Queue and Early Metal Floating
The queue at the beginning is intentional. If you're not attacking, then you need to eco the hardest you can without taking damage. As you saw, [ISP]Lauri was not attacking with any conviction, and so making minimal defenses and powering eco payed off. It's sort of a soft RPS, but in some matchups it's very important. If he had attacked with more gusto, I would have two cons, a factory, and a metal float to work with to deflect it. This might be insufficient, but I eventually got the defender and bandit pair too. Because of the shields on convicts, you can invest a lot less in defense if you're confident in your micro. A lotus or bandit pair under a convict shield won't be taken out without 6+ glaives.

This style also allows you to react to your opponents moves once you're ready to start real army production. In this case, I'd become fairly certain that Lauri had nothing but glaives, and that he'd be making a push for middle shortly. While admittedly my execution was lacking (I should have been able to pump out my response faster with the infrastructure I had), I was able to get the outlaw out with bandit support, which I knew would give me complete dominance of the field at that time. Disrupting a landgrab early is a very big deal, and often wins games; that I got his com too was unintended. Making a riot unit that early is very uncharacteristic of me, but it was a good move and was the only reason I took the game.

Bandit/Wyvern Finisher
I wasn't really trying to fake him out, but I was trying to avoid the late game scenario where he has sharp-shooters/ticks and I have slow shield blob. Bandits are a very generalist raider, so the things that counter them don't wipe them out quite so severely as the counters to glaive or scorchers for instance. The counters cloaky have to them are basically tick and packs of 2+ warriors (also gunships and stardust). Wyvern deal with all this stuff but ticks, and the only way ticks work against that large a spread is if they've got support, otherwise they don't deal attrition. With a bandit wyvern combo, his viable options were limited, which is not the case for shieldball.

I think Lauri had this if I didn't luck out and nab his com early. If you look at the minimap I wasn't taking all the mexes in my territory (even misclicking and building a defender on one). I should have had another +6metal/second. My com digging to China was no good either.

All of the slop, to which Lauri says nop! if not for pop...