Playing to win: Dawn of War II, part 2

This is part two of a continuing series detailing the journey of a casual player into the intense environment of competitive real-time strategy in Dawn of War II.

When I started playing Virtua Fighter 4, I got schooled for months before I felt I could hold my own against my far more experienced coworkers.  So if there’s one thing I learned from my (admittedly limited) competitive experience in the fighting game genre, it’s that persistence is key – even when faced with an endless number of losses.  I can clearly recall going for weeks at a time where every single Virtua Fighter match I played ended with me passing the stick on to the next guy, at which point I’d sit and watch for the next six or seven minutes until it was my turn again in the player rotation.  And then, with a cold start, I’d fail again and repeat the process.

The past few days have really tested my RTS persistence in the same way that the Virtua Fighter scene once did.  After enduring another three losses on Saturday afternoon, I managed to pull off a two-win streak, bringing my TrueSkill rating to 10 (probably because I managed to defeat a TS 16 opponent).  One of those was a particularly tense match against an Eldar opponent.  The game brought us well into tier 3.  I managed to put some fully-teched Nob Squads and a Looted Tank out to clinch me the game.  The Looted Tank’s bombardment in conjunction with a Rok Strike was able to break the player’s troop cluster, leaving my Nobs to wipe up the mess.  My mobility and control of the map eventually netted me the win.

But my victories were short-lived, as I’ve since played at least six games without a single win – most of those losses being complete VP shutouts.   And in only one of those games did I feel I had a chance at winning.  It was a game I played against a Hive Tyrant player.  I had a lot of early victories due to some great Stikkbomma micro (at least by my standards) and harassment, but in the end, the opponent secured the victory point towers and entrenched himself with an impregnable combination of units.  Fortunately, he congratulated me after the match for doing a great job of harassing him with my grenades, so my performance wasn’t a complete failure.  Regardless, after another couple of crushing defeats, it felt just like those early VF months all over again.

It’s funny to read about the “insularity” of competitive fighting games when the barrier-to-entry of competitive RTS is so comparatively insurmountable.  Even newbies to Virtua Fighter can button mash Lei-Fei and get a few lucky wins against intermediate opponents.  But there is no such RTS analogue.  Every RTS match requires both careful execution and long-term analysis that can’t just be “guessed”.  To be more precise, fighting game matches often linger in what I’ll call “neutral states”, where neither player has any accumulated advantage.  It’s like when both players in Street Fighter are standing on opposite sides of the screen, quickly analyzing whether their next move should be a fireball or a jump-in or a dragon punch.  Neither player in that situation is innately “better off” than the other – they’re both entering into a new guessing game in which either player can win or lose as a result.  But RTS matches generally have no neutral states.  Every player choice has economic repercussions that affect their options for the rest of the game.  In Dawn of War II, if you mismanage your units early on and lose that squad or lose that generator, you are at an innate military and/or economic disadvantage, and you’re forced to fight the odds to turn the tables.  It’s not the neutral-state mind game that you find yourself in when you just ate a combo in a fighting game.  Furthermore, an RTS match in modern, faster-paced RTS’s can go anywhere from 15-30 minutes, which means that competitive play requires a much longer attention span than the typical 2-3 minute fighting game match.  It’s clear why competitive RTS is far more insular than competitive fighting.

And it is with these things in mind that I’m attempting to climb this insanely steep learning curve.  Today actually marks my first week of playing Dawn of War II.  With a current record of 3-17, and TrueSkill rating of 11, I can’t say the journey hasn’t been discouraging.  My efforts are also amidst allegations of Tyranid imbalance, a population cap bug that “breaks” multiplayer, and possibly bugged damage output on the Ork Wartrukk, making the experience that much more difficult (and confusing).  But I’m still playing and I’m still learning.  I’ve made a lot of stupid mistakes in recent games: neglecting my units, floating too many resources, pointing my Mekboy’s turret in the wrong direction, retreating units I didn’t intend to retreat, building incorrect counters (Tankbustas are not infantry counters!).  But I’ve also been getting better at the Stikkbomma micro, map control, multi-pronged attacks, and anticipating the opponent’s actions.  It’s the kind of stuff you really only learn by getting it beat into you.

And believe me, it’s definitely being beaten into me.  But I’ve got high hopes and a stride in my (limping) step.  My most recent game was against yet another Hive Tyrant player – TrueSkill 21 – a step up from my own abilities.  I went with a very unconventional build order, opting to use the Mekboy to build turrets to secure capture points while equipping my Sluggas with early flamers as opposed to teching my HQ.  I was sick of early game ‘gaunt dominance – they were going to burn.  With a Stikkbomma squad to help out, I had pushed the opponent back into his base, and I had almost entire control of the map.  With all three victory point towers under my control, I brought his VP total down to 19.  This was shortly before his massive pushback hit me hard.  The opponent’s T2 and T3 units began dominating everything I threw at them, and he was able to spread his forces out enough to guard two of the three points.  I used an infiltrated Kommando squad to target his clustered forces with my Looted Tank, and I had some success, but I just could not get the leverage to snag those last VP’s.  The opponent made a huge comeback and won the game.  But it was a great match.  I even saved the replay.  It was one of those losses where you’re proud of the fight you put up.  I was beginning to glimpse that light at the end of the tunnel – the enjoyment of going toe-to-toe in epic battle with peers of comparable skill.  It was like seeing the holy grail of multiplayer RTS.  So few survive the treacherous trek to it, but those that do cling tightly to their priceless treasure.

I mentioned my first two victories, but I never mentioned my third one.  I played a Space Marine player that was clearly not proficient in the multiplayer game at all.  I defeated him with almost a complete shutout (I lost 4 points), and I had only lost 2 units throughout the entire battle.  Looking at his stats post-game, I noticed it was his first ranked match.  Would it be his last?  I couldn’t help but wonder if he was just like me in past years – dipping his toes into the frigid competitive RTS waters, getting a bit of frostbite, and moving on to something warmer and fuzzier – like campaign mode.  “First game?” I asked in post-game chat.  He had already left.