The other game I play a lot of is League of Legends, and sadly the community around my skill level has not learned this gospel yet. If it looks like we have 30 seconds of advantage, the team of 5 almost invariably either does nothing or goes for a decapitating stroke whose downside risk is loss. A better tactic is probably "Get more ahead so we win the next skirmish, too, snowballing until we win by concession or overwhelming force."
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I think the spirit of what is being said in 'The Art of War', is the same principle that's being discussed in the article: Don't rush into striking before you are sure of victory, and lose everything; instead use the advantage to build yourself into an invincible position, with less risk.
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'The Art of War' has been around a long time.
If there's a lesson here, its that strategy gamers might benefit from doing some reading.
I liked the article, and thought it was good; but it comes across that the author has no education in either (economic) game theory, or the study of game playing AI (e.g. minimax, search based AI techniques like you'd see in a chess AI etc). (Two related, but sometimes separate fields).
Which is fine - but there's a lot of good work in those fields, that strategy gamers, that seek to understand games analytically, as well as intuitively, would do well to read.
If there's a lesson here, its that strategy
gamers might benefit from doing some reading.
In short, I think there are very few if any sc2 players that would benefit (in terms of improving their game at least) from reading The Art of War.
You seem to be saying that by the time they are playing at a level where general strategic advice becomes applicable, they'll already have learned it. This is a little circular.
Also, I think it probably takes a couple of months, before you get to the strategic level, not years, but that's just an opinion.
"The pinnacle of military excellence is not to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles. It is to subjugate your enemy without fighting."
Eg, to have the foresight and strategy to circumscribe and constrain your adversary's degrees of freedom until the only one left is capitulation.
Pretty cool that there are videogames rich enough for that to be applicable.
The point he's trying to make is that truly great (in his view: competitive) games are those that the most advanced AI algorithms won't have any real competitive edge, so that game "theory" would back-up game "reality" of winning with a marginal advantage is more advantageous than winning "big".
Anyway, I think most people study pure game theory, not because its directly applicable; they study it because there are some surprising results from it, that inform their strategic thinking - not because they apply it to evaluate their specific strategic situation.
>The point he's trying to make is that truly great (in his view: competitive) games are those that the most advanced AI algorithms won't have any real competitive edge, so that game "theory" would back-up game "reality" of winning with a marginal advantage is more advantageous than winning "big".
I'm not sure that's the point he's making. But anyway, I'm not sure its a valid point. For example, Chess is a game where the most advanced AI algorithms have a huge competitive edge, surely its a truely great, competitive, game?
It is desirable property in a game, that there is no obvious strongly dominant pure strategy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_dominance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_(game_theory)#Pure_and...
"winning with a marginal advantage is more advantageous than winning "big"" doesn't at all follow from: "those that the most advanced AI algorithms won't have any real competitive edge".
Along similar lines, chess grandmaster John Nunn wrote, in Secrets of Practical Chess, that when you are down, you have two basic strategies: "grim defense" and "create confusion". If you are, say, a pawn down, it may still be possible to draw if you make no mistakes; your opponent will have to work hard to force a win, and he may even get impatient and try to win quickly with a risky strategy; this is "grim defense". If that strategy is unappealing (if his advantage is simple to consolidate and exploit, or if you don't feel like slow and careful defense), then you may opt to do risky things to create complicated, high-stakes positions and hope your opponent makes a mistake; this is "create confusion".
This is probably why SC has become very popular and still remains very popular. There are constant conflicts throughout the game trying to increase or take back the small advantages.
They explain the many types of people that watch Starcraft, and that Starcraft games are fun to watch because of "Information Asymmetry"
I'm a platinum zerg, and don't play super often, but really enjoy the game.
My email is on my HN profile if you are interested.
Do you think this is always the case? I'm thinking about texas hold 'em, which has short-term variability but the stronger players win over the long run with a better strategy. Does chance have a place in competitive gaming?
A luck element lets players of uneven skill feel engaged. Even better is a great handicapping system like Go has, but that's notoriously hard to design.
Chess is a great game at certain skill levels and has a lot of beauty to it, but games with enough of a skill difference aren't really interesting for either player unless the better player is teaching/mentoring.
So yeah, luck has some place in letting different people (and even gamble) together.
I think that the issue is that people feel cheated if they are in the zone/on a perfect run, and have that pulled from under them by chance. However, I would contest that having some risk makes it more exciting.
Another likely issue is the fear that your tactics and your highly drilled skills might become less relevant if some elements of the game are based on chance/randomized. It essentially negates some of your time investment in the game. For myself, I think that it's more interesting to have to adapt your tactics to new situation. I also find the skills that a game involving chances emphasizes tend away from the repetitive and towards general strategy, for example: map knowledge becomes less important compared to scouting.
