ESOCommunity

Snuden wrote:See if you can get higher ranked players to play vs you and have them obs your gamesh.
Turns out my game is terrible, what a surprise!

Having a PR38+ player obs and comment would probably break down my ego.

We can do time to micro if u want

That's taking it too far for me, I like to play the game as it is.

I think the size of the games community and the competitive scene for it are the main reason you might feel mechanics matter less. There is a constant decline in skill level in older games like AoE3.

Yea the larger the player base the more relevant mechanics would be, there’s nothing inherent about the game that should let someone get away with subpar mechanics

_H2O wrote:I think the size of the games community and the competitive scene for it are the main reason you might feel mechanics matter less. There is a constant decline in skill level in older games like AoE3.

I don't really agree with this. Would you claim winston's in overwatch need amazing mechanics then? Or would you claim that if this community was playing sc2 we would also think mechanics don't matter that much?

On the question of how to improve mechanics, I used to be very low on this and kaiser helped me a lot to improve it (even though it didn't impact my overall lvl since the effect was negligeable befor how bad my adpation skill are) :
-We talked about what hotkeys I use
-We played quite a lot of ttm : people like diarouga will say it's useless, but that's wrong at least when you aren't already pr35 or smthg. Now I don't wast tons of key units like falcs anymore, bc when you play ttm you know how to not lose them and how important they are. It taught me how to fight with different compostion the positionning, how to use handcav and overall what to do in a lot of situations. Because when you see this situations during a real game, you can't take the time to think how you need to play them.

just watch a wellhii stream

The issue with ttm is that because you are forced to fight, and because the field is open, it doesn't really help you in real games.
It's surely good when you don't use control groups and you need to learn how to play bow/pike/cav vs bow/pike/cav, but in real situations, there are so many factors you need to consider.

1) Knowing when to fight is key. Fighting when you have the same amount of units as your opponent while you have a unit shipment and a batch on the way surely isn't a good thing. Even with a poor micro, you'll do much better if you know when to take the fight in order to get an advantage.
2) Knowing where to fight. Fighting in your opponent's base, in an open field, or between trees isn't the same at all, and engaging in all these situations (and knowing how to retreat if needed) isn't something you're going to learn in Time To Micro
3) In a real game, you do not have the same unit composition as your opponent. It just never happens, unless it's 100% musk vs 100% musk. So instead of learning how to be 3 xbows up at the end of a bow/pike/cav vs bow/pike/cav battle (which is never going to happen by the way), you'd better learn in real games how to take a good engagement with skirm/cav vs skirm/goon, how to hit and run effectively with skirm/goon vs skirm/cav, and make sure you don't get caught how of position.
And most importantly, learn how to have a good unit composition which counters your opponent's. With a better unit composition, you can totally crush your opponent's army while ttm's goal is to teach you how to get a 2 xbow advantage in a specific situation.

[Armag] diarouga wrote:The issue with ttm is that because you are forced to fight, and because the field is open, it doesn't really help you in real games.
It's surely good when you don't use control groups and you need to learn how to play bow/pike/cav vs bow/pike/cav, but in real situations, there are so many factors you need to consider.

1) Knowing when to fight is key. Fighting when you have the same amount of units as your opponent while you have a unit shipment and a batch on the way surely isn't a good thing. Even with a poor micro, you'll do much better if you know when to take the fight in order to get an advantage.
2) Knowing where to fight. Fighting in your opponent's base, in an open field, or between trees isn't the same at all, and engaging in all these situations (and knowing how to retreat if needed) isn't something you're going to learn in Time To Micro
3) In a real game, you do not have the same unit composition as your opponent. It just never happens, unless it's 100% musk vs 100% musk. So instead of learning how to be 3 xbows up at the end of a bow/pike/cav vs bow/pike/cav battle (which is never going to happen by the way), you'd better learn in real games how to take a good engagement with skirm/cav vs skirm/goon, how to hit and run effectively with skirm/goon vs skirm/cav, and make sure you don't get caught how of position.
And most importantly, learn how to have a good unit composition which counters your opponent's. With a better unit composition, you can totally crush your opponent's army while ttm's goal is to teach you how to get a 2 xbow advantage in a specific situation.

Everything you say here is no counter argument to why playing some ttm is helpful. You just explain why ttm doesn't teach everything in the game which is ofc true, but it doesn't teach nothing either. I was being specific about why it helps to improve the mechanism : You don't only learn how to deal with a Mirror composition, you learn how to control each unit. And even though that's not exactly yhe fights you see in the game, in ttm you have around 3 différents units in your composition each rounds, which put you in severals different situations that happends for real in the game at many moments. Then again ofc you still have a lot more stuff to learn after being good at ttm, but that's not a reason for it to be bad.

ttm is the best way to get used to using control groups without playing a full game. practice make perfect. and you can practice quicker with ttm. ofc its not a substitute to playing games, but its a good complement.

