Sprint Tournament Nerfs & Strategy

[awojnowski]

Hi guys,

So just summing up we were defeated in the round of 16. However, top 16 make it to the final tournament which is shown live, and top 16 also are in the money/prize pool/job-at-google-pool. I'd say it's worth our while to continue.

Version 1.1.0 was released with information here: http://www.battlecode.org/contestants/releases/

Drones got nerfed a TON and I really feel they're going to be much less viable now. I'm testing against Anbelov Team which shit on us with their micro to see how viable their micro is versus tanks. In addition to the drone wreck, launchers have been nerfed too! I honestly feel like the meta is now tanks (which is good imo).

So for the seeding tournament which is fairly important, I believe we need to change our strategy to focus early marines for defence and then tanks for offence. This looks like it was the strategy that could almost keep up to the others, and since the others are nerfed, it's going to be super viable. @MuCephei can provide input as well.

As for code and architecture design changes, here's what I'd like to implement:

• [ ] Tower attacking awareness (if we are tribal dancing around a tower, just attack it and kill it)
• [ ] Better rallying of units to the enemy (no longer nearest tower, we need to do something better and block their base
• [ ] Miner defence with tanks/marines
• [ ] Enemy miner harass with tanks/marines

With the above, we should be good. Anbelov had really good tank coverage in his miners which allowed him to excel at econ, and I want to incorporate this into ours.

Thoughts?

[MuCephei]

The first commander to back up will win a fight in a commander on commander battle without blink With blink you can just blink on top of the enemy commander but you will still lose with ~1 hp I suggest not engaging enemy commanders unless we can get the first shot, other wise we should just blink away

The tank micro may be able to be approximated by having multiple rally points that start of close together

It only looks like we need <10 tanks to take a undefended tower

The soliders appear underwhelming becuase our attack is slightly staggered and the units stream in one by one

If the units can form a line or multiple small cluster in a line then the attack will be less like a meatgrinder

Other teams seem to have more tanks at any given time, do we adjust out build order?

I also suggest having a soldier rush playstyle that we engage when spawn points are very close

[awojnowski]

@MuCephei Hey man.

Commander

We lose to "Cleanser's" commander micro. I want to study what he does as it's really really good.

Tanks

Tanks will now assess the risk involved with attacking a tower. If they have greater than 10 other military units nearby and greater than 2x the other team's military units then they will engage the tower.

Soldiers

I agree. I just have them for distractions against drones and others until we get better units.

Units

Just wondering how we could put this into code ://// I want to add this too.

Tank Sizing

Do they have more? I haven't really noticed this actually. I feel like we're a little slower in the start but we have great production and rallying after that

Soldier Rush

On the contrary I feel like we should just commander rush. Soldiers are largely ineffective imo.