Topic: Widelands tournament 2016; official announcements

The game was very interesting and enjoyable, so I'm giving it a full analysis.

I started rather slowly because of my old enemy: perfectionism. Knowing that the building space was small, I wanted to place each and every building in the most perfect manner, and so I waited to build until I had explored more and cleared up all the space. Meanwhile, sirver made a good working economy very fast, and after 20 minutes she was already pumping out promoted soldiers. I had to wait a while more for that, and had further troubles as I didn't make the horse farm, and my traffic collapsed at some point. and then, all taken with placing the big buildings, I made insufficient wells. Sirver got a hefty troop advantage, and one hour into the game, she was definitely favored. She was however slowed by poor decisions regarding marble management. this granted me some precious time. When we made contact, I resorted to the delaying tactic of attacking any newly made military building, when rookies just came in and before it can be manned by stronger troops.

Here sirver failed the chance to kill me. Her main mistakes were two: she expended her marble making towers before we fully made contact, and was forced to advance with barriers afterwards; barriers lacked sufficient vision range to see my main defensive tower, and so I could resist there. Lack of a properly placed tower is also what allowed her to survive in the previous game against worldsavior, in a nice simmetry. But most of all, she let her best troops go to buildings that were too far from the front to be useful. She should have removed the troops from those buildings, and that way she would have had plenty of strong troops in the headquarter to go man the newly made buildings at the border. I was holding with difficulty; had the front fallen, I had no backup; all my land was sacrificed to economy, and I didn't make a castle behind to provide a second line of defence as I usually do. Had I lost my front tower, I'd have been forced to retreat halfway to the headquarter.

Sirver made progress, but at a steep price, a result of atlantean stronger troops and luck on my side (i won way more duels among equally promoted soldiers than reasonable). what made the difference, though, was the time factor. Once I solved my issues, my economy went to high gear, and I could soon outproduce her. The moment I made my first soldier with evade and attack promotion, the game was done.

What sirver did right: wonderful start, she got a full economy working capable of indefinitely supporting a colosseum in less than 30 minutes, on a difficult map. In general, good progression for all the early game.

What sirver did wrong: she failed marble management. she didn't quarry all the stone near the headquarter, and she made marble-expensive towers relatively far from the borders; this forced her to make barriers onward, but they lacked the vision range to attack me. Also, with more marble she could have readied her training camp and made a fully promoted soldier allready at 1:30 hours, well before I managed mine. She also failed at troops micromanaging: she left her best troops behind, exposing weaker troops at the front. she did not micromanage the training sites, and so she got many soldiers trained only with evade 1 - those were easily killed by my evade 2, and they coster her precious bread. Getting evade 2 for a single soldier is just as expensive as evade 1 for 2 soldiers, but it is much more cost-effective. Same deal later with the training camp, though at the time I was already outproducing her and it would have made no difference.

What I did right: great economy placing. I am myself surprised by how much production I could squeeze out of such a tiny land. I had 3 bakeries and 3 smokeries going at 100%, despite being forced to stop expansion early. At best, I could have squeezed in one or two wells. And good managing of soldiers, always finding her weak spots to attack despite being outpowered. I think it was a very good example on how to defend against greater power.

What I did wrong: I waited too long before setting up an economy. I didn't make all the medium buildings because I was reserving the space for the big ones, and that way I was greatly delayed in production. I didn't make a sawmill until I was almost out of planks, and for most of the game i had excess logs but lack of planks. I also failed at making roads, which are generally one of my strong points. I didn't realize the necessity of building detours around the most crowded points until late in the game.

Congratulations to sirver, it's been a long time since someone put me in serious danger.

Also, I'm glad those that did use my map so far liked it.

EDIT: sorry for using the wrong gender pronoun. I confused kristin and sirver's genders because in my head sirver is a more feminine name

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on short notice, auktionadmin and I will play tonight, starting in 30-60 minutes from now approximately!

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After Lokimaros comment I double checked the replay of Kristin vs Gun while uploading it - and it was played on Fjords 1.1, i.e. the new updated map. I double checked by comparing the diff of the downloaded map vs the map that is part of the replay and all checks out.

So Lokimaros did serve up the correct map and all is good!

Replays are now uploaded.

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I play against waylon531 tonight at 1930 UTC+1.

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waylon531 won the match against me. Congrats!

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