The Ministry Teaching Courses presents: Politics and Targetting.
Hey Class,
after the outstanding succes of our previous lecture we have decided to give you another class. This time the topic is 'Politics and Targetting', which also is a part of our grand theme of 'Competent Planetarion'. This time it is not about some mathematical exercise, but it is about the meta-game. By now you should have understand some concepts of the meta-game. Planetarion is not about 'picking the best race and thus performing', it is often also the case of picking a strategy (race, ships and so forth) that makes you flexible (gives you a lot of potential targets) and at the same time unattractive to most of the universe. A good example is Apprime round 34 where they almost always had their BS roiding fleets spare while 2 fleet defending, while Ascendancy, who was in a similar position, only had their CO fleets to attack with. This whole situation would have been different if the whole universe would have gone for FR/DE, then Apprime would've been forced to constantly keep Tycoons home and Ascendancy could've tried to dodge the FR/DE waves with their Fi/Co. How you influence this meta-game (if you can) can be critical for a round. Now that the concept of the meta-game is fresh in your mind, we go to politics. As it is also competent to keep your options open for attacking, it is also with politics. You want to keep your options open. (f.e. Ascendancy's choice of round 34 by allying Apprime and fully integrating the channels/bots/bookings/intel with them was in that aspect a very shit move to make, as it limited Ascendancy's playing field for the rest of the round) Lokken has stated it very nicely here: Quote:
Later on targetting becomes a choice of those running the alliance. This can be done by 'random gal raiding' as it is known, just pick a galaxy that has a lot of roids compared to its value and try and roid it. However as you pick targets, politics will start to shape. (You can imagine that if a galaxy with a lot of ziks is your preferred target due to the race set up of your alliance and alliance B is zik heavy, you inevitably start hitting them more then other alliances). You can also focus on an enemy; Hitting galaxies that are dominated by alliance A. Or hitting galaxies that are dominated by your own alliance, but targetting only the planets of alliance A. Later on you can go for 'Planet targetting' an alliance where you only put up targets that are in alliance A. Hand-in-hand with targetting are those 'orders' or 'guidelines' that an alliance gives its members with respect to 'solo-ing'. The targets that should be attacked by those who did not get a target due to missing the 'target pick' or those that kept fleet home because they thought they would get incomings and so forth. When targetting a certain alliance (or group of alliances) it is wise to limit the group of targets for those soloing. Although Planetarion is all about keeping your options open, it is also about making choices. When targetting a certain alliance it is very wise to let almost all attacking fleets focus on that alliance in order to:
This is in military terms easy: When alliance A is destroyed or when a far greater threat emerges. A big but however does ring: You should stop targetting alliance A when politics dictate it. When you need alliance A, who has now been weakened enough not to threat you alone anymore, to take down alliance B could be a good reason. However the estimation of what alliances are capable of, we leave that to another lecture. Combining politics and targetting we can come to a simple conclusion: They influence eachother, however politics should be in charge of targetting and not vice versa. This means that if you are pursuing some political goal (for instance the destruction of alliance A) then targetting should follow this. However, if targetting shows that 'the destruction of alliance A' is not possible, then those politics should not be pursued. Now where are the dangers? What usually goes wrong? One thing that we have seen in the last 10 rounds is that targetting and politics do not go hand in hand. A lot of alliances give their members a 'night of' or let them solo on planets while half-assed attacking 'Enemy A', this only means that Enemy A has a complete def pool for only half the incomings. Full defensive coverage and lowering of morale (willingness to attack Enemy A) is a logical consequence, while at the same time giving Enemy A to attack back with far more fleets. This gives away the initiative (or at least temporarily) and is a very bad move. Especially if you consider Enemy A to be more active and 'better players' than your own alliance. This is what we would call a targetting error and is very easy to spot. It usually goes hand-in-hand with poor member discipline (soloing on 'newbie planets', poor attacking coverage). On the other side is a political error. Forcing yourself in a position that you cannot move out of. The last two rounds have we seen Ascendancy making this error and the last two rounds we have seen Euphoria and DLR making this error. If you set yourself in a certain position where you cannot move out of then you also force the hands of other alliances. For instance this round early on P3nguins got forced to side with Apprime as DLR/Euphoria and at times CT and NewDawn teamed up again. The politics of DLR/Euphoria and CT/ND (DENC!) are in that respect made of failure. The worst mistake however is to pursue the wrong political goals and at the same time not consequently targetting those you should target. Readers of this post should now be able to give examples of that themselves. |
Re: The Ministry Teaching Courses presents: Politics and Targetting.
