In most games, the team that acts decisively first, and forces the other team to react, tends to win. Note how I phrased that: only by forcing the other team to react do you tend to victory. Simply put, if a 1v1 assault, or a 2v1 -- or even 3v1 -- assault is dealt with with minimal losses by a single player, then you haven't forced the other team to react, and, you in fact may now be in the defensive. However, if the team does not react, and you succeed in severely damaging whoever you are assaulting, that too will tend to enable victory.

This is, of course, merely a roundabout way of talking about seizing the game's tempo. ("In chess, this is called seizing the 'tempo'. If you can force your opponent to react to you rather than act autonomously, you've won half the battle.If you continue to control the tempo, your opponent is more likely to panic and make mistakes.")

Why do I bring this up? It's an effective way to view the three games we played with Fudge and Mepheus; it's also an effective way to view many team games in general. The Idlers (Soy, Pure, me) once played FS (Rogue, Oka, and Ras) on Dark Continent. I did the standard 2 gate opening, switching early to a forge and cannons as my scouting showed I was surrounded by all 3 of our opponents, with my partners across the map. Not surprisingly, I was 3v1'd shortly thereafter. I lost all my zealots, 4 or 5 probes, and a cannon. Importantly I held, and was able, as the attack was progressing, to tell my allies to counter rather than come to my assistance. They countered Oka, 2on1. He had built to rush, and his base fell. In this case, the decisive act was the countering of Oka, given my ability to survive. Had their 3on1 succeeded, it would have been the decisive act, and they, rather than we, would have seized the games tempo.

I say this to illustrate a perhaps obvious point: simply rushing your opponents 2, or 3 on 1, does not necessarily 'force them to react', nor does it guarantee seizing the game's tempo.

In our first game with Fudge and Mepheus, as described on Sunday; they spawned together, close to SoylentRed, with me across the map, on hunters. Both teams selected Terran/Toss; they rushed first. True, they had luck, but they kept the pressure up, and took advantage of Soylent's dislike of detection. They also played more efficiently than either of us, especially me. We reacted constantly to them and never succeeded in causing them to react. Even my reaver drop on one of them was something he'd prepared for with appropriately placed bunkers and towers.

The second game was different -- our map, bone canyon. I went pylon/forge, fast cannons in front of expansion, fast expansion, fast teching to corsairs, reavers, and carriers. Soylent, by contrast, built for a fast drop; he dropped the Protoss player's main with a 3 ship load of tanks, scvs and marines, just before I dropped his expansion with a reaver. Unfortunately, and very annoyingly, at that moment the Terran player dropped. Nonetheless, we would have won; the terran was in the process of countering me with 2 tanks and a number of marines. By the time he could have killed the cannons on the bluffs delaying his entree to my choke, my carriers would have arrived and dweb would be ready. Either way, fodder for Executor Angelife. Note there, that I did what they did to us in the first game; I expected a tank counter on me, and prepared for it, with tools to first delay it and then rapidly destroy it. We then agreed to play a second attempt on Bone Canyon, and see what the results were. All expressed a willingness to go to a third and deciding game.

Annoyingly, in the third game, they went with a direct counter to our build, and SoylentRed again got no detection. This left me delaying a drop for 2 minutes on the protoss, in order to micro around an observer at Soylent's for him. It also resulted in my 2 reaver drop on toss being useless (he had plenty of high templar by then; I had an observer stationed over the Toss main so saw what was happening :( ). The combined micro of my reavers and the observer at Soys left me with 1800 minerals built up (embarassingly). When the cloaked wraith fleet arrived as my first two corsairs were cooking in, I conceded, somewhat annoyed, mostly at myself. There the lesson was key: even though all that was required of me was to dispatch an observer to Soylent's and then maneuver it all about his base to deal with wraiths and dt, that took a great deal of attention. There, they had the tempo and kept it. Had I been able to click faster... who knows? If the wraiths had been met with 6 corsairs, 2 carriers, and several additional photons, they would have had somewhat less chance.... :/

Kudos nevertheless, to Meph and Fudge... they outplayed us in 2/3 games, and apart from being lame guys that disconnect as soon as they start losing (joke joke joke!), they're OK. I look forward to future games, and to their entry (hopefully) in the upcoming Idle League (after the NWTR tourney is further advanced).

