Victory through chaos

[SeraphimLeftNut]

Victory through chaos
“…The ubermensch...Who has organized the chaos of his passions, given style to his character, and become creative. Aware of life's terrors, he affirms life without resentment…
…There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness…
…You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star…”
F. Nietzche
A game can be defined as a series of orders given by the players. This definition although precise is a step away from the mechanism by which the players create the game. The more abstract and useful definition of a game can be, the series of decisions made by the players. The connection between these two definitions is the players’ micro ability to translate decisions into reality on the battlefield. With the latter definition, micro is removed allowing us to look at efficiency without staring at the players’ hands.
In the extreme example of 20 min no rush thermo, the most efficient economy builds are compared. The best player is the one who builds just enough power and build capacity to sustain the mass extractor upgrades, power overflow from noob allies is a bonus and military units are insanity. With the enemies separated there is complete knowledge of the battlefield and decisions can be made with absolute certainty. Here a perfect game exists and is unique, efficiency maximized, entropy minimized. As the no rush timer winds down uncertainty in the battlefield increases, and not until the 20 minute scout, perfect knowledge can once again be theoretically obtained.
As uncertainty increases the definition of a perfect game is smeared out over the possible enemy strategies. This is the point at which the players must make decisions that they could not have made before the game started. In a typical Supcom FA game this point comes in the first few minutes as the players feel each other out with scouts and early raids. Instead of a perfect game, there exists a set of games with the chance to be optimal given the player’s current knowledge of the battle field and the ability to predict the future. Scouting is the process by which this set is diminished, but it is important to realize that it cannot be diminished to a single game, since scouting doesn’t give information about the enemies’ future decisions and ally’s stupidity. The size of this set I will refer to as enemy’s entropy. Similarly your entropy is the size of the set of possible perfect games that the enemy can expect from you.
The simplest way to increase your entropy is to not be scouted, but it is useful to take this point further. Observe that there is an inverse relationship between efficiency and entropy. Simple examples are redundancy in TMD, SMD, power storage, excess power, excess engies, etc. Engineers are especially effective agents of entropy, especially when spread out over as large an area as possible, these serve as the direct link between the chaos in the player’s head and the battlefield. Engineers can quickly negate a recent scout by constructing structures such as point defenses, aa turrets and factories. Another way to increase your entropy is to become proficient with transports, a couple engineers rapidly changing position and making PD increases your entropy as well as forces the enemy to react, negating their scouting ability.
Taking away enemy concentration also creates a new layer of uncertainty, where instead of relying on intel from scouting, the enemy is forced to create a number of different possible scenarios inside their head, which they will later confirm or deny, but based on which decisions must be made at that moment. This is where your reputation in creativity and ability to execute is really the limit to the chaos you can create. Put yourself in a position where you were busy putting out fires for 5 minutes and not able to scout, in one case you are facing some average player and in the other case you are facing Zock. In the former you will be calm thinking about how good your eco will be once you reclaim all those fresh wrecks, in the latter your head is exploding with the different possibilities by which you maybe hit next. This also illustrates that aggression, frequency of attack, and variability of the attacking units are some of the methods to increase your own entropy, whether real or imagined.
There are many situations where efficiency beats chaos. These include, no rush games, turtling maps, and stacked teams. Stacked teams are especially a problem for a chaotic player on the weaker side, but they should never make the obvious strategic blunder by trying to win the game through efficiency, that battle has already been lost in the lobby. The stackers know this, so they will not engage you, allowing you the possibility to choose the losing strategy. The strategic choice for aggressive gameplay is clear, but is unlikely to work since while you were killing or damaging one of the opponents, the other enemies were peacefully upgrading their mass extractors. In this position you have two possible winning scenarios. Your allies, albeit weaker than the enemy are still capable players and your entire team attack at once, one example of this is Preparation H™. The other possibility is the enemy is overconfident and becomes complacent, while you attack multiple players at once without stopping. (send me that replay)
As you play Supcom FA you will be making the choice between chaos and efficiency many times during each game. When unsure, always choose chaos. Chaotic gameplay teaches you new abilities and improves your old micro techniques; you don’t need training balancing power, build capacity and mass extractors if you played thermo a few times. If you want to improve, the choice is simple. Chaotic gameplay will help you in your next game whether you win or lose the current one, other players will not know what to expect from you, while the sim city noobs are easily spotted, remembered, bashed and then kicked from games. Even if you are already a good player, but predominantly choose efficiency you will never rise above a certain level, you will eventually become really good on your favorite maps and will struggle everywhere else. If you want to be the best, the choice is simple.
This interplay between chaos and efficiency is just another illustration of Supcom FA superiority over other games. The balance between macro and micro, air/navy/land diversity, jumps between tech levels, engineering build capacity, large maps, an economy that is actually real time and many other reasons make the choice always difficult and critical.

