sanmu is up 2-0! https://www.warzone.com/MultiPlayer?GameID=26985822

@Austin Li

Haha yeah. Although, I think Game 2 is described more accurately as a 6-3 SA game, that later became what you described.

@everyone else
My friends and I play a bit of chess, so we like to name different openings and games that exist, as well as their variations. We're still finding more and more of them on Small Earth.

It would be an eventual goal of mine to standardize the names behind each one and create a rigorous opening theory, like in chess. I think standardization would help people discuss strategies, as well as the costs and benefits of each one. And there are a ton of them, so this process would take a long time to flesh out.

I hope to show Nauz a different type of opening/game every game, but of course, I will only do this if it makes sense. I'm going to go on a trip rn, so game 3 will be postponed for a week-ish. So there's plenty of time for people to analyze the games and rate them if they so desire!

I looked over Games 1 and 2 and imo the skill difference between you and Nauz is vast enough that these games are kind of tough to analyze. I'm (pleasantly) surprised.

Here's my cursory analyses. I didn't look at the actual orders within turns so I might've missed some cleverness there:

Game 1
Theme: Nauz learned the hard way the trade-off between South America and Oceania and the difference it makes when you are 1 hop to North Africa vs. 2.
Verdict: Decided on picks. After picks, it was sanmu's game to lose.

Let's start with the board:


We've got a SA FTB with East Africa in play, so North Africa might have an 8-stack on turn 2 if you go to the FTB; this is game-ending if you got 2nd pick. We've got an Oceania FTB. NA is 3 turn, Asia is not in play because someone nuked Japan (Truman, is that you?). This leaves Europe (2-turn +5) and Africa (to counter Europe and SA) as the other two viable starts.

Both Nauz and sanmu picked the same 4 places, in almost the same order:



Seeing the 2 starts adjacent to North Africa, both picked Europe 4th. The only difference between the two is that Nauz picked Oceania 1st, while sanmu picked SA first. Some have chalked up Nauz's preference for Oceania up to a newbie error, but I don't think he was that naive. I think he analyzed a few SE games from the ladder but couldn't fully contextualize their rationales:


Anyhow, when your theater of action is Europe and Africa (the center and breadbasket of this map), South America's armies get there fast, without additional effort. Oceania's armies don't.

sanmu's picks made the SA FTB viable: he would get both FTBs, start 1/3 (SA+Africa, so no threat on turn 2), or start 1/4 (first move turn 2, so taking the FTB turn 1 is survivable). If he got 2/3, that's his toughest-case start but even then he has control of North Africa on turn 2 and isn't in a particularly bad spot.

Nauz's picks are shakier, purely because he picked Oceania over South America. With SA, he does take the FTB safely (since he can only get SA on 2/3) but his 1/4, as we see in this game, does not actually counter his 2/3.

So the game starts:


Intel is a wash: Nauz has 1/4, sanmu 2/3 but sanmu only needs to plan for Nauz being in Europe. If Nauz isn't in Europe, sanmu has ample time to react to a North America or Asia gamble.

Nauz is at a disadvantage now. Both take their FTB's on turn 1 but Nauz tries to battle his way in to breaking SA while sanmu just takes North America behind the fog, since Nauz deals with the inefficiencies of playing on offense. By turn 5, the game is sealed- but it wasn't really exciting on turn 1 either. More or less decided on Nauz making the wrong choice between SA & Oceania on picks- Oceania on this board was only viable in conjunction with East Africa imo, and Nauz didn't see that.

---

Game 2
Theme: Nauz learns about the difficulty of holding Europe.
Verdict: 90% decided on picks. I think Nauz just struggles still with reading a Small Earth board.


2-turn SA, 2-turn Oceania, 2-turn Europe, Africa starts in Madagascar, and NA is 3-turn.


