so I went with the latter. Haste seems to have been a risky choice for you. What was your reasoning? Also, what's the standard thing to do if your opponent actually gets off haste?
Turn 22-24: What should I have done here?
Turn 27: The reason I went P/D here was sort of roundabout, and it was definitely not the best play. When you've just been charmed, gesturing D is (as far as I can tell) a pretty good sign that you'll be wanting to do DP. This would have given away the fact that I was planning to dummy the counter... which was precisely the opposite of what I intended to do. I figured that if I could bait you into casting the bolt and do DS on my other hand, I'd gain a bit of initiative.
The best alternative was probably W/D.
Turn 34: I'd been falling victim to you dummying stuff all game. I figured you'd assume I'd eventually "learn" and dummy the counter, at which point I'd eat a bolt. See above comment about thinking too hard.
Turn 38: Got punished again for making the "safe" play. I'm afraid that the first time I dummy the counterspell is going to be the time that you decide to actually hit with the threat, and getting Charmed there would have led to a bolt, and probably me losing shortly after.
Turn 42: I think we both agree that you really had no business not countering yourself. However, looking back, I don't think I really had any hope of winning at this point. One of the skills it's important to pick up in any game is realizing when you've lost, and making your last ditch effort count. In this case, if I'd looked forward enough and realized that I had no hope of winning if you did S/S, I might have said to heck with it and thrown all of the damage spells at you on the off chance that you wouldn't counter yourself... and in this case, it actually would have succeeded. In the worst case, I still could have surrendered before the Storm hit.
Also, not that it really matters, but: I initially expected you to do P/S on turn 42, simply because that's what people tend to do after being charmed. If you'd done that, I still maintain that I'd have had a good chance at landing the FoD. You're right in general, that you usually can't FoD at low health or when facing monsters, but exceptions can be made when your opponent doesn't start defending it until the S.
You:
xxxDP
xxWWS
Me:
PWPFS
xxxDP
The next turn I may or may not hit you with Amnesia, and you may or may not cast Amnesia at yourself (there would be no point to you hitting me with it, as I was planning on repeating S/P for the next two turns anyway). If either of the Amnesias hit you, you're screwed; you can't get off Fear, Storm, or Mirror, and I can continue with SSD/PPP and kill you. If you clap instead, you have a guaranteed mirror ready on turn 8, but you give up a lot of initiative, and if I do go ahead and hit you with Amnesia, you sit there helpless while I charm your troll (although I have to go down to 1 health to do it).
I was about to go for S/P when I did my whole, "But what if he anticipates this?" routine, and for once it actually helped me. I initially saw the possibility of S/S used just to force Fear through to interrupt my FoD; while I was looking into how to get around that I realized that S/S was just a better move for you than P/S in general, and then I noticed the Storm threat and... we know what happened from there.
Anyway, thanks for all the help you've been giving me. I really feel like I'm getting better every time I play.
|
|
|
|
Post by Slartucker on Jun 15, 2007 14:18:38 GMT -5
Overall, I think my problem this game was trying to outthink you too much. Generally, when I play, I tend to start each turn by putting myself in my opponent's shoes and trying to figure out what they'll do. I'll then pick the move that's best against that (or, if I can't decide which of two moves they'll probably do, I'll go for a move that's decent against both of them). This is a sound strategy, but as you noticed in the previous game, you can't always be sure of what your opponent will do. Sometimes there will be a situation where there really is one best move, and any deviation on their part will be worse for any of the moves you are considering. More often, when you are facing a creative warlock, there are five or six moves that don't completely suck, of which maybe two or three are more likely but not guaranteed. And this is why many players find heuristics like "don't stab" or "enter W when charmed" to be extremely helpful -- if you don't foresee every possible move your opponent makes, they keep you protected against the majority of fatal possibilities. What "don't stab" really means is "It's usually useless to stab, and in a few situations it could be useful but there's always large risk involved, so don't do it without carefully weighing the odds." Han Solo would be a poor Warlocks player. Yes. That kind of recursive thinking is very useful to explore. Last spring I played a bunch of games against Yaron, who is very similar to me both in tactical tendencies and playing ability, and I found such thinking could make or break our games. But remember, I'm going to play all the odds. I'm unlikely to tailor my move to what I expect you to do unless that custom tailoring also happens to work well for the other possibilities. In my strategy piece I wrote "the game is wholly reactive; the minute you forget this, let your ego slip in and say "I want to do X" your opponent has the advantage." But the same thing is also true if you let your ego slip in and say "my opponent is going to do X." You have to react to constellated possibilities and not to predictions. D/W is something I've just started exploring. I can't remember if I commented on it in the game. It's intended to provide an answer to D/P, which it does very haphazardly against DP/PS and DS/PS. I don't see how DSF/FOD is an issue, though. The charm/antispell setup stops FOD and makes disease useless. Suppose I commit to DPS/WWS and you have DS/PW: what do you propose to gesture to get an advantage? You could go DSP/PWW, which can push an antispell through but ends up not so useful against fear or an ogre on my side. And if there's any chance of my entering DPP/WWW it's completely awful. I'd probably do the latter. This is a question of evaluation. Yes, instant death is the worst possibility out there, but being down 5 health (*and* not up any initiative) is pretty bad too unless you're facing a weaker player. It's a situation where you were forced to take some sort of risk. I don't think there was anything wrong with your choice. However note that S/S doesn't actually save you from FOD, it just gives you two 50/50s:
