I finally caved in and took up the recommendation by TRS to watch Avatar: The Last Airbender. And in my customary obsessive compulsive fashion, I’ve gone and watched every single episode. I really like this show. I wish I had a show like this to watch when I was a kid. I love you Transformers, but your writing is not nearly on the same level as Avatar.
After watching for the entire day (Ah, the price I pay for TV geekery), I capped off the end of my Easter Friday with a ranked 1v1 game in Company of Heroes. Here’s another match recap:
I’m lucky that I’m at a point where I’m mostly playing against fairly green players. I’ve been watching a lot of replays and doing a lot of CPU skirmishes, so I’ve had a chance to raise my skills in such a way that isn’t reflected in my online ranking, so the automatching service is matching me against people who are comparatively less skilled than me. Case in point, this game against someone named Garnir (playing Panzer Elite) only lasted 13 minutes, when the average game can last from thirty minutes to an hour.
One of the maps I had checked off as “prefer not to play” was Beaux Lowlands, and unfortunately it was the map chosen to play on. I think I had an admirable start, quickly taking complete uncontested control of the left side of the map. So I moved nearly all of my riflemen (and therefore my combat power) to the right hand side to try and secure a quick win and to just get into some conflict and try to do some damage to my opponent. Luckily what resistance I met was pretty light; a procession of scout cars, later followed by two squads of infantry, which were easily taken out by my four and later three squads of riflemen. What was interesting, and later confirmed by going over the replay, was his choice of sending two Marder III’s after me after I had repelled his scout cars and infantry. Marder III’s are powerful anti-armor units, and are brutally effective versus vehicles. But they’re equally ineffective against infantry. And after seeing his scout cars, I quickly teched up for anti-vehicle sticky bombs for my riflemen, so his first Marder was easily disposed of when I encountered it. Followed up by a couple squads of Airborne troopers with their anti-vehicle recoilless rifles, and after losing his second Marder III to my Airborne, he conceded the game.
I think Garnir lost because he was inexperienced not only in micro’ing his squads (he continued to attempt to capture points when I engaged him in combat), but also in reading what signals I was sending him during combat. My heavy use of riflemen and infantry in general should’ve signalled to him that double Marder III’s were not the answer. He was smart enough to try to use anti-infantry assault grenadier squads, but his poor micro made it so that I could flank them from behind during the confrontation and easily wipe them out.
When reviewing my own play however, I definitely made some mistakes. In some cases, I chose to hold back when I should have pushed. Perhaps I was being hesitant; at the time, I wasn’t sure if I wasn’t simply just walking into a trap, since I encountered little resistance and was unsure as to what Garnir’s true skill level was (he was a rank 1 PE player according to the automatch system, and I was a rank 1 American player). Some more scouting would have been advantageous on my part.
Now that I’ve got my daily dose of CoH, I want to watch more Avatar.
