FFA Masters League
General => Strategy => Topic started by: SteppinRazor on November 07, 2011, 07:01:33 am
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So I thought we could get a good discussion here about the most complicated part of FFA...THE INFAMOUS 3-WAY GAME
The reason I am making this thread is because I (and I think probably many others, especially newer players) find these types of games hard to deal with in terms of decision making, and 95% of the time I just end up suiciding someone and then dying to the "smarter" player. From what I have experienced, the typical (and key word here is typical, since obviously there can be some amount of variance to this) 3-way games happens when one players kills one of the others. In the majority of the games I see, most 3-ways start out like this: "player 1" who has the strongest heroes, "player 2" who has the strongest economy, and "player 3" who is the weakest (weaker heroes than p1, and less gold than p2). At this point, I find that basically every scenario is a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. If you need hero levels and you make 80/100 food and attack someone, well then the third player just hoards at 50 or comes in your base and kills you when you are weak. If YOU sit 50 and hoard, then you usually end up with bad hero levels and run the risk of dying to someone who 80/100 food pushes you. There's also about a million other things that factor into the game, like what race the players are, if one player is super gosu, what the map is etc etc
So I ask this question: How do you play these types of games and actually give yourself a "decent" chance to win?
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Generalizations are hard to make in 3-ways, but my standard approach is to wait for that window where I am strongest (or just becoming strongest) and they haven't turned on me yet. My plan is take out the weaker one of the two ASAP, and by taking out I mean really destroy him before the damage inflicted by the other guy makes me unable to win the 1v1 (let's say at the start of the 1v1 there's a 5k gold difference, something you can really come back from easily). This is not always an easy task of course, prominent examples being human bases (takes fucking forever, masonry is a joke) or maps where you will have a hard time killing someone off permanently (gold rush..), or if the 2nd strongest guy is elf and may force you to tp constantly because of chims.
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Here is the simplest way to deal with 3 ways that works 99% of the time.
Scenarios:
1. You are the strongest:
-Try pretend you are not strong, if it works, make peace with the weakest vs the 3rd player, team to death, 1v1 the weakling
-If you can't pretend you are not strong, you are fucked. Assuming you are in a game with actually intelligent players. If you are in a game with micro monkeys, it doesnt really matter. Cause you will be stuck there for 3 hours until all gold is drained, then base race /yawn
2. You are the weakest:
-Make sure everyone knows you are the weakest. Use that advantage to hoard up.
-Make peace with 2nd weakest vs the strong and team to death. Then 1v1 and hope you have enough gold to win that.
3. You are not strongest or weakest.
-Peace with weakest. Team strongest to death, 1v1 the weakling. Ez pz.
Key point: private or public peace to THE END. No fucking backstabbing. Make that very clear when you have peace. If they backstab you, suicide the dishonorable fucker. And then 100 food rush them again and again in every game you play them. Dishonorable fuckers need to learn not to backstab. So Educate them.
=This way games don't last long, e.g. 30-60 min tops.
=The moron who plans being the strongest always loses. This may be difficult to understand, but if every player in FFA is 100% logical, not emotional, etc, the strongest (micro wise) player SHOULD NEVER win. Ever. You team them to death, always.
=The fun/important part is the 4 way. It usually lasts 20-30 min, and personally that's what I play for. This is the best part of FFA, the rest is garbage and I don't care so much to play/obs. If you enjoy sitting around and carousel teaming for 3 hours, then this is not for you, obviously. Have fun scratching your arse.
Toodles.
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u manip the weakest guy into teamin the other, then take the win
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3 way in it's simplest form is: "teaming the strongest until hes not the strongest anymore."
So the way to win is to identify the strongest, and make it a 1v1 as soon as you are the strongest (because otherwise they will team you!)
The hard part is usually judging who is the strongest. In order to do so, you must scout a lot (figure who mines what at what upkeep, and how much money they used on building/unit/items) or, you can try to look for signs of fake death
Often, a player will say "i have 0 gold", how to know if he is lying?
-If it's a market map and he has 10k worth of items, hes lying
-If it's a market map and he gets new items, hes lying
-If you destroyed some empty expo, and he starts building farms, hes lying (he can go 100 again, and needs the farm for it)
-Tavern revive is usually VERY suspicious
By that logic, you can also figure out when someone is really dead (but be careful, it might be manip)
-If he starts to sell items
-If he doesn't rebuild his farm/production building
-Orcs tends to make less bats and more wyv
And here are some stuff that DOES NOT MEAN HE HAS GOLD OR NOT
-Building an expo (seriously? you build an expo if you NEED gold, not if you have it)
-Repairing Main/Towers (that doesn't cost much... ofc if you see 10 peon repairing/rebuilding towers, that's another story)
Also, sometime you have to team someone who is not the strongest, but simply a bad match to you. For example, if you only have a few building left, you should be scared of anyone with base racing abilities (tanks/bats/mass tp/tinker/etc). Or some player have such terrible micro, that you feel you can beat him 1v1 even if he has more food/gold.