This time, we see a much bigger difference in how the players read the board. sanmu sees SA and Europe as the 2 biggest threads on the board and goes for them, with Oceania in play if he has to settle for unsafe Europe. Look at his 1/4- it's a strong counter to his 2/3. sanmu recognizes here that the NA start is only 2 hops from Greenland and so, if his opponent goes for Europe, he makes that bonus absolutely non-viable at the end of turn 3, with a double-border and an additional border.


Nauz reads the board differently. He once again picks Oceania over SA, settles for Europe/SA if he doesn't get Oceania, and then picks a 4 that counters his 2/3 somewhat adequately (North Africa). I think Nauz just didn't read the board quite as well as sanmu again.


Nauz gets his 1/2 while sanmu gets 1/4 and is perfectly in place to counter Nauz.


Both players take the obvious opening moves, with sanmu setting up his Europe counter while Nauz goes for 2-turn Europe + 3-turn Oceania.

Europe is broken on turn 3:

Notice how sanmu plays conservatively in North Africa this turn instead of gambling the whole house on a delayed attack from North Africa to Europe. No, he just has a late-turn 3. If he doesn't break Europe this turn, he lives to fight another day. But he breaks Europe, from Greenland, since Nauz had to defend his bonus at 3 whole points.

After that, sanmu lets SA fall so he can take North America;


Then he fully seals the game.

---

Imo we're seeing a massive difference here, because sanmu is playing like someone who's played a lot of SE while Nauz's analyses don't seem to be able to keep up quite yet. He just isn't reading the board and understanding the threats and plays the same way sanmu is. Perhaps this is because he's forced to think on a much more micro level than on medium-sized maps.

We'll have to see. But so far these two have been fairly boring games where sanmu made the correct picks and Nauz didn't.

Edited 5/24/2021 06:21:07

It’s pretty hard to replicate tj Oceania based style. He basically just toys with you while managing the western threats. It’s more than an advanced strat, more of a mastery style.

He dances in and out of fog while staying busy enough to counter extra expansion you might try for. As soon as you mis allocate troops he shows up with his whole army and starts slamming face. Except he doesn’t slam face and just backs off again while preparing to show up elsewhere.

> Theme: Nauz learns about the difficulty of holding Europe.
This is silly. Yes holding Europe can be difficult. That's not something I "learned". It's something anyone who's ever played the map, or hell, any map, is very aware of. Europe tends to turn into a "Predict right, and win, predict wrong and lose" scenario.

> Nauz studies very hard and is probably analyzing Small Earth games as we speak.

No. Still don't value the template or map. Is there skill involved in playing it? Sure. I never actually argued there wasn't, I said it has a lower skill cap, it does. The only way that this actually proves anything IMO is if it was done in the manner I'd initially suggested where we play a series on SE, and a series on something I've played more than Sanmu. That way it is actually a measure of the relative skillcap on different templates by showing how dominant two different people are who have approached the skill cap on different templates compared to someone who hasn't.

ie. If Sanmu wins 6-2 or 6-3 on SE, but gets swept on ME, MME, FB, etc. that would be a sign that what I was saying was correct. Not that SE is a purely luck-based coin-flip template, but that luck plays a much heavier part than it does on other strategic templates.

Edited 5/24/2021 11:21:00

Since I'm the best player at Small Earth I thought I would chime in with some thoughts:


Game 2, Turn 3:
-> https://www.warzone.com/MultiPlayer?GameID=26985822


The key is to realize that if Sanmu takes Iceland and secures North America then he's probably going to win. It's a common win condition on SE, secure safe expansion in an otherwise close game.

Once you realize this then several things follow: there's a good chance Sanmu will attack from Greenland; if you're wrong then it fails gracefully, since it'll still be a 7-7 game, you've foiled game-winning expansion, you have flanking opportunities, and you can pivot your army stack back into Europe. At this point the game will become your classic 7-7 game, where it'll come down to who plays better.

