Qt3 Multiplayer Gaming Tournament #1 - Rise of Nations

And here are the replays for Round 3.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/394299971895296031/404425928047984641/R3.zip

That’s going to be even harder!

I knew it was going to pair me with ott, but I honestly thought it was going to put Tom and Sharpe against each other after that. A solid shrug is about all I can give.

What, I’m matched against Tom Chick? Unexpected.

It’s the grudge match of the century, a battle for the very heart and soul of strategy games.

Sweet. I’ve delayed my imminent destruction by the SharpeBot!

-Tom

Well, since this is the final round, you’ve managed to avoid it altogether. :)

This is going to be fun :O.

Wait, the winners of the final round aren’t pitted against each other? I don’t understand sports.

-Tom

This tournament is swiss, so no. That said most swiss tournaments I’ve seem (Magic) cut over to a top 8 or 4 where the players with the best record play off in a single elimination series.

Yeah, the goal is just to get some dynamically balanced matches going, not to establish an actual formal tournament hierarchy with grand prizes and all that. We’d have to go seven rounds of Swiss or expand out into another bracket to get anything along those lines.

So I tried a test game as the Lakota to see if I can try a random faction for my last game and wow, they are terrible for my playstyle.

However, I did figure out a way to do at least semi-random faction selection without exposing myself to the Lakota. The Lakota are an “Offensive Nation” so just pick the options for Random Defensive Nation or Random Economic Nation and you will get a random choice from a list of 7 or 8 possibilities.

The new poll out for the next tournament.

Argh, Otagan has now gone 4-0 which means all the rest of us are competing for 2nd place. Oh well.

Sorry! I wish I could say it was close, but I don’t think I was ever really ahead. I did manage to hold him off for more than 40 minutes, which feels like an accomplishment of sorts.

I drew the Greeks, which was my booming faction of choice back in the day when I would play stupidly huge skirmishes, and proceeded to try to do just that. It went well enough for a while, until I saw two cavalry units dancing around in my borders on the edge of my line of sight. I thought they were Native American based on their appearance, which made me think Ott might’ve drawn the Lakota (which he didn’t, but would’ve made me feel super bad as I’d been joking about that happening to me mere moments before), but was followed by the realization that I had absolutely no military whatsoever halfway through the second age.

That led to a mild panic attack as I threw down a second tower, started a barracks and garrisoned a bunch of my workers to try and force the raiders back, and then poured out a swarm of units to make sure that didn’t happen again.

Expanding out again, I pushed across into a border city and started to lay siege to it, only to have over a dozen cavalry come out of my own borders behind my army and start butchering all my siege units.

While I may have had a momentum advantage, there was plenty of extremely effectively little moves that held me back and punished me for an array of mistakes I was making. I felt it was an extremely good game overall, and if those raiding cavalry had come in from the opposite side that they did, they would’ve found I had one city supplying half my income that was actually dangerously vulnerable to raiding. My early misplay of neglecting my military wasn’t punished as hard as it could’ve been, which just left me with the bigger economy from that point forward.

I say all this knowing that I would’ve personally been reluctant to commit much more to early game raiding if the positions had been reversed. It was a well played game that forced me to do a lot of things that didn’t happen in any other match.

The flanking cavalry was an idea I came up with while watching the replays of Otagan’s earlier games. I noticed he tended to keep his artillery pretty far back from his front line troops and figured they’d be vulnerable if I could hit them directly. It worked very well the first time, but Otagan was better prepared the second. The downside to this was that my army was split and when my front line was finally breached it was partly because Otagan faced two armies one after the other. He also was able to out-produce and eventually out-tech me. His CEO and Versailles combination made his troops noticeably more resilient too.

I wasn’t aware how successful my raiding had been. I mostly just let my pair of cavalry roam around while I focused on my own cities. If I’d been paying more attention I might’ve noticed how vulnerable he was. As it turned out, my later raids both ran headlong into his army. The resulting massacre discouraged any further attacks, which was a mistake on my part.

Thank God that’s over with. I’ve deleted Rise of Nations, now I want to know if I can have it permanently removed from my Steam account.

edit: ah, good - https://www.pcworld.com/article/3012199/software-games/steam-makes-it-easier-to-permanently-remove-games-from-your-account-heres-how.html

The memories will be there. Even rekall can’t help you when you get your ass kicked.

Vnr1wsm

Hopefully the next game will be more up your alley. I have to say, I enjoyed it.

Since have the discord up and running, feel free to drop by and suggest a game. It would be fun to have a multiple comp stop of some sort, if you aren’t interested in a head to head game!