Playing The Long Game: How Risky Short Term Behavior is Sometimes the Best Way to Win

People play Empires in a very short-sighted manner and that causes them to lose more often than they should.

I've been delaying an essay on this topic, but I had an amazing example drop in my lap last night.


Case Study 1

I was playing a shitty low-pop match on Cyclo and eventually found myself in a 1v1 with JGF. He had heavies and I had turrets. He should've won.

The moment I saw heavies, I knew I had one option to win the game. I left the CV in main and got in a UGL APC to go fuck shit up. JGF was waiting at BE main with a heavy and he destroyed about a dozen APCs with that heavy, but it didn't matter.

• I was keeping him and his heavy in his base.
  
• All building damage from our skirmishes were damage to BE buildings.

By the time more people joined, the damage was done. BE could barely keep buildings up and NF's income let it continue pumping 370-res APCs indefinitely.

Why the fuck did this work?

JGF forgot about the Empires win condition and got sucked in by attractive short-term tactics. He could've driven that dual HE heavy to NF main and fucked me and my mediums. But my petty UGL attacks made him inadvertently turtle in his main because keeping buildings up felt more important than killing the NF CV.



Case Study 2

I have over a thousand hours in Empires, but I have another thousand in an old source mod called Zombie Panic Source. ZPS is an asymetrical zombie FPS where a large team of humans fights a small (but growing) zombie team in order to:

1. survive until zombies run out of tickets
   
2. finish objectives like grabbing certain items and taking them places

Humans can only win via one of these methods depending on whether the map is a survival map or objective map.

The biggest problem in ZPS is camping on objective maps. Camping is perfectly fine (and even encouraged) on survival maps, but it's downright bannable on objective maps.

ZPS players camp on objective maps for the same shortsighted reason that JGF defended his main instead of destroying mine.

Doing objectives involves moving out in the open and increasing your chances of dying. If you camp, you'll likely be the last human alive, but you're not going to finish the objectives & win if you're holed up in some random room. If you do objectives, there's a good chance that you'll die and have to play zombie for a large portion of the round. However, you have a non-zero chance of finishing the objectives and winning.

Just like JGF thought that keeping buildings alive is "winning", ZPS players think that staying alive is "winning".

It's understandable how this confusions starts. In order to win Empires, you usually have to have a functioning base with plenty of buildings. In order to win ZPS, you almost always have to be alive.



You're not fine.

Case Study 3

So it sounds like you'll always win if you constantly think about the long-term win condition, right? Hell no.

A few weeks ago, I commed a large (>20 players) game on bootybay. It wasn't going well.

BE hit heavies and swiftly pushed us out of middle. They took out the first ref on our side, but were slowed by my turret farm.

I know BE heavies are better than NF heavies. No one on NF (including myself) can coordinate a kill maneuver on the BE CV. We're running out of money.

We have enough heavies now, but we're losing them too fast. We are not going to win against BE heavies with a res deficit.

So I drive up to the ref, drop it and use the CV to shield the ref until I can build it. Of course, Kyro & Friends shove their BE barrels up my feeble ass (using a wonderful sticky stun to open my ass wide enough).

We lost that match right then and there. If my ass wasn't bruised enough, NF took their turn at my GI tract.

If I would've turtled, then the turret farm would've bought NF another 5-10 minutes. Just like how a ZPS player will live for a few extra minutes if they camp on an objective map. If I go for that ref, we might still lose even if I get the ref up. If the ZPS player leaves his camping spot, he will probably still die and the zombies will win. But the ZPS player and I will both definitely lose if we don't try.



Case Study 4

If I'm the king of losing Empires, FN is pretty much the king of winning Empires. He may not be the funnest to play with, but he wins.

I remember one game with this winner in the CV. It was a 3v3 on forest. I was in a tank driving down to SE to do something and a BE jeep zips past me to NF main. I instinctively turn around to pursue the jeep and FN immediately tells me to ignore it and makes some snide comment about ADD.

I'm used to dropping everything and destroying incoming jeeps just like JGF destroyed my UGL APCs. JGF and I might forget the Empires win condition, but FN never forgets. I think that's one of the reasons why he's one of the most winningest coms in Empires.



The good news? FN is a freak and it's ok to be human from time to time. ove:



Why Do I Care?

You're human and you forget how to win Empires sometimes. Being aware of this tendency will cause you to win more.



P.S. I may have kinda singled out JGF in a kinda semi-rude way. That wasn't intentional.

 

Killspawn.
Killspawn killspawn killspawn.

 

Sorry, couldn't read your post, I was admitted to the hospital because the GIFs gave me cancer.

 

I like to build buildings. Especially refineries. I also like reviving. I love reviving.

It's a good thing.

Don't like commanding though; I'm terrible at it and will always be terrible at it.

 

Case study,

1v1

Yeah no.

 

I think it's fascinating when a certain behavior seems obvious and yet people simply don't do it.

 

/facepalm

Yes, the word "sometimes" usuallly causes tautologies if you're being strict about logic.

 

This shit happened again last night.

I was 2v2ing on money_cl with Evil Ed against JGF & Cap.

I absolutely hate comming money, so I designed my research for maximum troll:

Turrets
3phase
compo
arty
heavies
rails
nukes
BioML
-other stuff from whoever hopped into the CV-

The absurd thing was that it worked.

When arty finished, Ed & I rushed 3phase compo dual small arty tanks straight into BE main and we raped. BE had Bio mediums at the time, but we stayed alive for an astonishingly long time.

BE lost most of their turrets and couldn't keep walls up. Even when they had heavies, our arty tanks were still raping their VF. It was absurd.

For the longest time, I thought BE was trolling us (trollception?).

At one point, BE decided that it was a good idea to heavy rush. However, the turrets scared them away from finishing off the NF CV calmly sitting by its lonesome. Why they didn't keep it up, I'll never know...

Eventually, BE's main got completely artied from inside its walls and it was gg.

I think BE got scared because their base was getting fucked. So instead of finishing off the red NF CV, they turtled.

Also, lrn 2 gren.

 

please stop using 1v1 and 2v2 scenarios as any basis for any strategy in empires

 

Rifleman with sticky grenades and ammo upgrade. At the absolute most, it'll take exactly four grenades to cut through three plates of reactive and the hull if the driver has armor upgrade and is using reactive armor. But because most people tend to leave a single plate on the back, two grenades will take out most artillery tanks. It'd take three grenades to take out two plates of compo and the hull, but it'd also only take three grenades to take out three plates of compo and the hull.

 

I refuse to acknowledge this fact

 

I need to redo the outline but it's going to take years

 

Wow, stickies are way shittier than I remember.

 

reactive has a resistance to sticky bombs.

 

You get to give that kind of advice when you play Empires.