Is replaying your (lost) games essential for improvement?

There's an argument that it's more beneficial to replay moments of triumph to see what you did right.

I expect the most effective strategy involves a bit of both.

One of the best tips for improvement I have is to use the strategy an enemy used to win against you.
This way you either win your next games or see where the flaws are and can abuse them the next time you fight against it.

I would say no unless you actually dont understand how you lost. I've never thought that was helpful.

Although super common nub mistake in ZK is to tunnel vision on some pointless crap like microing a kodachi at the start of the game at the expense of everything else. It would probably be eye opening for ppl to realize how bad their apm is when every single constructor goes idle.

quote: i have been tought by my go-teacher that until you reach a certain amount of skill, you shouldn`t even watch low-skill-games. if you watch exclusively top-skill-games, you will get a subconcious idea about how zk should look

I agree with that as a general rule

I'd say the question is: is watching a replay of a lost game more valuable than just playing another game?

If you're not a competitive player, I would say you never need to watch replays. That won't necessarily result in you sucking forever. However, watching your replays sometimes would certainly be eye-opening.

If you're a competitive player, I'd say watch your replays sometimes, specially of 1v1s. I'm not sure if watching every single replay, or every single lost replay, would be recommendable, because that's time you could be playing.

After thinking about it for some time:
It depends on what you want to improve actually.

Strategy or execution?

Execution consists of unit micro and the "mechancal input" skills, e.g. keyboard- and mouse-usage. If you have problems with that and want to fix it, replays are definitely not useful. Instead play as much as you can, replays are a complete waste of time. (I found bots really good to practise that aspect specifically. For many players bots are boring, but they don`t realise that bots are relly really good practise tools. Try 3 legacy-ai on AlienDesert. That requires minimal strategical thinking, but is really challenging control-wise, meaning speed and precision.

Strategy:

If you want to learn that, you need to learn as much as you can about the game itself and about yourself as player.
Obviously the more you know about the game the better your decisions will be. I think if you want to focus on that, watching and analyzing are more effective than playing. You can watch the same replay over and over again, like 20 times or so and i will bet you still notice something in take 20 that you didn`t realise in take 19. (If it was long enough of course...)
The benefit of watching your lost games: You can reflect on your own playing, something you cannot do when you only play. Then, you are busy. You have no time to think about that stuff and you are under stress.
You simply don`t get a sense of your playing while you play.
On the other hand, you can also watch your wins and try to analyse why your oponent lost. Analyzing is the main thing, and that includes your own playing.