PWPFSSS
DFFFFFF
SD-SDP
>DPSDF
For that reason, I'd prefer D/S which gives you better protection against the haste. Your assumption there is a pretty bad one. Although fear is better than nothing, and so is charm, the only disruption that really screws haste up is amnesia (as it destroys enough of the spell's power to allow you to set up a defense against the remaining portion). Whereas fear wouldn't have been much of a "risk" there even without being hasted. What's wrong with what you did do? Ah, here's what you were talking about before. Yes, you overthought this one. When deciding whether or not to dummy the bolt, the two important possibilities to consider are both counter and bolt being dummied, or neither being dummied. If the first is better than the second, dummy the bolt, and if the second's better cast it. This gives you two options that are both in your favor. What I think you'll do isn't too important because you could very well do either one. That probably will be the case. Not because of any kind of inferior intuition on your part, but because I try to set up decisions points that, like the one you just described, have risks that favor me. Your best defense against being put in that situation is a good offense. Yes, that's true, although in a serious game I wouldn't use an equation like 3 + vodka = 4. And even if you WERE at 3 health, I would be unlikely to risk double death in a ladder game. Where is this post-charm DPP heuristic coming from? I've never really seen that before. DPP (or rather, DP) is often a good spell to use, it's true, but automatically following being charmed with it would be silly. It's situational. Sorry to be harsh, but this line of reasoning is completely irrelevant, because DPP does nothing to stop your FOD while DSF does, and (already possessing a troll and a health advantage) I have no reason to use the DPP rather than defending FOD intelligently, by killing you. You certainly are. Warlocks is rich in strategy so players who are intelligent and analytical tend to have very fast learning curves when they begin. You're actually in a unique position, as before the Refuge there was never any kind of advanced advice available that amounted to anything. You're really the first promising new player to make good use of it. So your learning curve is particularly fast compared to what we usually see. I'll be interested to see how far it can take you. Anyway, you're welcome, it's my pleasure. |
|
|
|
Post by awall on Jun 15, 2007 18:49:15 GMT -5
This is a sound strategy, but as you noticed in the previous game, you can't always be sure of what your opponent will do. Sometimes there will be a situation where there really is one best move, and any deviation on their part will be worse for any of the moves you are considering. More often, when you are facing a creative warlock, there are five or six moves that don't completely suck, of which maybe two or three are more likely but not guaranteed. And this is why many players find heuristics like "don't stab" or "enter W when charmed" to be extremely helpful -- if you don't foresee every possible move your opponent makes, they keep you protected against the majority of fatal possibilities. What "don't stab" really means is "It's usually useless to stab, and in a few situations it could be useful but there's always large risk involved, so don't do it without carefully weighing the odds." Han Solo would be a poor Warlocks player. Yes. That kind of recursive thinking is very useful to explore. Last spring I played a bunch of games against Yaron, who is very similar to me both in tactical tendencies and playing ability, and I found such thinking could make or break our games. But remember, I'm going to play all the odds. I'm unlikely to tailor my move to what I expect you to do unless that custom tailoring also happens to work well for the other possibilities. The problem with always playing the odds is that it makes you predictable, and when you're predictable you get whomped. I briefly worked through a few examples of situations where I felt each player had one play that gave him the best "odds," but all of these situations had enough wiggle room that if either player could predict his opponent's move and counter appropriately, he could come out ahead. If nothing else, I think most situations involving a Counterspell and a Bolt/Fireball/Antispell can swing the game a good ways in one player's favor if he is able to get inside his opponent's head. Right, I stand corrected. I suppose that while we're talking about heuristics, I really should learn that, in general, opening DS is a bad idea when your opponent's opening included a D also. How does D/W deal with DP/PS, by the way? The best I can come up with is DPP/WWS, but that still leaves turn 3 as a guessing game - if the opponent does DPP/PSD and the DPP's bounce, he's set to charm you next turn. DSF/WWP might work if you cast maladroit at the opponent, but that approach seems to me like a weaker version of S/W - the paralysis that comes off of DSF doesn't really go anywhere except Disease, while SWD can continue into Amnesia and then a Charm or Invis. Yeah, I was taking those notes as we played, and when I wrote that I was still under the impression that Fear (and Amnesia and the like) affected the first hasted turn, the following normal turn, and then the following hasted turn. With only two turns of Fear, it gets a bit better. Between the fact that Haste rarely gets cast and the fact that there's almost nothing