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Planning

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INrankGangstaGoo
29 hours ago
So since my regular schedule of being beaten black and blue via purple and blue ranks has started again I was wondering about playstyles. I always saw that whenever the players I'm up agaisnt commit to an attack they almost always win that engagement. It's insane how easily I see my frontline being punctured with precision. Which lead me to realise that I don't really plan before going on an attack. See a decent mass of units? Off they go into the grinder, donating metal to the opponent usually. But then I recently did start to think before engaging, retreating units if the engagement looks too tough and my troops now live FAR longer than they used to. Yet I still stumble when commiting to different attacking scenarios with different factories.

The rambling above is simply me asking this question, do you people plan out attacks by remembering the relative damage your selected army can do or is it just instinct honed by thousands of matches?
+0 / -0

CArankGalamesh
28 hours ago
There are specific unit compositions that work really well in lob pot simply because nobody knows or practiced cheap, effective counters.

Most players plop a factory, and that's all they do all game. How many times have you seen, say, cloakie plop to face jumpie firewalkers and they never switch out of cloakie or plate shieldbots or morph aegis?

How many players do you see with their factory either monospamming one unit, or one of everything? Neither work against a competent player.


Shield ball, especially assisted with lobster, is terrifyingly effective in lop pot but nobody builds faraday or tries to get snitches/imps.

Players plop tanks, monospam minotaurs, face placeholder or dominatrix and they keep making minos all game anyways.


But that's not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is information. You can't make good decisions if you don't know what to get, and you can't know what to get if you don't know what the enemy has. Nobody scouts. We're lucky if the plane player of the team ever bothers to make owls. And if the enemy gets tons of AA (especially when we enter the artemis phase), nobody makes gremlins on hold fire or widows just to get vision on the enemy front line. Nobody morphs radars into sparrows either. Almost every game I play, I have to plop planes myself, plate planes or use engicom copy to get owls because my team isn't getting any.

You want to see one consistent thing that happens almost every game on the losing side? They see nothing. Fire up a replay, take the vision of the team you know will lose, set your cam mode to their vision only and watch what they see. Then do it from the winning team's perspective. The winning team sees most if not all the front line of the enemy most of the game, and the losing team sees nothing until a disfavorable engagement starts.
+3 / -0

AUrankSnuggleBass
21 hours ago
ZK is less set in stone than other RTS. It's difficult to assume the specifics. Where other games have build-orders down to the second, set factions and precise building placement, ZK is loose and requires constantly updating your approach to available information. Where other RTS converges on compositions of 2-4 units, ZK begins with mostly monospam but as economies scale the compositions go truly nuts (watch any USrankfahx vs. USrankStuart98 endgame for examples). Planning is therefore very different to other RTS.

I would describe my approach as:

Knowing the loose parameters that predict which army wins. These are fairly simple for 90% of cases, involving unit match-up, reclaim position, and relative army size. Most of the complexity comes down to unit match-up, but there are simple rules that will ease the cognitive burden of this substantially (e.g. the skirm with more range wins). The only time an exchange should be decisively won is if someone has a diving force so strong they can win against a retreating or entrenched force. The windows for decisive victories are therefore not that common outside of opponent's mistakes. The default move is not to take commital fights unless you see these windows, which is not something easily planned around.

If you are not going to win the fight, don't take it. If you're going to lose the fight you need to figure out how to get the time to switch to something that wins the fight. If it's in your fac and within your budget, you're fine. If it's in another fac, you'll likely need to concede some territory to get there because now not only does their army beat yours, but yours is now 800m smaller. What you switch to should be a strong counter to make up for this. So most planning happens as a way of not losing a fight, not of winning it.

If you are winning the fight, you either want to leverage that advantage while they switch (e.g. take fights or territory), or if you're confident in their next move, adjust your composition to maintain your advantage post-switch.

So for me at least the plans come from either switching out of a losing match up, or they're built-in to the match up and so feel more like a flowchart? It's not that there isn't planning per se, but my brain is too smol to do sophisticated planning while also adapting to the context of the game.

+2 / -0
INrankTheWarning
11 hours ago
I am going to assume you are talking about 1v1.

You have to develop the skill of intuitively assessing whether an engagement is worth it. Typically, An engagement is "worth it" if you lose less value than your opponent in a fight. It's also worth it if you hindered the enemy's expansion or killed a mex or their energy.

This skill can only come with experience. Once you play enough games, you will realize that if you have four glaives (for example), you can kill a pyro by surrounding it; Therefore, you should generally avoid fights with a pyro unless you have four glaives.

You also shouldn't be losing units for no reason like you weren't paying attention in one place so all your raiders ran into a reaver. Practise helps with this.

Repair is very important with heavier raiders like pyro or kodachi. Obviously, if you repair units, you have more of them, and in the end, it mostly comes down to who has more army.

Make sure to expand simultaneously while attacking. Radar and placing defenses at the right locations will help you a lot.
+2 / -0
PLrankOTrWasYoda
5 hours ago
800 Metal is cheap, thats barely half a jugglenaut
+0 / -0


AUrankAdminGoogleFrog
4 hours ago
I would distill a lot of this down into the idea that you army should grow over time. Eg
quote:
You also shouldn't be losing units for no reason

quote:
If you are not going to win the fight, don't take it.

quote:
How many times have you seen, say, cloakie plop to face jumpie firewalkers and they never switch out of cloakie or plate shieldbots or morph aegis?

The question in the OP seems to be how do we predict whether a given action is going to result in a larger or smaller army?

It might be useful to think in terms of default unit selection. If you don't know what to build, then build something with a lot of health or a lot of range. Raiders, riots, and skirmishers all have a tendency to die on the front lines. These are great units because they can get a lot done, but if you don't have a use in mind they can end up getting attritioned away. Try just thinking about making units that will survive.

If you find yourself building flimsy units regardless then at least put them under a cloaker. Or maybe put up a terraform wall. This is pretty standard against Lance and has many more uses. Caretakers can hide behind walls to repair your tanky units and enable them to fight for longer.
+2 / -0