Nice post theam but People in glasshouses shouldnt throw stones , doesnt your current ally contain a certain 2 members (lets call them R and E ) maybe you should ask them to read this
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Re: The Ministry Teaching Courses presents: Politics and Targetting.
What did Rember and eki do? :|
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Re: The Ministry Teaching Courses presents: Politics and Targetting.
This post would have been much better if you'd just quoted Lok and not written anything yourself.
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Re: The Ministry Teaching Courses presents: Politics and Targetting.
Ministry sucked, but not as much as your mum
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Re: The Ministry Teaching Courses presents: Politics and Targetting.
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'Why opportunism ****s over your alliance' |
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The grandest example of a fleet strategy is arguably Ascendancy's mass Zikonian strategy (it may have been round 30) where we basically took any opportunity to steal fleet at base, in defence or on a catch. While we lost out to begin with, we ended up having the strongest fleets in the game and absolutely destroyed people as we were better players with better fleets. Quote:
With my post, I'd say it was valid but I was only talking about one particular situation. With targeting there are a number of strategies you can deploy, and they very much depend on a number of factors:
Put bluntly, a good commander generally adapts to the situation in deciding what attack strategy to deploy. This is why players like Agamemnon, Sid and JBG are among the finest players this game has seen, because they made good calls on a regular basis. In a position of weakness, he might look to play percentages, pull out fleets all over the place, send fakes, try to contain the opponent to stop attacks coming his way and ultimately turn the war round as the opponent runs out of gas. This tactic was used very effectively by Ascendancy in round 32, where despite our numerical disadvantage, we had to be very smart to get round Apprime's obsession with prelaunch and hideous amounts of activity. In the end we turned round a dominant performance from Apprime, into a bloody conflict where they suffered quite badly and had at least one HC and a few major players fleetcaught. Apprime may have won r32 but it was a conflict in which they were painfully outclassed by a patient, smart and disciplined opponent. In my opinion the fact that Ascendancy can pull off a textbook performance like that in r32 (compare it with my other examples) is why they can be generally regarded as one of the great alliances with some legitimacy. In a position of total superiority he might opt for decapitation to make the opponent lose heart and give way to a standard mopping up operation. Experienced players will know this to be a classic Fury tactic in their period of total domination. Find the people who instigated it and go straight for the throat to show that no such resistance will be tolerated. For example in round 7, my galaxy (Fury) was instructed to go straight for Tesla and the key ministry galaxy. Credit to the Fury commanders who chose us, as we were a fantastic choice. Up for a fight and not likely to quit or throw a paddy if the opponent threw the kitchen sink at us. Admittedly, while Xan and Titans were routed pretty hard, this particular tactic led to a conflict where Ministry were more processed than beaten. You could of course be reasonably evenly matched, thus you need to optimise your roid intake compared to the other guy. A good way of dealing with this is by sending an attack at your opponents strongholds while focussing on their more vulnerable out of the way planets, and taking them out of the equation in the long run. Agamemnon used a version of this to spectacular effect in round 6, chipping round the skirt of Fury and Legion, leaving them with most of the top 20 galaxies (not a lot at the time) and pretty much nothing else. In the end it all fell down because they just ran out of support. But for all this, a sense of bloody mindness and belief that in the long term your strategy will pay off, whatever the roid losses is important in all of them. As I said in the post you quoted, you have to keep the attacks relevant to your goal of winning and not piss off people you don't have to. Focus, patience and judgment is what makes targeting effective. I'm not even sure it can be taught to people very easily. |
Re: The Ministry Teaching Courses presents: Politics and Targetting.
Obviously the Deus Ex Machina teaching courses should be presented!
Thank you for pointing out and improving some of the flaws presented in the original post and elaborating on the subject in general! |
Re: The Ministry Teaching Courses presents: Politics and Targetting.
You should mail this to euph ingame theam , seems their members think sending over 1 mil in fleet value to cap 60 roids is good game play
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