Hazza54321 wrote:just watch a wellhii stream

only if you want to learn micro, I play with master sergeant builds, pr 60 micro.

gibson wrote:

Hazza54321 wrote:just watch a wellhii stream

only if you want to learn micro, I play with master sergeant builds, pr 60 micro.

b...but its so hard to keep track of micro because of that insane apm.

gh0st wrote:

gibson wrote:

Hazza54321 wrote:just watch a wellhii stream

only if you want to learn micro, I play with master sergeant builds, pr 60 micro.

b...but its so hard to keep track of micro because of that insane apm.

Just watch the VOD with 0.1x speed and you might see what he’s doing.

[Armag] diarouga wrote:The issue with ttm is that because you are forced to fight, and because the field is open, it doesn't really help you in real games.
It's surely good when you don't use control groups and you need to learn how to play bow/pike/cav vs bow/pike/cav, but in real situations, there are so many factors you need to consider.

1) Knowing when to fight is key. Fighting when you have the same amount of units as your opponent while you have a unit shipment and a batch on the way surely isn't a good thing. Even with a poor micro, you'll do much better if you know when to take the fight in order to get an advantage.
2) Knowing where to fight. Fighting in your opponent's base, in an open field, or between trees isn't the same at all, and engaging in all these situations (and knowing how to retreat if needed) isn't something you're going to learn in Time To Micro
3) In a real game, you do not have the same unit composition as your opponent. It just never happens, unless it's 100% musk vs 100% musk. So instead of learning how to be 3 xbows up at the end of a bow/pike/cav vs bow/pike/cav battle (which is never going to happen by the way), you'd better learn in real games how to take a good engagement with skirm/cav vs skirm/goon, how to hit and run effectively with skirm/goon vs skirm/cav, and make sure you don't get caught how of position.
And most importantly, learn how to have a good unit composition which counters your opponent's. With a better unit composition, you can totally crush your opponent's army while ttm's goal is to teach you how to get a 2 xbow advantage in a specific situation.

Just check how many people (including higher level players) are unable to micro falcs properly, to split fire, to pull back low hp huss, or even simply to focus the right units. No one said ttm is gonna make a micro god out of you in every single situation, but it definitely helps improve some specific skills.

do what I do.

Metallica wrote:I always lose and I can't beat anyone? How do you become good at this game?

Understand the game mechanics
Understand the MUs
Understand the meta
Practice... a lot

I didn't.

Prince was my trainer, sensei, so me neither.

umeu wrote:ttm is the best way to get used to using control groups without playing a full game. practice make perfect. and you can practice quicker with ttm. ofc its not a substitute to playing games, but its a good complement.

One crucial part of using control groups is just regularly adding the new units to the control groups. I feel like this is as important as properly using them, but you dont train that in ttm. Its fine practise though, probably.

If you took all the Aoe3 players and put them in an isolated setting to play sc2 the level of play would remain low. Mechanics wouldn’t develop nearly as much as there are simply less people pushing the path forward.

Look at the isolated small Mac community and how far behind their skills were.

Also when you look across skill levels in the same game different things matter more. Lower levels the big picture matters more and macro. Later on micro matters more for sure. There are exceptions to everything too. I remember duck had quite good multitasking of his units relative to his PR when he was pr 25 but lacked in other areas.

Well just look at nilla, there's half the player base so they all have like 5-7 pr more compared to tad, for a given skill level. Just shows that less players means less skill.

Neither mechanics nor strategy are more important than the other. To say that either is unimportant is simply wrong.

If we had the same number of people playing AoE3 as play some of these modern games, I'm certain that all of the top players would be more mechanically proficient than those below them.

momuuu wrote:

umeu wrote:ttm is the best way to get used to using control groups without playing a full game. practice make perfect. and you can practice quicker with ttm. ofc its not a substitute to playing games, but its a good complement.

One crucial part of using control groups is just regularly adding the new units to the control groups. I feel like this is as important as properly using them, but you dont train that in ttm. Its fine practise though, probably.

yes that's true. I don't actually do that anymore hehe. I used to. when i had more apm and could use 9 groups... now I just use the select all infantry or select all melee cavalry hotkeys from the game. It has the benefit of not having to add units to the group. It has the drawback of when I'm raiding with 3 cav, and fighint at same time, and out of habbit i press all melee cav hotkey, then my raid totally fails hehe.

Yeah the select all units of same type thing is great to update control groups, as long as you don't have units of the same type spread on the map

It also kinda fails with chinese army honestly. Too many different units in the same group makes the logistics kinda awkward with this Hotkey