[Softly]

I gotta say you sure know how to come up with a wall of text

This interplay between chaos and efficiency is just another illustration of Supcom FA superiority over other games.

Just another eh?...

This superiority over other games seems to be a trend with FA

[Myrdral]

SeraphimLeftNut, I agree with every word after my first read. Your analysis of efficiency and entropy and their respective relationships to turtling/teching and raiding/rushing reveals reveals an important perspective. There is an interplay of causing chaos for your opponent's strategy while being efficient in your creation of chaos. Chaos generally refers to forcing your opponent out of their comfort zone. It is easiest to do this by being unpredictable. You can only be predictable and unpredictable both inside and outside of enemy intel. If a player is perfectly predictable in their economy, then you do not need to gather new intel. Remembering intel from the previous set of games with that perfectly predictable player on that map is all the intel you need. A player becomes more unpredictable outside of your intel coverage the more he or she changes his or her build order and positioning of units(including structures). A player's units are predictable while within your in-game intel range if those units do what you expect them to do. A player's units are unpredictable even while you stare directly at them in full vision if they act in way which you cannot predict.

Being predictable and unpredictable are tools and when mixed neither is necessarily better than the other. Would you agree that striving to be perfectly predictable or to make all of your opponents predictions incorrect is not optimal? I believe you made a similar point about how you need to be efficient in your entropy. Entropy for the sake of entropy is unfocused chaos with no clear goal. Efficiency for the sake of efficiency allows your opponent to counter too effectively. Is it optimal to unpredictably and efficiently create chaos for your opponent's predictable efficiency?

[Pavese]

It's cheap and easy to scout anything your opponent does. If you get surprised by anything, you did a bad job at scouting.


Games are decided by your decisions and your mechanics. If you make blind decisions you will not perform well.
Good players are good because they make the right decisions and know the mechanics of the game.

[Myrdral]

Although cheap, scouting has a cost. The original post discussed extensively how you can build things quickly after being scouted to throw off your opponent. He mentioned having a mobile team of engineers with a transport to make the enemy's intel out of date. Intel can be out of date the moment it is no longer actively being updated. Even the best players do not have constant visual of the entire map. If they do, they are cheating. It is quite possible that they have radar coverage over all relevant portions of the map. However, buildings may still be built under stealth fields or in radar coverage gaps. If you are attempting something which requires the element of suprise to have a chance of being successful, then I assume an equally skilled player will put a large focus on preventing the enemy from gathering intel. The original post also addresses the importance of inhibiting the enemy from gathering intel. As cheap as scouts are, the investment to destroy these scouts is only needs to be made once and may continue killing repeated scouts throughout the game. One mech marine certainly could kill two scouts at two different times and places. At this point, the intel provided by the scouts must give you an advantage to outweigh the opponent's mech marine along with the mass they reclaim from your scout wrecks and their surviving veteran unit. You gain an advantage in intel, they gain an economic and military advantage. Knowing the mechanics and making the right decisions is something that is predictable between top players. If your opponent knows the right decision in optimizing your mex expansion and reclaim early game, then he already has intel based on what he expects you to do. He then uses that intel of a your optimal economy build order to plan his raids to meet up with your engineers. He would certainly benefit by first scouting those locations with a snoop to see if he should move his slower raiding units to that scout's location. I believe the original poster wanted to express the importance of predictability and how the most efficient or correct play is very predictable. The best players are good at predicting you in the early game and using that as a basis for how they optimize their gathering of radar and visual intel. You can do a great job scouting, but if your opponent knows where you are without scouting based on your predictable correct gameplay, then he can spend more of his economy on military and not on scouts. This is a small economic advantage that requires knowledge of the map and opponent. I believe the original post is talking about the highest level of play obtainable between very equally skilled top players.

It is more a question of whether you can gain an advantage by abusing the predictability of your opponent, not a question of who spends more on intel or sees more of the map with that intel. Take two players of equal skill in scouting. Both players know the optimal economic placement of mexes and reclaimers etc. One player builds and raids based on this information and the information they gain from scouting those optimal locations. The second player does very much the same thing but chooses to build the mex which would normally be raided first at a different location. He also raids a location which the opponent does not expect to be raided first and takes a path which is not normally scouted at that time in the game. The first player gains no actionable intel as the place where he scouts first in empty and no raiding is possible at that location. He is forced to go on the defensive against the unpredictable raid while trying to figure out where to scout and raid next against this unusual opponent. He has no economic advantage by placing his mex in the optimal locations as they are now being raided before even paying for themselves. The second player has mexes and engineers which are difficult to scout and gain actionable intel.

