So what if my account is older? I played this game as a party game in college with my roommates. I remember it was Warlight then, and the default settings were 1 troop minimum, randomized battle outcomes. I introduced it to my hubby a year ago as a way to stay connected with friends during covid, and he really took to it. Here’s one of our first games, with our friends. Just a friendly free for all.

https://www.warzone.com/MultiPlayer?GameID=23598965

What does any of that have to do with him being my husband? If my account were newer, would you believe me then?

Does Small Earth have strategic merit?
Yes, it's great for learning to play precise.

Do Small Earth casual specialists deserve more respect?
Yes, I believe there is no other template which shows skill easier than this one.

Can Nauzhror, who's played little Small Earth outside forced Quickmatches, figure the whole template out?
Depends on whether he practices. Just as a warning, I myself get clobbered on Small Earth.

If sanmu beats Nauz, will that prove anything? If Nauz beats sanmu, will that prove anything?
I'm too dumb currently to understand Small Earth so I will look at their respective strategies and try to improve.

Will this challenge run its course?
I hope so.

Who will achieve their dreams first- Nauz of getting a 1v1 Ladder gold trophy or sanmu of having the Korea clan dominate the QM SE leaderboard?
Hm, the latter I guess.

Will sanmu eventually be a top player in the competitive scene?
He has the brains now it's up to if and how strong he wants it.

Who would you rather have on your Clan Wars team?
sanmu is on my team and he is great.

Who will win this challenge?
sanmu

What will be the final score?
Well, how many games are there? I guess Nauzhror can take 1 maybe 2 games and sanmu wins the rest.

Edited 5/20/2021 05:00:06

My main Small Earth strategy is to play it with bomb + commander and then I hope that my opponent either parks his commander in Australia or casually suicides himself. If this does not happen I start to run out of ideas already.

@Dr. Ape
To make the goal of the Republic of Korea more explicit, it is to have at least half of the top 10 on Quickmatch Small Earth Auto Dist or Wasteland to be in our group.

This is where it currently stands:

Auto Dist:


Wasteland:



My apologies if the image paste messed up; Not sure how to resize it for this site. We briefly achieved that goal already for auto dist a couple weeks back, when my main was still in the Republic of Korea (and before I went on a losing streak). But now I'm grinding on this alt.

I find it likely that we'll achieve the goal again on Auto Dist fairly soon, due to the players we have grinding for it, and some of the other members of the top 10 have already agreed to join us.

Now, on Wasteland, I won't lie, it'll take some time. Many of the current top 10 are inactive (and therefore unavailable to join us). The ones who aren't, like TJ, are currently dominating the seasonal ladder. Also, the ratings are generally higher on the Wasteland map. We have members grinding for this map as well, so fingers crossed. I think we will achieve this too, but it will take time and probably new recruitment.

Our other goal is to simply have as many of the top 100 as possible on both maps. But that's also just our membership requirement (in addition to being nice)

Edited 5/20/2021 07:18:00

don't you get points in quickmatch for literally existing if you spam it enough?

No. Template rating gained and lost depends on the rating differential between the two people who played. The minimum you can gain/lose per game is 1, and the maximum is 10.

Once your rating is 800+ on an individual map, you start to only get 2 or 3 rating per win on average. On the other hand, you also lose 7-8+ rating per win on average too. To keep climbing at this point, you generally need to maintain a >75% or 80% winrate. Which is also difficult, because you'll be matching with a good number of people who are also at this rating.

And the rating lost/gained in each match doesn't even have to be equal. For some reason (we have checked this) the rating you lose can be more than the rating your opponent gained. And for some reason, that's often the case for these 800+ match ups (again 800 being the template rating, not the global rating. The global rating is like some kind of weird logarithmic addition of individual template ratings). Also, rematches don't count towards rating, so there isn't a way to game the system by playing a bad player over and over intentionally either.

Point is, it's like rolling a boulder up a hill once you get to this point. Yes, on average, you gain rating if your winrate is high enough. But it takes a high volume of games to increase it. It's not trivial.

Edited 5/20/2021 08:57:45

sanmu takes game 1: https://www.warzone.com/MultiPlayer?GameID=26974103

Does Small Earth have strategic merit?
Yes, anyone who's played it competitively will agree.

Do Small Earth casual specialists deserve more respect?
Yes, but at the same time it's child's play compared to MME and the like.

Can Nauzhror, who's played little Small Earth outside forced Quickmatches, figure the whole template out?
No because he's much too elite to mess around with SE.

If sanmu beats Nauz, will that prove anything? If Nauz beats sanmu, will that prove anything?
If sanmu wins it proves that Nauz should practice a template before playing an expert on it, if Nauz wins then he has my respect but it mostly proves that sanmu is shit.

