[lokken]

Originally Posted by Knight Theamion

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.

No, strategies are not about being flexible. The whole point of picking a strategy is that you generally stick to it and exploit its advantages for all they are worth. If you are playing with discipline, you'll be flexible in the sense that you'll be well positioned to overcome a lot of enemies.

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.

Quite honestly, the only choice I can think of that destroys your chances of winning planetarion, it's going cathaar. Ascendancy were not in a similar position to Apprime, which is why you are still missing the point with round 34, which was very much a political defeat. When you sit there letting yourself get roided to shit while your main opponent doesn't and in fact decide to co-operate with them, of course you are going to lose. In my mind, this is gross overcomplication of the situation.

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.

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)

I'd say that was a mistake. But quite honestly from my observation Ascendancy could have had all the options in the world and not taken them that round.

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:

• your political status (at war or not at war)
• the spread of your enemies' planets
• you and your opponents strengths and weaknesses (this includes activity and their level of burnout)
• the capacity of your own alliance to cap asteroids

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.