For heads-up play (a match between two players), the winrate of a winning player versus a substantially worse player is can be anywhere from 4 big blinds/100 hands to 20 big blinds/100 hands. The standard deviation is more like 140 big blinds/100 hands. This means that you have to play quite a while to have an almost zero chance of winning, even against a substantially worse player. Most professional poker players even have an occasional losing month (let's say one a year an average).
It makes for a really tough game, cause if you do get ahead, you have to face a series of attacks which almost but don't quite work, and if you mess up any of them it's over.
The maths of this can be found in the article "A Rule of Thumb (not only) for Gamblers." Currently, this article is available free here: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.55.3...
Lot of little zen-like lessons in learning that game, is why I love it.
Check out crazystone's stats: http://kgs.gosquares.net/index.rhtml.en?id=CrazyStone&y=...
72% win percentage as a 4d.
I'm surprised that there was only one AI in the competition that did this. We were all expected to use this strategy in my class. Once everybody's figured this out, it becomes a game of:
- Who can think ahead the most turns? - Who has the best "am I winning?" heuristic function? (For Mancala this function is fairly obvious, but for many games it's not.)
The behavior of AI programming winning by 1 point does exist in real life for Monte-Carlo based agents calculating winning probabilities. You can see it in computer go games.
The interesting thing about starcraft is that it's played _so_ much (in s. korea is a profession, kids actually go to live in "pro houses" were they play all day), that the game has/is evolving to a point where every little thing matters. In the highest levels, you can't really fight a straight up battle and hope to win, it's a game of getting little advantages (like removing %1 of his income) and trying to get ahead, and push those advantages much later on. Increasing your economy, building up you army, the execution and management of your units in the fight, everything counts.
Bronze league matches often end up being a contest of who can win with the first rush or the earliest "cheese", but most pro-level play does end up being a careful balance between aggression, defense, and expansion. The winner is usually the one who can stay just slightly ahead of their opponent until they can seize a clear advantage.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJztfsXKcPQ
Edit: 0:28:45 - On strategy and execution
> being so passionate about <x> that he made <y> believe in him
IMHO, this sounds like two pieces of sage advice for entrepreneurs already :)
Games: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ahgl Homepage: http://afterhoursgaming.tv/
There are a number of interesting game theory articles on competitive Starcraft. This is one: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=258... (and my comment to it: https://plus.google.com/116918963723558831013/posts/A8DRTY11...).
=]
Does this not make sense to anyone else? Can someone please explain it to me?
Edit: Apparently colanderman beat me to it.
The pitfall for the average viewer/player is to take these mantras and apply them directly to what they see. They see a game where T apparently overcommits after winning an engagement at his 3rd, and wonder why he didn't take a 4th instead. Surely, this is a mistake of not getting more ahead!
An expert player might look at the same scenario and see an entirely different picture. The problem was that he scanned a 15m timing instead of a 17m timing for the Hive, so he was actually behind in that engagement (he should have decisively won with the Z's gas locked up elsewhere!). And that Broodlords would be due out in 2 production cycles, but it takes 3m for him to break-even on the new mine, and he would miss the window to secure enough of an advantage to push the game into a low-econ trade phase.
My point is that real game understanding is extremely specific. It's all about the actual state and timing. To go back to the article, that's where the marginal advantages are gained - by understanding and controlling how these extremely specific scenarios play out. The larger ideas about strategy that everyone loves fall out from the analyses of these interactions. But "getting" the general idea isn't the same as actually _getting_ it when you work out these scenarios and timings yourself from extensive playing/testing. So heuristics are really only part of the picture, the much larger part is a precise understanding of the system at work.
Do you write game analysis like this somewhere, or do you know where I can read something similar?
Also,
http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/Day9_Daily
has a good list of his videos, with their subject, etc.
I read some time an article in which was argued, that this is a fundamental difference in Soccer compared to other team sports. As there is often only 1-2 goals in Soccer a Toss-up between a top team and an underdog is more likely. It is even often the case that a team is playing dominating but they lose anyhow, because the weaker team is getting lucky and stumples the ball in the goal. This keeps the sport fresh and interesting and is seen by fans as a virtue. The randomness is then cancelled out over the season and marginal advantage is important in competition for the league championship.
Title should be changed to reflect that as to not bring confusion about it referring to the broad (and complex) Game theory subject.
Very nice read though. Day9 is right. The best players all seem to have a knack for maintaining a marginal advantage or taking a small one and getting a bigger advantage.
The corollary, for those in behind, is that they should attempt more gambits.
The principles of variance are strange. Sometimes, if you're in behind, you reduce your chance of losing by adopting what looks like a "losing" strategy (according to naive expected value calculations). With a wild all-or-nothing strategy, your chance of winning from behind likely won't exceed 50%, but by acting more like the 'risky amateur,' you might up your chances from 10% to 30%.
Sometime, in a game of 30mins, there's only a few seconds where you have the upper hand.. and this is where you need to attack. Miss that moment (from a couple of seconds!!) and you lose. Go a little bit before, and you lose!