Holy shit this was awful. Porc artil all the way. If you can't beat em with reasonable unit choices, join 'em in outporcartilling the porcartil.

Games like these make me question shields and the durability of towers. I would say, nerf both HARDCORE.

you excessed like 1 fusion of metal by 10 mins, then qan aditional 2 fusions of metal by 12 minutes. be careful when building units like Aspis that your economy is balanced, and to bolster your energy economy more than normal with an extra fusion to power them. If you scale with e-useing units more, keep building more energy to keep pace. Also at 12 mins, I'm confused how this isn't a hate thread against Emissary. At this point, the most anoying turret looks like double Faraday emplacements.

A note on faradays and shields: people have said that EMP is super effective against shields. it is not. it does deal 400 damage to shields every shot, but that's like 150 DPS. Stardust is 450 DPS. EMP is not super effective against shields, you can afford to use shields to tank it. it's strength this game is alpha and AOE, which will pass through shields, and it's armored state. assault with a double wall of thugs and rouges to deal damage, you want like 7 to 1-tap the faradays(it takes 5 to tap a stradust, and 8 to tap a stinger. double tap gauss turrets).

Losing all the Aspises towards the middle changed overdrive from 0m/s to 10m/s. just sayin'. Also just sayin' this can be achieved with an extra fusion or 2(and a better balanced grid when you have excess energy).

The firewalker spam was not responded to all that well. Lessons learned, think of a solution when clear of mind out of game.

I try and aproach this in-game tendancy to tunnelvision with your stratagy by setting some sort of nervouse tick internal clock. about every minute I tell myself: what else could I be doing? it's an attempt to make me macro better, to scout, to look at other front lines, analyze the whole battlefield. when I tunnelvision for too long on a strat, I get a small panic that I've been ignoreing things, then start investing in overdrive/radars/owls to survey the battlefield and balance my macro. While I may at times overreact and over invest in these things, in a long drawn out battle having overdrive, proper scouting of the enemy's back lines, and time to think, I can make more decisive plays for victory.

and here comes your typical commentary:

"go around the porc"

(as if it were that easy)

quote: Look at all the reclaim my opponent has and how map control completely switches around after I lose my units trying to destroy his factories. That's about half way through. At this point I just spam thugs aspis merlin and add a funnelweb or two. I then turn my brain off and just use my ball to chip at my opponent until I win. That's far more telling than anything else I think. Playing out of my mind rewarded me with a dead army trying to kill stuff, and turning my brain off handed me the game on a platter.

I don't think this is totally fair to your earlier army. Committing to the factory attack with your shield level at the time was pretty ambitious and you got unlucky that a Jugglenaut was just about to finish.

When your opponent overcommits to a strategy like mass Emissary/Firewalker, then gets an advantage, it doesn't seem outrageous to me that your path to win from there is to strongly commit to a strategy which at first sight looks weird as well.

For the record I think Emissary and Funnelweb are problematic. Firewalker and porc in general somewhat less so. Faraday is perhaps an issue but I think at least some of the claims about it are overblown. For instance as an air player I find I can generally work around the existence of Faradays.

The north flank of the map didn't seem to see much action for most of the game and rewdrfe2 defended it pretty minimally. So, yes, there was at least some potential to "go around the porc".

Ok, I stand corrected, there was a fair bit of fighting over the north side of the map where the porc isn't; I wrote that comment towards the end when nothing had been sent up there for a while. I stand by my assessment that bypassing the porc in this way was effective when it was done.

Watching the game back again, for the time between 10:00 and 20:00 where you are splitting your army between the south and north of the map, it feels to me like you are controlling the game despite a significant army size deficit (mostly due to excess, and rewdrfe2 has some Tridents sitting around doing nothing).

Around 25:00 you are pushing the north side of the map where the porc isn't, and were it not for an overextension or two I think you could have won here.

Making a Likho to pick off a few of the artillery (even if it eventually dies to AA) feels like it could have made this game considerably easier. Switching to Tank and making Minotaur might also have worked. In the end Merlin worked OK as well.

Fundamentally to defeat long range attrition units like Firewalker and Emissary you need to construct units that (a) can kill the artillery and (b) don't die too often themselves. Bandit and Rogue do not fit the bill (although some Bandits to flank and abuse the slow movement of artillery is probably a good idea).

I would expect Minotaur to do fine until the concentration of Emissaries gets too strong. Even Thug+Aspis did OK when there were less Rogues involved. Halberd would probably work. Skycrab will at least buy you time. Merlins got the job done in this game. Maybe a Krow or dropping something with air transports if you're feeling spicy.

Lobstering stuff is probably too slow. Ravagers are probably not tough enough and Knights are way too slow, but in theory both of these factories should get a significant advantage out of the early game against somebody rushing porc and artyball. (In theory. I'm not convinced cloaky is in a good place.) Grizzly would probably need too much areashield support to be practical, unless it is a map with significant amounts of water. A well placed Cerberus might be helpful but isn't really my style.

I know that switching tech in a timely manner is still not in my skill set, but as you said my opponent already had tridents.

In general I am hesitant to switch to planes. In teams it is hard to get allies to respond to a specific and timely threat, but in 1v1 at 40+ m/s income, prioritizing a chainsaw or two isn't hard and we're right back to ground battles.

Normally I would say that even if planes are shut down by static defense having them is still good to defend vs raids/assaults, but my opponent never switched strategy. I repelled the single kodachi early on and a small number of raiders were enough to handle the one minotaur that broke into my base. There was also a lone lightning tank at some point and it died to LLTs without breaking anything. I don't recall a single other unit of his ever trying to push the line. It was just artil spam with jugglenauts at the front.

I forget when, but at some point I think I made an athena. Or at least I wanted to. I thought that maybe if I build scythes I can sneak on the firewalkers, but then again I tried something similar with an ultimatum. It made cost, but it wasn't all that great.

I'm having second thoughts. What if my opponent went with tremors instead of firewalkers? He easily could have, and at that point I don't think I would have stood a chance because there is no way the shields would have kept up with that consistent damage output.

At this point I'm going to do what I always do: try to mimic my opponent's strategy and see if anyone can counter it. I am going to replace the firewalkers with a tremor or 2 however.

The last time I faced rewdrfe2, he shield artil spammed me despite my constant raiding around the porc and won. He taught me to do this.