Close Game Help

[Flynn]

I've gone up against this guy several times and things have always been pretty close. I seem to take the early advantage but everytime he has come back and beaten me. Two things I noticed when watching the replay is that he upgraded three of his mexes to T2, without losing the T1 land spam war. I don't understand how this is possible. And no, I was reclaiming way more than him. The second is that the UEF Commander's recharge rate seems a lot higher than the Aeon commander's recharge rate. I get his commander below 5000 hp on one occasion which should force him back for a few minutes atleast, but the next time I see his commander in combat he is nearly at full health again The only thing I can see might have lost it for me was going to T2, other than that I can't see how I could have done anything better.

[Eukanuba]

I watched up to 14mins and I can tell you what lost you the game:

1. UEF gun upgrade - this can 1-shot any Aeon T1 unit.

2. He had upgraded 3 mexes to T2 by this point.

However, I took lots of notes so I will put them into sentences and hopefully give you some constructive criticism.

Starting out, you sent an engineer east to get those two mexes. The travel distance is further than getting the two on the cliff, and it also delays the time it takes to get radar up on that cliff.

Too many initial engies, you made at least five before making anything with a gun. My rule of thumb is 3 engies then 1 LAB, but of course it can vary depending on the map.

Your ACU stayed in the base a bit too long, and when you did send it out it went north. Put it in the middle and stop the enemy getting a foothold there. Also from an area-denial point of view, middle of the map is nearly always best on a 5k map, especially that one.

First military units were scouts, often building one LAB first with no scout is a useful thing - send it to the mex point you estimate will have an engy by it when you arrive. Invert your own build plans to help you decide if it's a map you don't know well. Unaccompanied scout is suicide, it's not even capable of killing an engineer. The south scout was killed very easily.

However, the scout in the middle was good and spotted the enemy ACU, this is valuable intel. Well done on running away with the scout too.

I've got a note that says not to build LABs past the initial raids, but TBH I think you got that just about right after having watched on further.

Good sending tanks to east side.

Also good sending one LAB into enemy base, causing his entire army to chase after it. That let you raid in the west with a couple of LABs and take out a couple of mexes.

At 6:40, your reclaim was 447 mass, his was 2513. The difference is the cost of the two mexes he upgraded early on and helped him win the game.

At 8:00 you had no E-storage, meaning no overcharging. I often forget to build e-storage but you should certainly build one as soon as your ACU makes first contact, often it's a good idea to build three or so for redundancy in case you lose one and also to help you rush upgrades.

You had lots of planes flying over his mobile AA, several unnecessary deaths there (both fighters and bombers killed this way).

8:40: There has been a bit of a fight in the middle which you have both retreated from. He has realised that you have equal numbers, so he's going for the gun upgrade. He's assisting with a couple of engies, who help repair him after the upgrade is done. If you had had storages or more pgens you would have been able to get a gun upgrade too. Aeon have two gun upgrades, and these can be devastating if you get them both.

9:40: Your reclaim is much better by this point, 2770 vs 3238, but still you haven't upgraded mexes.

11:20: He's upgrading his third mex to T2 with engy assist and plenty of mass stored so he won't stall.

11:30 - I notice you have 12 land facs and he has 8. Generally more is better, but perhaps you overstretched, meaning that any production that was not land units would suffer. Potentially reduced your flexibility, and of course the cost of extra factories will have played a part.

12:00 - Flynn ahead on reclaim, 5793 vs 4796

12:30 - attacking with tank blob vs equal or higher number, with enemy ACU w/gun upgrade in the middle. Throwing away units. You ran away tward your ACU but there were still heavy losses.

Also, I found out by accident that you can pause replays by pressing the Pause/Break key on the keyboard.

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So in summary, you lost because he had upgraded mexes and an ACU gun. Traditional wisdom has it that you don't upgrade mexes on 5k 1v1s, but because he didn't feel under too much pressure he felt he could get away with it, and he did (mex upgrade is worth ~20 tanks and takes ~3.5mins to pay off). So more pressure, more raiding and consider when you can upgrade mexes yourself. It's not an exact science but I've found you can get a feel for it.

Let me know if you want a game if you see me online.

[Flynn]

Wow dude! Really good in depth analysis there, thank you. So essentially you came to the same conclusions then. I too noticed that he was able to upgrade his mexes but I didn't realise he took advantage of that early reclaim there so was left scratching my head. I think you covered pretty much the whole game in your write up Just one thing though, I am surprised you didn't mention my attempt to go T2 land which I thought might have contributed to my loss. Although by the time I was doing that I had already lost the ACU battle which was the turning point as you pointed out. Whoops, answered my own question there! I am sure that the UEF ACU regenerates faster than the other ACUs though, they just seem to soak with the T1 units with so much ease, even without the cannon enhancement. At the start, I am a bit lazy. I set the factory to infinite build engineers until I have about half a dozen and then to spam scouts and LABs for about 2 minutes in the enemy's general direction Thank you very much for taking your time to review and critique my performance.

[ColonelSheppard]

Eukanuba said the main things, reclaim, reclaim and reclaim again

[Flynn]

I thought I was reclaiming! I had six engineers working on the wrecks from the battle in the middle of the map!

[Rocksteady]

Your bomber scouted his ACU very early into his upgrade and at that point u had 4-5 engies on the left just sat there doing nothing that should have been reclaiming mid, you didn't send them to reclaim til the ~12 min mark, Instead they built 3 more factories and even stalled your mass for quite awhile.

Why the decision to build 3-5 more t1 factories against an upgrading ACU when you were already ahead with map control?

I think it's just a scouting/awareness problem, even after he had the upgrade you didn't respond or pull back just fed him 100 kills and few k more HP. I don't think the t2 mex were an issue in that game as he was behind on mex anyway and lost map control, apart from his early reclaim advantage he was never ahead.

[Flynn]

Yeah I think a lot of my failings are due to awareness, when I'm trying to do 101 things at once I become absent minded. That is probably something that will only improve with experience.