Topic: Widelands tournament 2016; official announcements

wow, that was a good game. It's exactly the kind of game I envisioned when I made the fjords map. A couple of comments here on managing troops in attack and defence:

we have seen many times before a handful of strong soldiers resisting against hordes of weaker ones. Yet waylon succumbed to tando's horde of rookies. Why? Because he missed the evade 2 promotion. Is that promotion so important? Yes, because a soldier with it will take less damage. It's much more effective than defence, because after winning the fight it will heal faster. And statistically, the amount of damage a soldier without attack promotion does to a soldier with evadde 2 is roughly equivalent to the healing of a large military building. So two soldiers with evade inside a fortress can hold almost indefinitely: by the time one will need to go inside to heal, the other will be at full strenght. The only effective way to breack through that is by investing in the attack promotion. But waylon didn't have troops with evade 2, so he had to retreat in front of the mooks.

Another thing to note here is that he abandoned his buildings too late. often, when attacked, his soldiers would win the duel against the first enemy, but remain severely wounded. At that moment, dismantling the military building would have ensured all those soldiers would survive, resulting in a half dozen enemies killed with no losses. Instead, waylon insisted in keeping the building untill all his soldiers were dead. Needless waste. Still better than tando, who also let his buildings be conquered, allowing waylon to attack much faster than he would have otherwise.

And second, I want to point out a very common mistake. In front of the advancing enemy, both players (indeed, most players) tried to make military buildings in front of the enemy. Seems intuitive, you want to bring soldiers to stop the invasion. But it's done in the wrong way. If you just build stuff in front of the enemy, chances are it will get burned down before it's finished. Even if it is finished, the enemy can just attack it. If he's advancing, he's stronger, and a few hastily-gathered soldiers won't stop him. they'll just be wasted. and in fact we saw both players immediately abandoning the buildings they just finished. What you need to do instead is to create a line of defence. you can't stop the enemy right there, you need time to organize. so pick a place that the opponent will need some time to reach. there is where you musst make your stand. Building foresters to slow down the enemy also helps. with the extra time, you can make many military buildings and put strong soldiers in them. then the enemy makes his advance tower, and now you attack, and bam! suddenly it's you who have more and better troops, and it will be your opponent who will have to abandon his building and retreat. In order to advance, now he will have to make close buildings for support, and wait the best troops to go into them, and that will take a lot of time. Ultimately, you can't hold forever against a stronger army, but you can gain a lot of time for your economy to maybe catch up. A very masterful example of this is einstein defence against me in the 2015 tournament. unfortunately the replay would only work on trunk builds who are no longer available for download. the best examples in this tournament are Sirver's defence against worldsavior in round 3, or my defence against sirver in round 4. Ideally, it would be best to have already a second line of defence, not garrisoned but ready to be manned if the front is breached. Unfortunately, fjords has so little buildable land that it's hard to spare any of it for a contingency.

Last small thing: so far, I am the only one who occupied all 12 small building slots east of the headquarter? why? they aren't hard to get, and 12 spaces matter a lot in a map so small. Why nobody else made an effort to get all of them?

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Last small thing: so far, I am the only one who occupied all 12 small building slots east of the headquarter? why? they aren't hard to get, and 12 spaces matter a lot in a map so small. Why nobody else made an effort to get all of them?

I occupied all of those that I could find and built woodcutters/foresters on them and still managed to have a massive wood shortage... maybe the smokery used up too much.

Busy indexing nil values

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Thanks - i will study and improve ervery point ;-) FYI: My Plan was to get all the gold Resourcess before waylon get them under controll. From my Memory: My Scout did not work well and did not reach the enemy militäry buildings ..... I lost time at this point. He could get alot of Gold and could develop his solierds.I change my Infrastructure at this point... too late.

tando

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waylon531 wrote:

Thank you for the analyses of the game! I really appreciate it, I'd been meaning to ask a better player to review one of my games

I hadn't mentioned yet, that providing water only after some building shows it needs it is rather late in the day, you should have had at the very least that first well up and running smoothly at that point. Instead, it was still at 0% as you build a second one.

On the plus side, like I said (?), your building your training sites and moving trained soldiers up to the front won you the day: it caused tando to lose more soldiers even than you, so his relentless approach along your south coast failed to reach your headquarters, and you had made sure (?) all crucial buildings you lost had duplicates along the north.

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I regret to announce that epicspartan and trimard are given a penalty for being late with their turn. By the rules, I should have handed out penalties yesterday as soon as i got home from the office. I bent the rules a bit because nobody here has been trying to take advantage, but I have to draw the line somewhere.

I remind everyone that in case of real life problems, it is possible to say in advance that you will play late and avoid a penalty. notabilis did so, and he will play tomorrow witouth any consequence

By the way, since I'm announcing stuff, the last turn will last two weeks longer to take into account people going in vacation. I will go in vacation too, and probably won't play before 8 january. My opponent will be the highest ranked of those against whom I haven't played yet, which at this point is mathematically worldsavior. If I don't lose, I win the tournament (in chess tournaments, the leading player at this point generally offers a draw...). If I lose, me, worldsavior and whoever else will be at 4 points will play phase 2. I am almost tempted to give forfait just to play on archipelago sea

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