written about it, I'm still fairly green as far as using/defending Haste goes. It seems like one of those spells where the only really good answer is a Counterspell, though you're right that Amnesia goes a long way toward damage control. I'm not entirely sure where I messed up here. I know that after you accidentally hit yourself with Amnesia I had initiative, and by 26, I'd lost it. I want to say that the error was between 22 and 24, but I'm really not sure. Was not dummying the Fireball my only real mistake? I apparently still have a lot to learn about when to dummy and when not to dummy. I've always tended to go with the mind game approach of, "If I was my opponent, what would I be thinking right now? What would I think my opponent was thinking right now?" and then do the opposite of what I think he'd expect. Given it's track record so far, maybe I should go back to just making the safer play. But against better players, I've found that my initiative tends to leak away over time, and the only way I can keep it up is often to do something unexpected. Again, that'll probably just come with practice. See above comment about my tendency to lose initiative over time because I'm not that great at pressing small advantages. Yet. Nowhere in particular. It's mostly a combination of the heuristics: "Try to cast a lot of short disruptions," "DP is a solid and flexible base," and "DP beats DS." For what it's worth, a lot of what we're discussing on here seems pretty obvious in retrospect, but it's less so during the game. Go figure. |
|
|
|
Post by Slartucker on Jun 16, 2007 10:40:38 GMT -5
The problem with always playing the odds is that it makes you predictable, and when you're predictable you get whomped. I briefly worked through a few examples of situations where I felt each player had one play that gave him the best "odds," but all of these situations had enough wiggle room that if either player could predict his opponent's move and counter appropriately, he could come out ahead. If nothing else, I think most situations involving a Counterspell and a Bolt/Fireball/Antispell can swing the game a good ways in one player's favor if he is able to get inside his opponent's head. Yes, definitely. If there is a statistically "best" option, it's a good choice to default to, but if you are too predictable, you can get taken advantage of there. So playing the odds does mean playing, and not just "solving." You have to keep in mind, however, that sometimes being taken advantage of still leaves you ahead of your opponent, and so being taken advantage of may in some cases be less of a disadvantage than opening up even a very small chance of something worse happening. A good example is the PSD juncture against your monster when you have a disruption or counter to defend with. This is pretty common. I think there are probably 1 or 2 games in the past 18 months in which I've protected myself and not the monster. This makes me extremely predictable and easy to take advantage of. But if my giant, troll, or even ogre gets charmed just once, I could very easily lose the game because of it; whereas me being charmed is usually easy to recover from when a monster is beating on my opponent. It's still much worse than bouncing the charm entirely, so if you look at things in isolation, you'd expect the optimal choice over time would be to vary your protection, maybe favoring the monster. But in context, I can commit to accepting the charm person every single time and almost never lose games over it, so that's almost always what I do. Does it make my monsters less effective? Yes, it certainly does. But do I still have an advantage with them? Yes, and that's what matters, not winning by a mile, just winning. DPP is probably the most powerful spell in the opening. The reason is that none of the turn 3 disruptions accept it gracefully (SWDD, DSFF, DPPP) except for para, which has its own problems. So while there are ways to accept fear, maladroit, and para into your spellflow on turn 3, amnesia pretty much forces you to either defend it or meet it with an offense of equal force. It forces the issue. The short version: from DP/WW both players have two viable options, DPP/PSD with the amnesia targetting either player, and DPS/WWP or DPP/WWS. (I did out a giant matrix to determine this.) Two outcomes favor D/P and two favor D/W, so it's a toss-up. However, one of the D/P favored outcomes provides a noticeably smaller advantage than the other three outcomes. So statistically it favors D/W a bit. I don't like it as much as I'd hoped due to its haphazardness, but there you go. At least so long as D/W remains esoteric, axioms about not targetting yourself with amnesia are likely to make DPP/WWS the better chain to default to. It does quite well against standard-targetted DPP/PSD. *nod* I don't think you made any outright mistakes, but here are a few comments. Beginning the fireball on turn 21 lost you some initiative as you had no way to force it through, so you weren't likely to get more than a dummy out of it. Yes, you could have dummied the fireball, but that still isn't any real gain -- I put the blame on beginning the fireball in the first place. Which, incidentally, would also have been disastrous if I HAD cast fear on turn 21. Dummying the amnesia on turn 22 might have been useful as well. If you had turned it into PSFW but I had still countered on 22, you would have gotten either the fireball or an ogre through. Doing unexpected things is good. But I would focus less on what your opponent will do and more on what possibilities the unfolding spellflow hold. How can you get a small advantage that I won't defend because I'm worried about something else? The mind game is always part of things, and it is a wonderful part because it prevents Warlocks from being solvable; but it is always a smaller part than chesslike analysis of the future is. If you replace "during the game" with "in the moment" I think that's a good statement about life in general. I think I make that comment to my supervisor on a regular basis. |
|
