Opening Plan: Last round I opened with a domi and that did not go well for me, so now my plan is to get a few scorchers together and try to make a useful pick. I have a vague idea of controlling the supermex in the center, but that's all.

(Obviously this plan needs work)

1. @ 00:15 - Allocation Mistake: Currently opening blind scorcher. A dart would have been better to let me know who the enemies in the vicinity were.

2. @ 00:54 - Tactics: Scorchers are not kodachis, they are cheap, single target against spread enemies, and have low damage at range. This skirmish is unwise, and I'd be better off using my mobility advantage to pressure his flanks.

3. @ 1:00 - Tactics: Going back in with a 2/3 hp scorcher against 4 glaives is basically a donation. *This violates the original plan of balling up and finding a good pick.*

4. @ 1:13 - Strategy: Hey you know what's better than feeding 4 glaives a scorcher? Feeding them 3 scorchers, obviously.

Overall I am sacrificing map presence for the idea of pressure. Even if this were a good idea, I'm not sure it'd work here. Perhaps a fencer/scorcher combination to zone out the glaives and force them to approach the scorchers? Rippers aren't great against small numbers like this ime.

5. @ 1:37 - Awareness/Strategy: Here I am putting myself in an aggressive forward position with... no real plan exactly. I know the enemy has bombers, I see 3 enemies, and I have nothing with me. The vague idea here is to pressure Sauce but frankly I have no pressure to provide.

6. @ 2:39 - Strategic Flaw: Fixation, Failure To Retreat. I know damned well an ogre isn't going to be intimidated by a lotus, and a second lotus is not going to help that fact. Worse, I am currently in a position to be enveloped by the entire enemy team and lose my factory.

7. @ 3:25 - Strategy: I am very lucky here and get bailed out by Surfmaniac but then undermine that by chasing. The correct thing to do would be to pull back and recover combat capability. This position isn't doing anything- I'm not denying the smex, I'm not holding my smex, I'm not rebuilding my downed fac and I'm not porcing to stall. I'm not even aware that Legend7777 is getting tied down with spiders to his north, and I'm not considering that Falelovsky has failed to advance past a very conservative porc line.

8. @ 3:39 - Allocation/Strategy/Positioning: Continuing off #7, when surf wipes, I build a stinger. Against bandits. Presumably at this point I'm in full bronze brain mode.

9. @ 4:18 - Misanalysis: Okay so obviously this is a bad fight but I think I know what happened here- I have, frankly, played too much tanks. I'm looking at unit count here, not metal value. An Ogre and a pair of Emis would absolutely be capable of holding this position, but that's also 1900 metal. Here, I have 530, against more than half again that just in bandits. The funny thing is that I still almost win that fight.

Skipping forward a bit here because, as predicted, I wipe completely and it takes time to get a con, rebuild, etc.

One interesting note here is that I'm voting to surrender even though, broadly speaking, we're not that far behind. We're down a smex, but the map position is otherwise roughly symmetrical and we're up on attrition.

10. @ 9:16 - Allocation, Strategy: Building a scuttle vs felons seems to almost always be a mistake. Just build firewalkers and bleed them down. Alternatively, I'm getting fixated on sauce when I could instead be bullying dot_dot, who has no way of holding his current position. SauceMeUp could be spread thin if we played our cards right.

11. @ 9:54 - Strategy/Presence: Placeholders are stupidly good against these rover runbys. While we do win this fight, I could potentially make Atbot's life hell by just scattering a few placeholders at key chokepoints and letting them pin enemies for others to finish.

At this point, my strategic thinking is off, I think. I'm still fixating on the army threat, but I should know that shieldbots hate having to try to play multiple lanes. I think the correct strategy here would actually be to leave a placeholder and a firewalker to hold mid, and then push the bottom lane and just make life hell for the tanks and rovers. In any case, I need to work on my map-wide threat.

12. @ 11:30 - Strategy: Priority number one needs to be maintaining the smex and getting it gridded up. Failure to rebuild here is a problem. The skuttle engagement wasn't great but I think it's probably a net win for cutting down the shieldball.

13. @ 12:15 - Opportunity/Presence - Placeholders on hold position in front of the spiders could make Atbot's life hell. Reiterating this because new situation, but the same opportunity.

14+. @ 15:00 - Rotation Success! - See this? This is what happens when a surprise rotation is done properly. MrGristle had been trading fire with the emis for a while and there was an impaler that kept missing the crab, and for the cost of one jugglenaut I killed the crab and completely shattered the position. Beyond that, now he's building Widows (possibly to scout, I think more likely to stun the juggle should I try that shit again). Calling this out because, given my tendency not to do these rotations, calling out how absurdly successful they can be may help adjust that pattern.

15. @ 16:15 - Opportunity/Presence/Awareness: So I've been aware of the gap between SauceMeUp and dot_dot basically the whole game, but even once I know there's a silo there I never capitalize on just how little is holding that position. I have this weird idea of sneaking a couple skuttles through or something, but in practice a better choice would have been Pyros, puppies, or just threatening to wedge that open with my army using the juggle. The fact that I never really capitalized on this is still a mistake.

16. @ 16:18 - Economy: Guess what? I've been holding this position for a while and I still don't have the smex. If people weren't trading so well on attrition our eco would be in a very sore spot indeed, and Sauce not having his smex is no excuse.

There's a bad puppy engagement that follows, an incredibly dump juggle initiate against shields (they do better pulling shields apart, scattering the ball doesn't seem to work well), and I just kind of ignore the silo, but I'll wrap up here since I think I've gotten the meat out of this analysis.

re: re: 10. In this case, I believe the error was not in the act of building the skuttle, but the decision to do so.

I wasn't thinking about the enemy commander building the skuttle, only the shieldball, which I knew contains felons which usually make skuttle jumps much less effective.