So, SoylentRed and I 'lucked out' and drew Fudge and Mepheus, who are a pair of very nice guys, but pretty darned good. We've been struggling, both groups with the best of will, for 2 weeks or so to set up game times. At long last we had our first game, on their map, hunters, and they blew us away (yeah yeah, it's a technical violation of rules -- ladder maps only -- they wanted it, I wasn't going to cry lawyer... we can always rematch on Temple and Soy and I can leave after two minutes, for the 'official game' :) . Soy wasn't feeling well, and I ... well I just played plain badly. It wasn't a very good game IMHO, in that it was a straightforward rush 2v1 on Soy, (they were next to him) with me struggling to cross the map in time to help out (usually failing). Bad map choice, for a 2v2 I think, but I can't complain; they played better than we did. Annoying thing was that Soy and I won about 10 games in a row when we did try playing Hunters -- against good people, too. Oh well. I did manage to badly bungle a game against Yavoon and someone... but that's another story.
We're rematching this afternoon on our map -- Bone Canyon. I suspect they will kill us again, but Bone does lend it self to strange things... you never know. A pleasure to meet these 2 gents, and I look forward to playing with and against them in the future, come what may. (But why o why could we not have drawn PsiSoldier and Yavoon :)? At least Inferno and I beat them :)

Homeworld, which some say is the next big RTS to appear, has at long last gone gold. Made by Relic Entertainment and distributed by Sierra, a demo (thanks to FS-Rasz for pointing this out) is available here. Be warned; it's 66 MB (or so) so will take a little while to download over your V.90 modems! My initial impressions? Very good, elegant interface, remarkably stable. Beautiful graphics -- the best I've ever seen on a conventional software/accelerated card, much less a true 3D card. Set to ship on the 28th of September, this will definitely be something that takes me away from StarCraft at least initially. Whether or not the simpler resource model coupled with minimal terrain restrictions (as compared to SC) will limit the game's long term appeal, I'm not yet sure. However, the magificent graphics, great soundtrack, and unlimited true 3D movement make this a very potent contender.
Update: The Multiplayer does seem a bit TAKish -- in that you generate huge numbers of ships quite quickly and giant swarms of monster ships seem to win the day. There appears no room for the clever 'psi-storm' equivalent -- in  SC, a single unit can have a potentially devastating effect. Strategy does exist though, in that most 'killer ships' seem to have a much cheaper effective counter, unfortunately often later in the research tree! Anyway, I may be on late tonight for some SC once I get back from a party.

A quick and dirty summary, this tells the tale of the epic Idlers/SC Demons game from my perspective as a player. Inferno is purportedly working on a longer battle report :) Check out the summary here.

.Inferno, of course never lags...
And Chaos never loses... except when he's playing with Froggy and Anarchy against Soy, me and a random public guy. I know I've got a screenshot of that somewhere :)

On the other hand Soy and I had a great loss that taught us a fair bit -- we played a 3v3 against a NWTR team with some unknown guy (maybe good, maybe not; didn't seem it). Was an island game, and we did not master the air; we let them. They made no efforts to defend themselves, just went purely offensive. Clever. Moral of that story? Don't go up against an established team with unknowns; always cook some corsairs! Rest of the games I won, but that 3v3 island game was the most instructive of them all.

FS-Ranger and FS-Chaos unchain the Lightning in an exciting new battle report. Who cancels two buildings? Which one of these master players has trouble placing a gateway? Which one places multiple photons out of range of the mineral line? Who wins in the end? Thanks to both of these strong players who let me observe.

One of you jokingly told me I needed some 'girly' music to go with the swan backgrounds for the tables. I've added some :). For those of you who find Pachebel insufficiently StarCraftish, check out the new background music on my Battle Reports page.

We're running at 1100+ hits for the month of August. In addition, our peak hit rate ran at an independent hit every 5 minutes during the part of the afternoon of August 23rd. All this with no search engine references yet either (though search alta vista for Idlecraft and you will find us).