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rANDY's ZK Tutorial Videos

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I've just made my first "ZK tutorial" video focusing on making improvements to your strategy and how important mindset is. These are primarily aimed at players who have a good understanding of the game, units and interactions, but there should be some stuff that everyone can benefit from.

In this video I go through two games I had vs the same opponent/map/matchup two weeks apart, detailing the changes I made to improve my strategy from the first to the second game.

New link with rebalanced audio between intro and the rest, I'll leave the original link beneath until HD processing completes.


[Spoiler]

Please give suggestions on any topics you would like to see covered in a video!

The replays used in the video can be found here
[Spoiler]


If you have missed some of my older videos where I analyse some of my replays, they can be found here:
[Spoiler]
+15 / -0

22 months ago
If anyone wants a longer write up about Lanchester's square law, https://zero-k.info/mediawiki/Strategy_Treatise#Lanchester.27s_Square_Law
+1 / -0

22 months ago
A much more succinct and thought out way of what I was fumbling my way through!
+0 / -0

22 months ago
Definitely loud intro, or silent voice :P I also hear the rumblings that particular map has as ambiance, theres a slider in options for it.
It's nice though that a native english speaker makes zk content, the rest of us sound just a little bit shit tbh
+0 / -0

22 months ago
If you want you can send me the audio file to fix the problem. Or I can show you how to fix it yourself. :)
+0 / -0

22 months ago
Just reuploaded a version with quieter intro.
+1 / -0
Just in case you are interested:



+ if you can it would be advisable to use a pop-filter (this kind of fan in front of the mic).

That aside, love that suff and looking forward for more videos.
+2 / -0
22 months ago
Bravo. I think I could definitely benefit from these. It is perhaps questionable whether I've achieved a "good understanding of the game, units, and interactions", so it might be my preference that the commentary be dumbed down just slightly. I confess I am still having difficulty with the audio on the most recent tutorial. It sounds very faint and occasionally seems to cut out altogether. For contrast, I checked out Replay Analysis 2 which is very clear, both as voice audio and as analysis. Also, my preference would be that map stay zoomed out during the cast, to the extent possible, as it makes the overall state of play more apparent - at least to my eyes - and allows for less jumping and shifting around the map, which can be kind of disorienting. Regarding topics - one possibility immediately comes to mind: I have sometimes been in a situation where I control the bulk of the map but I am unable to close out the opponent who withdraws to a heavily defended corner. Or how about terraforming? No clue there... to mention just a couple of possibilities.
+1 / -0
There can be two ways to deal with an enemy who's hunkered down into their final corner: both start with claiming all the resources on the map, as well as making yourself radar for vision. The first way is the rush way, where you mass the army you have and overrun their position. Sometimes you already have enough units on the map and by grouping them all together you can beat the infirior army before you even finish building up the entire map's worth of economy. Other times, you need to use the army you have to contain them in that corner while you build up overwhelming numbers. But it sounds like you're having problems with incredibly fortified enemy positions, where even just attack moving a large army in is not an option.

That leads to the second way: attack from range. Most factories will have an artillery unit that can out range the usual defensive structures(less than 1000 metal), like impaler(rover) or sling(cloaky). The cleanest kill is the one where you don't get hit, so stand an army of assaults and riots out of range of their defenses and clear them out with your artillery. You may want to morph a light radar tower into a sparrow scout plane to scout the lay of the buildings, or go all the way and build an air factory for Owl, the best scout in the game. But say your problem is an enemy lucifer, which I have seen in low ranked 1v1 games. A lucifer will kill just about any lone unit you send in it's range, no matter what. If the enemy has a very strong weapon like this, you need to scout their base with maybe a couple scout planes and see if there's a weakness that's undefended you can strike. And one of the greatest weaknesses is no riots. Lucifer will kill any individual unit, but cannot kill an entire army on it's own. If a Lucifer costs 2000 metal, that's 30 glaives. If you capture the map for the metal resources, you should easily be able to double that, 60 glaives(or equivalent of other raiders) and attack the enemy base from all directions in a reverse fan. If there's no other enemy riots, superior raider dps and numbers will defeat everything.

You also have counter- porc and silos. Use an army of constructors to build some defences in the mid, and build a missile silo(special tab) in range of a couple key enemy structues of lucifer weight, and hit them with tacnukes before rolling an army in.

Back to an air factory, you can build a giant bomber fleet and start picking off enemy targets. Look into different forms of the ForceFire command for bomber control. Use the Owl to spot good targets.
+1 / -0

22 months ago
Oooh nice to see you start content creation Randy! :) I just wonder why you thought it's a good idea to blur the screen for so long when you were doing a lengthy introduction. It's repelling as there's nothing to look at. Also a thing to consider is a short notice with screen of topics you want to cover at the start.
+2 / -0

22 months ago
Yeah I still need to work on the presentation and structure side of things. I needed something to be on screen while I did the introductory speech and decided to just have a blurring of the first replay I was going to review, probably some text like I did in the middle part of the video would have been better!
+0 / -0