Also, after watching/obsing many game, you should get a feel of who says what in what situation (some player are completely random and/or new so you can't)
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First: team the orc. If there's no orc team the strongest. If you are the strongest try to point out that someone is hoarding because someone is always hoarding. If there are two orcs, leave because there's nothing you can do. If there's 3 orcs (including you) then you should be ashamed of playing such a race.
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What if there are 4 orcs?
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DISGUSTING
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if there are 3 orc, you have to team whoever has a DR
if two player have dr, team whoever has a DR + imba micro (don't consider gold)
if no one has a dr, then chances are you 3 are idiots for not taking it in orc mirror, and deserve to suffer in a long 3 way of cowsex
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I feel like these are often decided by either the dumbest player who has no idea of whos weakest/strongest/gold amounts being manipulated into teaming.
Or the player who gets bored (me in my games)
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Yes, many time when nothing happend player A just say "... want to team player C, then 1v1? it will go faster", player B will say yes because he's just happy he wasn't just chosen to be teamed
The other commun "luck" scenario is
Player A attack Player B
Player A says "ok, we both fought, we are both weak... lets team C now"
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The way I deal with 3 ways is by identifying the person who I think I can beat 1v1. Doesn't matter if that person is the strongest or not, if I can take him 1v1, i'll team with him to kill the guy that I can't. Then proceed to kill the other one once the one I can't beat alone is dead.
If I don't think I can kill any of them I just go after the one who pissed me off the most in the game...
Yeah, I don't usually have 3 way games because of this and if I do, they dont' last long.
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...
last 3 way we had, you ask me to team the other guy
:(
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DISGUSTING
4 way orc battles are actually a lot of fun :icon_razz:
No one can claim imbalance and it's just a massive amount of cow battles, one after another. Fights last a super long time due to all the tauren rezzing. It gets pretty insane!
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DISGUSTING
4 way orc battles are actually a lot of fun :icon_razz:
No one can claim imbalance and it's just a massive amount of cow battles, one after another. Fights last a super long time due to all the tauren rezzing. It gets pretty insane!
The hell you are going to, Darkness, will have plenty of cow coupling that you wil no doubt enjoy.
Toodles.
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DISGUSTING
4 way orc battles are actually a lot of fun :icon_razz:
No one can claim imbalance and it's just a massive amount of cow battles, one after another. Fights last a super long time due to all the tauren rezzing. It gets pretty insane!
That sounds more boring than the w8man/L77/Rain game where everyone just went gryphons/tanks.
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DISGUSTING
4 way orc battles are actually a lot of fun :icon_razz:
No one can claim imbalance and it's just a massive amount of cow battles, one after another. Fights last a super long time due to all the tauren rezzing. It gets pretty insane!
Actually, the DR orc is usually considered imba and teamed (Long battle of all ground => Charm ftw)
And, the horrible part, is that every battle usually last 10min, and when someone finally tps away, they are both still 100/100 cause of the rezing!!!!
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u can either try to constantly trying to balance the 3-way, which will end in hero-arena or baserace ( in best case) what can be really funny or forcing a 1vs1 sooner or later while letting u the option to team up when u cannot finish someone, hoping he will understand why u pushed him >>>> do not overreact on provocation, chat/manip, attacks generally.
u usually get the best 3-way when u have equally experienced/skilled player, when the gap is too big for whatever reason it can become dirty.
experience, playing with seasoned ffa-players escpecially, scouting and using ur brain instead of taking too much care about texting ( filtering out the useful infos is the key) helps, too.
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3-ways with same races are fun.
i actually hate more facing 2 mass-tower human-hoarders with mass tp/tanks than 2 orcs, since with the orcs u atleast often get ur fights, while with the humans u facing only 3 heroes,tanks or or u have to enter their simcitybases with more towers than rygorych has posts referring to his own games ( really not need to answer in any way to this , just could not resist ^^ ).
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An apt comparison, old chap.
