How I failed at being awesome

I’m back on the blog after a lot of different tournaments!…But not the WTC unfortunately since I wasn’t deemed worth it, booh booh. The last weeks have been pretty hectic as there were lots of tournaments, and pretty important ones at that.

I talked a bit about the La Garde tournament in my last post but there was the Lyon Summer Master in September where I almost managed to snatch 1st, which would have given me wins at both the biggest french tournaments. It’s okay though, 2nd isn’t that bad and that puts me on the map for the next WTC selections too hopefully.

 

But the important fact is that those two last months gave me pause to think about Warmachine in an entirely new way, and I believe I learnt more in 2 months than I learnt in a year. This has a lot to do with the number of tournaments and tournament-like games I did and quite frankly I’m impressed by my performance. Sometimes I still think it’s a great deal of luck but in the end I managed to win 3 tournaments this year and went 2nd to the most important one….

…Which brings me the real topic of today: how to gain experience. Unlike in RPGs gaining experience requires a lot thinking, and not just killing mobs/chaining games. At least I need to think a lot about my games to really improve. There’s an old saying that goes like: You learn more from losing than from winning.

Learning from your mistakes

First off I’d say I quite agree with that BUT, to me, you only learn if you really wish to understand what went wrong and improve. Many people -and I was one of them at one point- will attribute this defeat to dice, and that defeat to a poor match-up and so on. Sure sometimes you’ll get dice raped and that happens, shit happens, but most of the time if you’re whining on round 3 it’s because YOU made a big mistake on round 2, and your opponent is just bashing your skull in because YOU let him do it with your mistakes. Excuses like “He charged me with his heavy and bashed mine but he was like one tenth of an inch in, what a luck” can feel very reassuring but that’s just self deception really.

On the French master finale I lost because I activated Orin before my sirens, went for a chain lightning on Blackbane’s raiders with pSkarre feat on and, thinking about their armor 18, I thought “It’s no use” and declared I was gonna null magic. The Null Magic bubble then just prevented me from using 2 sirens and 2 venom from 2 arcnodes with pDenny. At the end of the game I was at an advantage on attritrion but lost on scenario because I couldn’t clean the Blackbanes fast enough any more.
Of course all my friends taunted me on that mistake but in the end, my mistake was to not understand the real extent of the problem. If my mind had caught that this was a fatal mistake, I would have moved pDenny behind Orin and just killed him to go on as planned.

As Illidan would say, my one true mistake was not to be prepared. But don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that with more training I would have known that I needed to kill Orin myself. My point is that -had I been prepared- I would have given myself time to think about the consequences of my mistake. One mistake in a whole game can be enough to make you lose and if you made a mistake, you need to be able to detect it fast enough to mend it.

Learning from your wins

Just because you won doesn’t mean that your list/gameplay/plan is perfect. I do believe winning requires the same kind of thought process to help you improve your game. It’s important to understand what made you win and what mistakes from your opponent your exploited to win. Did you play the whole game according to the original plan? Did you change your plan and why? Did you have lucky roll at some point that put you back in the game? Did you take advantage of a big mistake from your opponent? Do think your target priority is spot on?

All those questions are very important if you wish to step up your game, as answering these questions will force you to go over what you did and how you won. It will probably force you to talk about it with your opponent or to check out some of his models profiles to come to a decision.

Thoughts on Adversity

There is no better than adversity. Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance the next time. -Malcolm X

If you learn from defeat, you haven’t really lost. -can’t remember who 😡

Although Warmachine/Hordes is just a game, I really believe those two quotes are spot on. I believe adversity is the key to “going on to the next level”. It is when you are pushed in a corner, seemingly out of options, that you have the best chances to learn. Going back to how you handled that situation is a very good indicator of your current skill level. Sometimes, and it’s especially true with someone like me, you can only think outside the box when you are under a lot of stress. It’s important to be able to play the game again in your mind and to detect the thing you did that got you out of a seemingly impossible situation. 

That’s why you need to play against what you think are strong opponents/hard match-ups. From my experience it’s very hard to go to an opponent you think/know will crush you. But in the end if you don’t go out of your comfort zone at some point, you’re bound to stagnate as a player.

These days I’ve had the chance to train against the best french Skorne and his anti-cryx Mordikaar list, as well as the best french Legion player and his anti-pSkarre list (she’s going rampant in our meta). I lost most of the games I played against them but it was extremely entertaining and I really feel I learnt a lot. And I do believe they learnt a lot too because we talked about it during hours, and that kind of exchange is, in my opinion, very positive.

That’s all for today, with a shorter post than ever before, woot woot! Next time we’ll talk about my next caster, which is gonna be either eDenny or Scaverous. Or I might come back with a new shooting list for pDenny, but maybe we’ll talk about Mortenebra. So many interesting casters, I really love Cryx, I feel like I’ll never be done with this faction.

 

o7

pSkarre ramblings

It’s been quite a long time since I last posted ! No lazyness here, just a case of severe lack of time and choices to be made, in the direct line of this post.

When you throw in the fact that I’m creating my own company, it kinda spiraled out of control and the blog rather died. Well, people seem to keep coming and reading so I’m trying to update stuff a little bit.

I’ve been rather active on the warmachine scene since I last posted in early March. Actually I’ve won a number of tournaments and I feel I’m getting better at this game. This appeared to me quite clearly on my last tournament at La Garde, France at the Dreamweavers Tournament: The Knock-Out where I managed to secure the 1st place with my usual pDenny list coupled with a pSkarre list.