Yours sincerely,
The Small Earth Grandmaster

Thanks @Quicksilver, those were also my thoughts. Turn 3 was the key mistake from Nauzhror here, everything before looked fine for me, including his picks (but I'm not the best Small Earth player around). After turn 3 the game was probably already over.

Edited 5/24/2021 17:14:12

Europe tends to turn into a "Predict right, and win, predict wrong and lose" scenario.

Imo that's not the right way to play Europe or vs. Europe. It focuses too heavily on just the European border and not the overall picture of the map. As a rule of thumb on SE, if you're playing predictively, you've already lost.

Wdym by that? Aren't you supposed to predict the other players move, count their armies etc?

I have won several games using the analyze attack tool to count how many armies I need to fight based on my predictions?

You can count and play non-predictively: e.g., if you have first move, they have 5+7 income, you have 12+8 income, you can accurately "predict" that your 20v12 attack will succeed if made as your first order.

I was talking about risky predictive play (i.e., gambling) , where whether or not you win the game hinges on which border territory your opponent chooses to deploy to. E.g., if you have North Africa, they have S. Europe and W. Europe, and you gamble that they will deploy more armies to S. Europe and not W. Europe. This gamble is often fatal if it doesn't succeed.

Per both my experience and the wisdom of people much better than me on this template, SE is about safe play for the most part. If you find yourself gambling the whole game on which European territory your opponent is going to attack, you're playing wrong imo and need to take another look at the threats and opportunities on the board.

@QuickSilver, Norman, and l4v.r0v

The attack from Greenland turn 3, was in fact the decisive move. I internally realized that too, and was prepared if it didn't work out.

Some of you might be wondering why I didn't 4th pick China. If I had 4th picked China, I could have moved west turn 1 and be threatening Europe turn 2. If I had done that, then I wouldn't need to do any "prediction" in Greenland. I could have just broken Europe before it even began, without much effort.

So why didn't I do that? There were 2 reasons. I thought that NA was unbelievably broken on this map, with the wasteland on the Asian border. I think the specifics of the map drove away interest in this area, because it wasn't as easily rushable as South America or Europe. I believed it was possible to take NA slowly and thought I could use the "threat" of losing Europe as a ruse to take it.

And the second reason? Small Earth is all about precision and anticipation. You have to be very good at both. You have to squeeze every last drop of juice out of each soldier you have and you have to get inside the other guy's head. But how can I anticipate Johnny if I don't understand him? All I learned Game 1 was that he doesn't really know how to play Small Earth. But I didn't see how he likes to allocate troops in a scrappy fight.

In other words, I needed data. Was I willing to lose a game just to acquire data? No. I bet that he wouldn't see the threat of Greenland (which was honestly a fair bet from what I saw Game 1 and what I knew of his picks). But even if he did and protected it, my 3 on S. Europe would have been enough to breach most likely. And in an even 7-7 game, I felt confident I win. Those games tend to go to the person who has more experience.

I agree with l4v.r0v. Game 2 was unlike Game 1 because there was a "possibility" Johnny could win. That possibility would exist if he could defend Europe at all 3 locations for 2 straight turns. If you think about it, I didn't have to get lucky at all; I just had to not get supremely unlucky. Rather than rolling bad dice that don't favor you, Johnny should have changed his strategy at that point imo.

Edited 5/24/2021 22:30:20

turn 3 has many ways to play it. i know i would have done something different than both players in this spot. 2 turn europe is best strategy when plan is to wield that income for only 1 turn, and move on from there. even when you know you will be contested on turn 3, you can outright win the game with small misplays on turn 3 from your opponent, even if they break you

Is there a game 3 yet?

Currently on a vacation, but there will be when I'm back :) I don't get back till June 2nd tho

sanmu the shamu - is he based?

He’s clearly a shaman

@Quicksilver, you arnt the best SE player no offence.

Best of 11 Arrow vs Quicksilver when?

Sure, but SE1W

Btw, i never said i am the best player in SE, but all ik is that Quicksilver isnt the best as he is claiming to be...