Neither player is making blind decisions. They are simply utilizing their pre-game knowledge to formulate different gameplans. The first player is what the original post described as a predictable efficient player. The second player is what the original post described as a chaotic or entropic player.

Obviously, no one is the extreme of either of these as I used in my example with early engi/mex raiding. I believe the original poster argues that adding a certain amount of entropic or chaotic play to your strategy can yield an advantage over your opponent who if focusing more on doing the correct and efficient thing. I believe both players will try to counter each other. The difference is in their build order, or more specifically economic expansion order as well as the order in which they choose to scout different locations for opposing units and structures.


I can think of a commonly occuring example depicting how being predictable and doing the correct thing may allow your opponent to directly negate that advantage. On a certain map, the correct thing is to build a land factory first. Your opponent knows this and builds an air factory and early bomber. He then sends his bomber to try and kill your engineers. He knows where those engineers will be based on you doing the optimal thing with your engineers. He has no need to scout to know that you will not have interceptors or where your engineers will be. From what I know, many find it to be the correct thing to move their engineer toward the bomber right before it drops to prevent it from dropping or to increase its chances of missing the engineer. Perhaps it is best to move the engineer perpendicular to the bomber's attack vector to make it miss to the side. Either way, the bomber player can predict this correct and optimal movement and ground target where the engineer will be. This is not unreasonable as the two players will both be actively microing to accomplish their bombing or dodging goal. If I know you will run your engineer at my bomber, I can simply target the ground in between the bomber and engineer. Also note that the bomber has a larger vision and radar than the snoop. Even if the engineer dodging player has a snoop nearby, they are at a disadvantage to the early bomber.


Of course all of this silly bomber nonsesnse could be negated if the engineer dodging player had an air factory. However, he did the correct thing and built land first. He does the correct thing now with a bomber over his base. He builds whatever is correct whether that is build mobile AA , static AA, radar, an air factory or all of the above. If the land first player loses an engineer or two or more no engineers but has to temporarily take them off build projects to avoid bombs, then does this make the bomber raid worthwhile and provide the incorrect air factory first player an advantage? If the correct thing is to start building enough AA to kill 1 bomber( a minimimum of one mobile AA?) is it enough to stop the skilled bomber player from killing off more engineers and other units than the bomber costed even after you reclaim it's wreck? Will the bomber player simply retreat his bomber from your land based AA and attack an expansion mex or relaiming engineer unprotected by AA, rendering any static AA or mobile AA in your main base useless and a complete waste in the short term? Will he only attack you with that one bomber and then use his air factory to quickly mobilize his engineers and expand to distant mexes more quickly and unpredictably? Would you even send a scout to an obscure part of a large map because you are certain he won't be there because it is not correct for your opponent to be expanding there at that point in the game? If you do scout that location, did you build units which could raid it quickly even though they were not the correct units on this map?

I propose that the very best players are choosing when to make plays which are not economically correct to avoid being too predictable. An important part of the early game is evaluating your opponent's predictability and testing his ability to become unpredictable when you take advantage of it. Does he continue to run his engineers toward your bombers right into your ground targetting bombs thinking that you are aiming directly at the engineer with a normal attack command? Does he realize that you are ground targetting in front of the engineer and make you miss badly by moving away from the bomber or to the side instead? I think two players with unpredictable build orders designed to take advantage over the common metagame build order have a distinctive advantage and are playing at a higher level than two players who make a game a competition of who can execute the correct widely known and accepted build order the most perfectly. Adding just the right amount of unpredictability to your game to gain a consistent advantage over the widely known metagame build order is optimal. Using the same exact build order, unit movements and counters etc. every game for a given map and settings will cause you to consistently lose to the player who specifically designed a strategy to find gaps to efficiently exploit.

Another way to look at this is most players use a build order which is the best in the most cases. They feel this gives them the best chance of winning overall, especially vs players of lesser skill. If they are in the top 50% of players, this strategy will yield a positive win ratio with good reliability. Now this strategy is designed mostly to win through a balanced approach to econ, teching, raiding, countering and gathering intel. An opponent who is familiar with the metagame commonly used build order is free to design a build order absolutely tailored to exploit weak points in that 'correct strategy to win the majority of games vs players of a variety of skill levels'. A player who is strictly worse in all areas of the game by a slight margin may beat a slightly better player by choosing to 'metagame' his build order.