Meddling with higher powers

I know this title sounds all mystical and stuff, but we’ll be talking about warmachine again today.

As you may have noticed, I didn’t post much in February, and that’s because I’ve been working almost every single day of the month on Masters of the World, and with my usual “should I play or should I paint? Oh crap I’ve got to call my girlfriend  -syndrome” it didn’t help my writing.

Anyway I’m back now and I’m here to talk abooooooooooooooooooout : meddling with the established system of Warmachine. Let’s put up the background here.

Warmachine : Cube Tournament Part 1

I’ll start by saying right off that it doesn’t have anything to do with the eponym movie. The Cube tournament brings 3-man teams from all over the country to the city of Grenoble and I think it’s one of the biggest tournaments in France. On November 24th-25th, 18 teams fought mercilessly(ish) against one another to determine who had the best team members or something!

Warmachine Lists Ramblings

I’ve been willing to write an article about Warmachine for quite some time now but I felt like I didn’t have enough to say to actually be interesting. Now I still don’t but I feel like talking about WM anyway so here it is.

I’ve been playing for about 6 months now, as Cryx. I started out with Mortenebra and quickly found out about Lamoron’s blog which is a real goldmine of information for any Cryx player in my opinion.

Petit Monde : Art Game

I had such a busy day today I thought I’d never have time to write down any post but here it is!

In the end I even had time to play a small warmachine game in a new tabletop games club I found about a week ago. We played a 35 points game without any scenario, my Mortenebra against his Kallus (Cryx vs Everblight). I made some mistakes in the beginning and lost my assassination pieces but in the end Kallus saw a 3 focus-3 souls-Terminal Velocity-Recalibration-Harrower coming down on him… One more warlock soul for the Lord Toruk!

Anyway back to the topic : Petit Monde! (‘A Small World’ in Shakespeare’s tongue)

This is an Art Game I made with a team of 7 other people last year as part of my cursus. It took us approximatly 3 weeks to do and we added the sounds on the 4th week and did some final adjustments to the balance of the game and some AI tweaks. As you probably know the goal of an Art Game is mainly to share and show an idea in a “recreational” way.

We were quite influenced in this work by Gonzalo Frasca’s game : September 12th

In his game you must kill terrorists hiding in a middle east city by shooting missiles at them. Even though you try and aim only at the terrorists, your missiles end up killing innoncent civilians. These civilians will then gather around the corpes of their fellow countrymen to grief… And some of them will then turn into terrorists.

This is a perfect example of a good Art Game to me. A small message, easy to decipher and which bears meaning. You don’t even need to agree with it, but it’s just there for you to discover. It will make you think about it, and you might want to do some research to either agree or disagree with it… Anyway it carries an idea.

And we quite liked that! Petit Monde is also the simulation of a world : here you have the villagers of the town (on the left) against the monsters of the forest (on the right). In order to survive the villagers must gather food, and the food grows on trees which are in the forest, where all the monsters are… Obviously the monsters will kill any citizen they see.

Here you are, God of this Petit Monde, sitting on your cloud, watching your people live. You probably want to take part of this world and so you can! By clicking a villager or a monster you can take control of it and do whatever you like. But here is the catch : any action you’ll take will destroy the balance of the world. If you help the villagers too much, the small town will grow and soon there won’t be any trees left to fill your citizens belly. On another hand if you eat every single citizen with your monsters, they won’t be able to eat anymore.

Whatever you do, if you side with one “faction” the end result will be a game over. So let’s say you want to understand the game for real : you’ll make a game and help what looks like the “goodies” and end up with a game over. Then you’ll side with the “baddies” and end up with another game over. Then you’ll side for the goodies a bit, then with the baddies a bit to keep the balance of your world… But what if you hadn’t done anything in the first place ? What would have happened ? Well I’ll let you find out by yourselves but the answer is pretty simple!

You will probably notice that there are some achievements and stuff if you click on your God. These are some sort of challenges you can do to enhance the game durability. Let’s be honest it’s not very good and add nothing to the experience. Actually I think it discredits the work we did but heh, teachers’ are always right, aren’t they…? My advice would be to not even read them (they’re in french anyway!) and play your first games as though they didn’t existed.

But let’s go back to the artistic part. I think this is quite beautiful ! It’s a nice sight of things, and it puts your game experience in relation with what happens to our planet. Don’t get me wrong I’m not saying this is actually a simulation of our world, but it might help people understand that their actions create opposite reactions. It’s amazing how productive doing nothing can be!

Then again, you can agree or disagree, but it makes you question yourself (and maybe to wikipedia too…) and I find that very interesting. It’s probably the best type of games you can do as a small team of relatively green devs.

This experience was awesome for my reasons, even though I missed the first week of development because I was having some surgery (and I didn’t even die \o/). I liked the idea of the game and I was the only one to tweak our .lua’s to balance the game. I did a huge load of play tests and I’m rather happy with what I did. It’s far from perfect of course but still, I can see my work when I play, and remember how this or that was completly broken and it took my a full night to actually correct the problems…

Anyway this was supposed to be a short post to talk about this game and it looks like it’s gonna be a huge wall of text filled with typos… I’ll correct everything tomorrow, that a promise!

Getting Started

After so many years it’s finally time for me to create a big blog to put together all my works and critics about video games, but also some general ramblings about boardgames and tabletop games, especially Warmachine/Hordes !