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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

My little brother, quoting a noted SC personality: when you're ahead, get more ahead. It is probably the most important strategic lesson in the game: if you have a temporary 5 pct material advantage, you can still easily get outplayed if you force a fight. Better to turn that into a 10 pct material advantage, etc, and force a fight only after you've already won.

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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"Sun Tzu said: The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity of defeating the enemy. To secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself. [...] Hence the skillful fighter puts himself into a position which makes defeat impossible, and does not miss the moment for defeating the enemy."

* * * * *

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.

* * * * *

'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.

Sun Tzu was my first thought as well:

"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.

    If there's a lesson here, its that strategy 
    gamers might benefit from doing some reading.

You have to play sc2 or similar games for years before that kind of advice becomes applicable (since there is so much basic skill to pick up before the game becomes that strategic), and by the time you know the game well enough to find the correct analogy to something written in The Art of War you've probably already discovered it yourself.

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 have to play sc2 or similar games for years before that kind of advice becomes applicable (since there is so much basic skill to pick up before the game becomes that strategic), and by the time you know the game well enough to find the correct analogy to something written in The Art of War you've probably already discovered it yourself.

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.

    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.

Can you point where the circularity comes in?

I said that by the time the advice that can be learned from reading TAOW becomes useful they would have already learned it from their "battle" experience.

What I am saying is that reading it in book form will at most provide an "aha - that's why this strategy I've been contemplating is good!" moment, rather than a new idea about how to play the game.

I've been playing sc2 on and off (mostly off) since it was released and am a diamond league player & most of the time the game is still more about paying attention and tactics rather than high level strategy for me.

And I am pretty sure I would have not have even got to this level were I not already a somewhat competent wc3 player.

Maybe if you play 10+ hours per week of sc2 every week since it came out you would not need years to master the game, but as a busy professional with little free time and many games I doubt you could ever reach that level in a matter of months without having played a lot of sc1/wc3 beforehand.

EDIT: take a look at http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/Battle.net_Leagues#Lea... - 80% of players are at platinum league or less, where the game definitively requires more getting over basic tactics than high level strategy. I would bet you can win with a marine/zergling/zealot rush in almost every match in these leagues if you have sufficiently superior micro to your opponent.

> 80% of players are at platinum league or less

By definition, platinum or below is the bottom 80% of the player base. No matter how good the sc2 population gets, around 80% will ALWAYS be platinum or below.

That doesn't necessarily mean that the skill level for platinum or below will always be static though. For example, the korean server is generally regarded as more difficult. A platinum player on the NA server might only reach gold there (or might still be platinum but lose more).

But you are definitely correct that their mechanics are the main thing that separates most top players. I would emphasize macro as being much more important than micro though.

Studying pure game theory isn't going to help the SC2 player, at least not in any tangible way, the same with current AI practices.

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".

It'd definitely help people wanting to write articles analyzing starcraft. There's definitely things the author doesn't get, that'd seem obvious if he'd read this stuff.

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".

> It is desirable property in a game, that there is no obvious strongly dominant pure strategy.

Unless it's a game of skill. E.g. you win a race by running faster than other people. That can still be fun.

Yes, sure, fair point. I was talking about strategy games as such - but you are right that there's large elements of execution skill in many games, even in an RTS like starcraft, which is also fun to compete on.

Yes. Though even games that have dominant pure strategies in theory, like chess or go can be fun to compete in. Because humans don't have access to the optimal strategies, execution skill and gambling creep in.

(Gambling in the sense: You can create more or less complicated situations. There's more or less apparent entropy in the game you are playing then.)

The flip side of this is that if you are down by a little bit, you should not allow your opponent to slowly and confidently increase his advantage (unless you think he'll make little mistakes and lose the advantage; that would probably mean you're better than him, and we're probably not talking about that situation). Instead, you should force a big risky fight in which your opponent has a substantial chance of losing, if that's possible.

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".

As someone who's been watching professional Korean SC competition for almost 10 years, the strategy described by your brother can be found from many high class players. Unlike Warcraft3 or other RTS, units in SC have very low health. Even if you have 5% more units, you can easily lose a fight within seconds from bad unit control, bad fighting position or just bad luck. It's never a good idea to attack just because you have 5% more units. Good players will continue play cautiously to make sure the opponent never gets a chance to take those 5% back. In the end, they win by the accumulated bits of advantages from various battles or economy advantages. You don't always need an glorious "final battle" to win the game, as long as your advantage is big enough (say 50%), you opponent will know that he lost and leave the game.

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.

For the Starcraft watcher/spectator's counterpart of the article, there is the University of Washington Starcraft spectators study: http://jeffhuang.com/Final_StarcraftSpectator_CHI11.pdf

They explain the many types of people that watch Starcraft, and that Starcraft games are fun to watch because of "Information Asymmetry"

Your brother is quoting the author of this article, in fact.

I thought he was quoting Dan 'Artosis' Stemkoski? Although both Day9 and Artosis are great analytical commentators and have a great knowledge of the game, but I believe Day9 usually cites Artosis on this.

Yep, that's Artosis's line, not Day[9]'s.

Didn't know you were interested in SC at all, patrick. Would you like to play some time?

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.

What's your Elo?

Suffice it to say that if this whole entrepreneurship thing doesn't work out, my odds of supporting myself through professional gaming are even worse than everyone else's.

Don't feel bad. I'm a cool 900.

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