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Slythe, wtf you typed??? more boring then my game??? Did you see how gryphs fl blizzard easily kill sparkle on mosoon?! go to ground army is shit! no mobility, no dps, free XP for enemies! only what you need are mortars if other have much tanks, sb if other have something like Panda, other is shit!!! human dont have good casters like orc! FF\polimorf good only in begin cauz of dispel and ofc its will be dead very fast
p.s. dont understand why you think that my game is boring ofc there are mass camping but if something go attack he lose, cauz of gold lack. may be you like shity games in 30 mins like on DR with star
sorry for my french.dont wanna use translator, but cannot watch how you all guys fuck this!
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My game was boring too. It's just that in yours there were 3 players doing nothing but gryphon/tanks for one whole hour. I don't remember a single other unit.
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omg i dont think my game was boring like yours!
in your game 1 player kill yourself other dont have micro other was pushed in first 15 mins...
but i think its not freewin for you
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(mobility? tanks are slow as hell!)
your game was "boring" because there was almost no variation (except the end, that was fun!)
Gryph/Tank vs Gryph/Tank vs Gryph/Tank
Now, if you know your vs gryph tanks, your might as well get hawk/motar
Or at least add a couple of hawk to stop the gryph's mobility
Or add a few casters, there is no way they could have dispel slow/poly/innerfire because THEY HAD NO CASTER!
I'm not saying you should go all ground or have 20 food of caster, but having just 1 sorc, would either own them, or force them to get priest + micro the dispel instead of microing the army during battle!
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omg tanks need for protection against gryphs, only gryphs make damage! about motar i have 3 ITS ENOUGH. hawks - lol, if enemy have hawk then it first unit who will be killed!how you wanna use hawks? army always tp so gryphs dont run as much as need for this . about sorcs and other shit - mk kill that very easy, 1 sorc as you say, not help much, btw casters need much more micro, so when you use your poli your hero can be killed in a few seconds and enemy tp...
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Use only slow! its auto cast, so no micro
And for hawk its not the first one to cast, its the one with most hawk!
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Basic goal is making a 3-way into a 1v1 against someone weaker than you. If you're strongest, you kill the easiest to kill (which would be an undead). If you're in the middle, you team the strongest until he's out or much weaker than you. If you're the weakest, you play equalizer until you aren't the weakest and then refer to the above. Beyond that it's a mess of skill, balance, perception, and deception that'll only get sorted out with experience.
Now somebody tell me I'm pretty.
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plush, you motherfucker, come game with us
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If you're strongest, you kill the easiest to kill (which would be an undead).
And get 2v1ed. If you're strongest, you need to pretend you're middle, and team up with weakest to kill the real middle.
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If you're strongest, you kill the easiest to kill (which would be an undead).
And get 2v1ed. If you're strongest, you need to pretend you're middle, and team up with weakest to kill the real middle.
Problem with this is players eventually get used to players doing things like these. The strongest player sometimes need to even act as the weakest, but they need to make plays throughout the game to make it believable. Like a good example, in the last round I purposely let rain kill an entire 100 food army to make him believe he would win vs me if it came down to a 1v1. The human had been tanking his expos all game and I was clearly ahead and all I had to do was hit the human who couldn't physically attack me because he was cross map. I then literally sat at 50 all game with 7 mines? and was able to feign my weakness because I had the fact I tower rush suicided Eshan at the start and then got raped by Rain. Morale of the story, you can't just say you are the weakest or middle player vs strategic players, they will eat you alive. You have to be setting it up all game and make it known to all players so they physically know you are "losing."
On another note, if somebody asks you for your gold, don't divide by 2. Take the duck approach and /10( obviously switch it up now that I posted this...)
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That's a good point Duck, of course there are many ways to play underdog, and certain players can't really be underdogs no matter what they say/do just because of their history/micro.
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but according to plush's post, you should want to look like the middle man, not the weakest, since the strongest will try to finish you off
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Ideally you would look like the weakest, look weaker than you really are, but also look harder or about equally difficult to take out or cripple than the middle guy. It's also better if you can accomplish this with your play rather than chat because there aren't many ffa players, we've all seen each others' tricks, and it takes the automatic presumption that you're manipulating out of it.
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my FFA games on ladder are ALWAYS like this:
- for some reason 75% of my games i am surrounded :icon_mad: so i have to rush one out because i need mines (ladder noobs dont let me expand crossmap anyway...)
so its a fast 3-way with:
- me
- 1 human with 1000 towers, mass tp and tanks but inferior skill
- 1 retard who doesnt realize "he can not beat mass tp so he decide to kill me first", as a result i am suicided and left with 0 gold against a mass tp human who gets the freewin
That's actually the reason why i wanted to play in FML because after those ladder games i always have a feeling like: why did i lose my time on this?