Will this challenge run its course?
Yes but only cuz Nauz won't want to back out and look like a dick.

Who will achieve their dreams first- Nauz of getting a 1v1 Ladder gold trophy or sanmu of having the Korea clan dominate the QM SE leaderboard?
Realistically, Nauz.

Will sanmu eventually be a top player in the competitive scene?
No, moving from SE to MME and other competitive templates is basically like starting from scratch. He has just as much chance of becoming a top player as any other casual quickmatch player.

Who would you rather have on your Clan Wars team?
Ursus.

Who will win this challenge?
sanmu

What will be the final score?
sanmu to sweep

Edited 5/21/2021 02:57:50

LMAO

Woohoo 🎉, gg

dang. either johnny is a 200IQ hustler, or this match wont be very exciting. maybe hes trying to bait sanmu into coin games?

Too soon to say. Only 1 game so far, and even I have beat "better players" at SE before.

However, do recall that Johnny's point was that SE has low skill cap, so for skilled players it will be a luck based result, so results in the 50/50-ish range kind of proves his point (so 6-5 & 6-4), but 6-3 or 6-2 state a case for Sanmu's perspective. And of course 6-1 or 6-0, well now that would be pretty telling.

But that said ... keep in mind that this is only Johnny vs Sanmu ... the results don't necessarily speak for all SE vs other template skillsets and players, but it does lend some examples with which to further analyze. Who knows, Sanmu might be the future WZ MME GOAT in the making!

@Jacob the Restless

Good to see you respond here man! One of my favorite SE Wasteland games was with you. Your analysis is much appreciated.

Honestly, I see what you're saying. But we both agreed it would be coinless, and I won't be accepting any coin games period out of principle. And the chat has been much more respectful as compared to before. I think he just made simple mistakes (I also wondered if they were intentional at first). I find it likely there will be less of them in the coming games.

Nauz studies very hard and is probably analyzing Small Earth games as we speak. This is why I predicted him to drastically improve during the series and even give sanmu a run for his money at the end. I expect sanmu to go up something big like 3-1 or 4-1 only for Nauz to win 2-4 matches before sanmu finishes him off.

I think he just made simple mistakes

What were the mistakes? Can someone break it down for us simple folk?

To me it looks like:
- your pics were similar, just reversing SA/Aus, and Shamu SA 1st seems the more typical choice.
- But tbh with Brazil & East Africa, this seems like it's over already on turn 1, which I see all the time in CW now ... whoever gets SA + North Africa typically wins
- Both got FTB
- Shamu pushed up to grab early NA while Nauz was unable to break into SA
- turn 6 deployment of 7 in Mongolia seems odd to me, I feel he needed to be attacking SA or up through Europe not Asia
- though with NA completed & at least 2 turns away from attacking Alaska, it is really already over at this point and nothing else matters

But as I said, I'm too simple to really see the truly good & bad moves ... expert analysis please?

RE: coin games, I thought these were "betting games", but someone (Nauz?) suggested to just transfer the coin difference in bulk after the fact, b/c making each game a 1000 coin game means that a close series of for example 6-5 game split results in 2200 wasted coins (20% of each 1000 coin game x 11) when in reality the difference is just 1000 coins, which can be done in one 1000 transfer and only waste 200, so a 2000 coin difference.

Makes even more sense to do it this way if Shamu is covering the coins via volunteer donations ... better to waste less generosity of the donators' coins.

But actually just read Shamu's latest post and seems like they've agreed to do non-coin games, which still works as long as they're both seriously playing. All we really need is top tier play!

Edited 5/22/2021 02:08:14

https://www.warzone.com/MultiPlayer?GameID=26985822 game 2 now up!

@Krinid

Nah, first picking Oceania is often viable (and more viable than most players who haven't played SE extensively think). So I actually respect Nauz a bit for trying it. SA/Africa starts is not, by any means, an auto win between 2 people who know what they're doing.

That being said, the way he went about it was incorrect in several ways. If it's true that Nauz deep studies the games and learns from mistakes, it is, perhaps, not smart for me to correct them. Otherwise, this match won't really be a battle between a generalist and a specialist anymore.

But I'll list a few basic mistakes:
1) first picking Oceania with the Wasteland in Japan
2) There was no reason to create the level of delay he did turn 2
3) Unnecessarily revealed turn order priority for no real gain
4) Was not as economical as he should have been about troops
5) Arrived in Kamchata 1 turn too late
6) Could have gone +1 (at the very least) turn 3, but didn't
7) was not aggressive enough and seemed to be more re-active than pro-active in his general strategy

Thanks Shamu.

Ahh, the Expedited Westboro Gambit in game 1, followed by the Westboro Gambit: American Trade Variation in game 2. That's dirty man......