A final example. In baseball, a hitter with a less thannormal average and less than normal home-run power has a 3-0 count on him with no outs. He is a great base stealer. The pitcher is absolutely certain he will take the next pitch because it is the correct thing to do for this player to try and take the walk and perhaps steal a base to get into scoring position. The pitcher throws the pitch which he knows he can throw for a strike - a fastball out over the plate because it is the correct thing to do. The opposing coach gives the hitter a green-light to swing and he gets a hit, perhaps even extra bases. It turns out he is a great fastball hitter but cannot hit a curveball to save his life. The pitcher perhaps did not know this because he had good intel about how to pitch in this situation to a less than average hitter who steals bases well. Perhaps he knew the guy couldn't hit a curveball but was so certain he would do the correct thing in his mind and take the pitch that he played it 'safe' for throwing the strike and threw the fastball. Perhaps the other coach was a noob for telling the player to swing, perhaps he knew his team had the best chance of scoring because he was factoring in something which the pitcher was not. The pitcher was over confident that what he doing was the best in this situation that he was exploited for his predictability. Maybe the coach even knew that pitcher always throws a fastball over the plate with a 3-0 count to that type of hitter in that situation.

This baseball analogy relates to predictability in FA as being exploitable by your opponent even when you are doing the correct thing to beat the vast majority of players on a regular basis.

[Pavese]

Just know that once you have scouted, you can see everything he's doing with his current buildings. Buildings that get teched up or destroyed become grey. And even if you can sneak a tech in by building a new factory to tech it's easily scouted again before you can do serious damage.

It's very hard to do something "fast" in Supcom that couldn't be spotted by radar coverage or flat out scouting.

Bomber first is only so strong because you can not reliable scout and prepare for it without playing the guessing game or have a lucky scout midfield.

I also think you confuse this game with starcraft a bit. SupCom is nowhere near the level of balance and refinement that Starcraft has. You have 4 almost identical factions that play pretty much the same.
It's not so much about tactics, it's about map and zone control. Who has the mass to build more army then the other. That's supcom in a nutshell. No Special tactis carriers. The bigger army wins.

Tech comes into play when you control enough mass to justify a tech. If you just tech up you will loose map control and with it the game since any amount of land based tech is rather easily shut down by ACUs (OC be praise) and any Air tech by appropriate T1 air spam.

[Myrdral]

It's cheap and easy to scout anything your opponent does. If you get surprised by anything, you did a bad job at scouting.


Games are decided by your decisions and your mechanics. If you make blind decisions you will not perform well.
Good players are good because they make the right decisions and know the mechanics of the game.

Even players who are scouting 'correctly' will be scouting 'incorrectly' if they end up scouting and trying to raid places where an unpredictable player did not build at the time you expected them to. The unpredictable player may even make everything seem normal but when you go to raid his engineer or mex you get a nasty surprise by say a stealthed cybran ACU. He decimates your overconfident 'correctly' scouted raiding force. He gains a huge advantage and carries it the rest of the game. It is also easier to counter a correct and predictable raid if you know it's coming earlier. Predicting can always be done before you can have actual visual or radar intel. Original poster mentioned enticing someone to attack a target and moving heavy defenses to that location before they gain additional intel. Advance scouts require heavy micro to never die. I think even the best players lose at least one scout per game even if it is their intention to never have that scout ever enter enemy weapon range and they do their best to micro them whenever they are free from other more important tasks. If you gain intel of an engineer just starting to build a mex and your scout is killed by 1 lab, would that stop you from trying to raid that mex with a force that can cost efficiently kill 1 engineer and 1 lab? What if your opponent reinforces that position before your raid kills the engineer and lab. Now he has radar coverage and artillery or other long range at that location and you are hit by it before you gain more recent intel. More likely, you keep a raiding force very close behind that scout and it slows down your gathering of intel. This seems like the correct thing to do if you do not want your scouts to die without killing what killed the scout in return. It would suck to have 2 labs near that scout and still have it die to 1 lab. I think it is common to raid to send any land scout with 2 labs for this reason. Any actionable intel will require at least 1 nearby lab to raid effectively. Say you have those 2 lab + 1 scout. You scout and see 1 engineer 1 lab and 1 scout. You launch your raid against this roughly equal mass of units which has less military power than your 2 lab + scout force. Your opponent has planned for your raid on this 1 engineer and 1 lab and 1 scout. He has decided to bait your first raid and destroy it before reclaiming and launching a raid of his own. He has at least 1 or 2 labs waiting to trap your raiders when they move toward the engineer scout and lab. He has extra force of at least one or couple lab at this location because it is on his side of the map and closer to his factory and he did not send any units to your side of the map yet. Perhaps he is really good at micro and planned this counter raid all day. He send in an extra lab or 2 from both sides. Your raiders are completely unable to retreat and facing a superior force. It is destroyed and reclaimed. The counter-raid player then plays the rest of the game just as you would. He has an advantage in numbers due to him killing and reclaming your 3 unit scouting/raiding party and any of his one or two losses. With reclaim, he perhaps has a 3-5 unit advantage now. He uses it to control the mexes in the center of the map or at least 1 of the mexes on the opponent's side. This advantage allows him to slowly snowball and claim more of the map, eventually leading to a victory.

