After-game chat suggested that the failure of the Cyclops rush was my fault, for not applying enough pressure to Atosty to keep the Fencers from rotating. This has merit; throwing away my small gang of Glaives for zero value killed was what let the rotation happen.

On review, the team's main problem was a critical lack of energy. I was building a majority of the team's energy generation while also needing to apply that pressure. Jobubb built a fair amount of wind, but the other five players' energy investment totaled to six Wind Generators. So by the time the Cyclops went down we already had three players in hard e-stalls, and the Iris only made that worse.

In light of that my main mistake was not putting high prio on the Solar Collectors I was building.

Punting away the Glaives at 1:30 was an error but I don't think that anything you do stops the Fencer/Placeholder from rotating most of their force if they want to. West team has two commanders, several lotuses, and very few vulnerable mex to defend on that front. If they keep a Placeholder south then there is no chance you are meaningfully threatening that lane on your own with anything short of a sniper. The Stinger is maybe a mistake but the Fencer rotation began before you even started it.

As far as the endgame value-killed stats go, your team should have gotten more done on south lane but its hard to blame you for that when your teammate's army is just sitting there doing nothing while you at least try to probe.

Something like Cyclops or Grizzly rush is... i dont want to say only viable... but it is much better if the other team makes mistakes. In this case the other team didn't make many.

I don't think I had any option to apply pressure after punting those Glaives, other than the eventual Slings that end up not doing much or a plate. A lot of my own options like Scythes are foreclosed either because they wouldn't do anything in the same zip code as Placeholder-Fencer or the terra'd Caretaker, or because they had energy upkeep while the rest of my team was relying on me to transfer 15+ e/s to not fall over dead.

Even the Stinger, although it wasn't well placed, I thought was necessary to have by the time the armies returned or else they'd push straight through me and my team would lose very quickly.

If I'd kept the Glaives, on the other hand, I would've been able to credibly threaten either the low ground mex-triple or a Commander, and I'd also be able to threaten a Placeholder-Fencer push from the flank so that the Stinger could be delayed.