Surprise Attack in Progress

[Surprise Attack!]

Having recently embarked on my quest to "get gud", I will be posting my replays here with some thoughts of my own on my play.

In this particular game, I feel that I made a the following mistakes, but after watching it twice, I feel that I'm suffering from the "self-proofreading" issue where it is often difficult for one to spot issues in their own writing. As a result, I turn to the community to help me "get gudder".

Please feel free to take a look or to leave a comment if so inclined!

Thanks in advance, and again, a big thanks to Cheah18, who volunteered some of this time to this great game. We actually played another just before this one but it was a lot more lopsided, where my mistakes were a lot more apparent/obvious.

Mistakes:
1) Losing noise marines to failed attempt at genbash
2) Bleeding too many tics meant I had no req for better units later on
3) BL purchase instead of teching to T3 for Lightning Claw termies.

Last but certainly not the least: I forgot about Tome of Subjugation.



Yes, I do suck


Without further ado:
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http://www.gamereplays.org/dawnofwar2/r ... y_overview

The villainous Alpha Legion Chaos Sorcerer's plans to contaminate a major fuel refinery's stocks with RC Cola is foiled by the more brand conscious Grey Knights intent on outdoing the forces of Chaos with more expensive Pepsi products.

[Ven]

well you made some very odd choices in terms of your build.

bloodletters vs GK is not idea... i mean they ARE deamon hunters afterall. the SS justicar has an ability that snares an infantry squad and saps their energy. basically the perfect BL counter.

plague marines were a VERY weird choice. cheah decided instead of going for an early vehicle he would kit out his squads. you should of exploited this by getting a BC/Kdread as your first T2 purchase.

rod of warpfire was also a very weird choise, but it payed off with your quick thinking pushing that VA in to the dread. i still think, at the time sword of flame would of been better as you had AC on both your tics.

i think why you lost came down to a few things.

#1: Weird squad and upgrade choices.
#2: not spreading out to cap. Cheah had map control which is why he outteched you. you just seemed to be focused on fighting in the mid once you hit T2. this is likely one of the biggest reasons why you lost


at the end of the day though, i think its just a lack of experience. and especially a lack of experience with each race (or just GK) that lost you the game. you did say yourself you didnt know what mindblades was.

have a look at the most recent BT tournament on codex's twitch, might help you see what i did vs GK.
http://www.twitch.tv/codex_hel/b/601351973
go to 1:19:00 in the stream and watch the two games i did vs atlas. the first game especially; atlas went a very similar BO to what cheah did in your game.
also, i think this thread belongs in strategy. just sayin.

[Surprise Attack!]

Good points, thanks Ven!

Rod of Warpfire actually did a lot of damage to his squads as well, I'm pretty sure it was responsible for bleeding his GK strike squad singlehandedly, since it does full damage on retreat. I have been working on the map control bit where my map control is pretty alright now.

If possible, can anyone take a look at this replay for me? A huge thanks to Eko for playing with me!

Link to Replays: http://www.gamereplays.org/dawnofwar2/r ... &id=300150

I had a strong start, but was unable to really capitalize on it. There are some drops in micro where I just stop moving units, but I've had a really long day(chopped down a tree) and those drops aren't normal for me. I just kinda zoned out thinking about what to get next.

This has been a huge issue for me as far as playing Chaos goes, where I've kinda almost gotten to the point of wanting to abandon maining the CS for something else. I just get to points in the game where I'm floating massive amounts of req and power because I've done well early to early-mid, but then I don't know what to do.

This is not the same as not knowing what to buy to counter whatever is coming next, I just... don't know what to get independently.

Thanks in advance.

[Nurland]

I think I might be able to do it later tonight.

[Atlas]

So I checked out the replay and honestly I kind of want to give it an incomplete on strategy because the play was pretty raw in this game from both sides. You can see some design in there but losing squads to pure mechanics issues invalidates strategies a lot of the time even if they are good.

Starting with (start)tic-csm-tic-havoc was just fine for example, but you lost two tics squads and your sorc when they were saveable imo.

The purchases that boggled my mind in terms of overall composition were the second csm squad and then t3. I could see some form of argument being made for blastmaster noise marines in t2, but I also thought that a lashavoc would serve you better there.

I didn't like the csm squad purchase at that time because you were floating a couple hundred power at the time and getting them really unbalanced your economy. Sure, double MoT CSM is great vs Tacs but you should have considered something else imo.

T3 was a bad choice because a) you bought it right when you lost a major engagement and b) you had no economy to get anything when you got there.

The plague marines were a good call because you needed something to control that dread since you went autocannon on your havoc.

For next game(assuming the mechanics were an issue because of tiredness) I'd try a list that goes something to the effect of:

Game Start
- Build CSM
- Build Tic
--If:
---Opponent going heavy ranged -> Raptors
---Opponent going heavy melee -> AC on (1/2) tics + Sword of Flame
---No knowledge of Opponent -> Havocs
----If:
-----Opponent lost major engagement -> Push towards generators, consider Noise Marines
-----Opponent adds more than 4 total squads excluding hero -> See earlier if, respond appropriate
------If:
-------Tic Squad Loss -> if losing map control rebuy, if not fast tech to t2
-------CSM Squad Loss - > don't replace
-------Power costing Squad Loss -> if required for engagements rebuy, if not fast tech to t2
-------Hero Loss -> replace
--------If:
---------@125 power with no major losses -> t2
--------->125 power with no major losses -> t2, possible upgrades before t2 finishes
---------@125 or >125 power with major losses, see earlier if, respond appropriate



This is really hard to try and structure a build order based on a bunch of conditions, but ^ is a really raw, really basic method of getting through t1. Hope it helps.

[Roey]

How do you upload replays like this? It would be useful if we compared notes Suprise (attack).