[Myrdral]

Just know that once you have scouted, you can see everything he's doing with his current buildings. Buildings that get teched up or destroyed become grey. And even if you can sneak a tech in by building a new factory to tech it's easily scouted again before you can do serious damage.

It's very hard to do something "fast" in Supcom that couldn't be spotted by radar coverage or flat out scouting.

Bomber first is only so strong because you can not reliable scout and prepare for it without playing the guessing game or have a lucky scout midfield.

I also think you confuse this game with starcraft a bit. SupCom is nowhere near the level of balance and refinement that Starcraft has. You have 4 almost identical factions that play pretty much the same.
It's not so much about tactics, it's about map and zone control. Who has the mass to build more army then the other. That's supcom in a nutshell. No Special tactis carriers. The bigger army wins.

Tech comes into play when you control enough mass to justify a tech. If you just tech up you will loose map control and with it the game since any amount of land based tech is rather easily shut down by ACUs (OC be praise) and any Air tech by appropriate T1 air spam.

I never played starcraft so I definitely did not confuse it with supcom. I agree that map and zone control are important for winning in supcom. I do not agree that tactics play no part in who acquires more mass than the other. I do recognize the need for units other than t1 land to combat an ACU. I also know that you can spam interceptors to kill all other t1 air. My point is that tactics can cause your opponent to lose more scouts and raiding parties than he should. Losses can be reclaimed by the victor. The first meaningful fight( i mean more than killing just one scout, although killing a scout and reclaiming it will give you an extra 1/2 lab or whatever over your opponent) won gives the victor an advantage especially if they reclaim the wrecks with a nearby engineer. Travelling an engineer way across the map to reclaim a small wreck would not be optimal or worth bothering as it would cost you more than it is worth. I also know that teching is a short term disadvantage for a long term advantage. This period where teching puts you at a disadvantage can be very short if you do certain things like assist the factory and start fielding those higher tech units more quickly. Even then, you often need to complete quite a few higher tech units to equal a constant spam from your opponent of the lower tech to equal your economic expense of upgrading the factory.

Do you agree that baiting, trapping and destroying the opponents first raid with a superior force on your side of the map will yield a potentially game winning advantage? This advantage is small when we are talking about a scout and a couple labs, but between good players a small advantage can snowball to one player having an additional mex. The extra econ can increase the rate of the snowballing. I think focusing on counter-raiding instead of raiding until you have killed some opposing units is a tactical choice which could be the main factor in winning the game. I generally stay on my side of the map early so that I have a numbers advantage against any raiding force. If there is an important neutral section of the map such as on Seton's, then I consider that to be my side of the map for the purposes of this counter-raiding. With equal military production to your opponent, you can always have the numbers advantage on your side of the map. I think maps like Seton's are popular in part because of the importance of the mass in the center at an equal distance from the starting points of both sides. Some maps are more clearly cut into two halves with little mass in the exact center. I will sometimes raid before my opponent but only with very good intel and I do not risk too much without good intel. I agree that intel is absolutely necessary especially on their side of the map as you need to avoid their superior numbers while still causing some damage. It is better to retreat or to delay raiding rather than feed your opponent on their side of the map.

[SeraphimLeftNut]

I think you guys are focusing on scouting a lot. Scouting is pretty clear. I wanted to stress that even after scouting, depending on what the enemy saw in your base they will have to be prepared for a different number of unique attacks from you. This number is what you want to maximize. Having your enemy see that you ahve t2 air is bad, but it is also good, because they will now have to prepare for a larger number of different possible attacks. It is that randomness factor that we should always keep in mind.

[Myrdral]

I do agree with your Seraphim. I focused on the scouting issue in response to the other post. We can probably all agree that it is good to keep your opponent guessing and influence them to make more human errors.