So a buddy of mine who I've been playing with for some time wanted me to help him get better after he suffered a savage beating at a tournament a couple weeks ago. I invited him out for a mock match where I'd coach him on his fleet and how he ran it. He brought the fleet he played in the tournament.

It was a close match, I lost some valuable ships very early, but I managed to strike the intel out of his fleet and move Jendon/Stele in to finish off an Mc30 I softened out the side of my ISD. The last couple rounds I got my ISD in range of his lifeboat, and a momentary lapse in judgement on his part caused him to activate out of order letting me target it at blue range. We play often and he did exceptionally well with a point difference of only 60 or so. ( I normally table him, or **** near)

(On a side note I got a chance to actually use some of the squad plates I bought for myself a while ago, they worked great. As it turns out color coding the plates really helps me track what is where on the field. I was able to track my escort, intel, and bomber pieces at a glance and, when squads were doing stuff just popping the card holder on the mat near squads really speeds things up.)

All that said, I want to continue to teach my friend to play better.

We both started playing at the same time. He picked rebels, me imperials and at first we were very balanced. He knows the rules, he understands the synergy between his ships and squads, but I think he's having a real hard time seeing big picture.

I tried tutoring him with these steps:

1.) What do you want to do
-damage via ships (big)
-damage via ships (MSU)
-damage via squads
-objective focused
2.) How will it work (synergy)
3.) What objectives will enhance it
4.) What formations can you design


Is there any other methodology anyone else has tried to help improve or train others?

Pic of match:















I just noticed these two plates have the wrong markers lol never came up in game they weren't shot at ^^

Number one rule is practise.

Number two rule is make it good practise.

Playing the same fleet 10 times is a good way to start. If you play a match once, and then swap your list, you make it difficult to apply lessons learnt.

18 minutes ago, TheCallum said:

Number one rule is practise.

Number two rule is make it good practise.

Playing the same fleet 10 times is a good way to start. If you play a match once, and then swap your list, you make it difficult to apply lessons learnt.

Yes! Agreed completely, we worked together to come up with a pretty hard hitting MSU fleet, I'm going to encourage him to play it often to get a feel for it.

STOP BREATH.

Who wrote the article on this? Its basically, stop and breath.

14 minutes ago, TheCallum said:

Number one rule is practise.

Number two rule is make it good practise.

Playing the same fleet 10 times is a good way to start. If you play a match once, and then swap your list, you make it difficult to apply lessons learnt.

Partners that are willing to swap "constructive" games are a huge help. Find a fleet concept you like, play it consistently, and then get your friend to take different stuff against it. You do the same for him.

Take your egos off the table: these are learning games, not competitive. Give each other advice during the game, talk out your reasoning for what you're thinking about doing or why you did what you did. Consider the pros and cons of a given maneuver from both sides of the table's perspective, and talk about what "I was afraid you were going to do this" scenarios you see.

I also like to play very loose with the rules with these kinds of games, sometimes allowing take-backs of mistakes or tactical missteps if it becomes immediately clear that it's a game-ending mistake. Nobody becomes a better player by exploiting an obvious bad play on the other guy's part.

Then after the game sit back and assess big picture. What were the critical points of the game? What were each of you trying to do, and how successfully did you accomplish those things? That will help you identify weaknesses in strategy vs weaknesses in execution.

And yeah, just practice with consistent list archetypes. A broad range of fleets will give you insight into the other guy's strategies, and there is value in it, but mostly playing a focused "regular" fleet will help you learn how to use your own strategy to exploit his. It doesn't have to be completely unchanging, but keep it relatively consistent with only incremental changes until you're comfortable with it.

1 minute ago, Ardaedhel said:

Partners that are willing to swap "constructive" games are a huge help.

True dat. Shout out to PT, CNinj and GK here.

4 minutes ago, Ardaedhel said:

Partners that are willing to swap "constructive" games are a huge help. Find a fleet concept you like, play it consistently, and then get your friend to take different stuff against it. You do the same for him.

Take your egos off the table: these are learning games, not competitive. Give each other advice during the game, talk out your reasoning for what you're thinking about doing or why you did what you did. Consider the pros and cons of a given maneuver from both sides of the table's perspective, and talk about what "I was afraid you were going to do this" scenarios you see.

I also like to play very loose with the rules with these kinds of games, sometimes allowing take-backs of mistakes or tactical missteps if it becomes immediately clear that it's a game-ending mistake. Nobody becomes a better player by exploiting an obvious bad play on the other guy's part.

Then after the game sit back and assess big picture. What were the critical points of the game? What were each of you trying to do, and how successfully did you accomplish those things? That will help you identify weaknesses in strategy vs weaknesses in execution.

And yeah, just practice with consistent list archetypes. A broad range of fleets will give you insight into the other guy's strategies, and there is value in it, but mostly playing a focused "regular" fleet will help you learn how to use your own strategy to exploit his. It doesn't have to be completely unchanging, but keep it relatively consistent with only incremental changes until you're comfortable with it.

Yeah! This is what we did.

He's the one who pointed the game out to me back in 2015 and we both invested in waves equally till wave 3&4, at that time we were equals, since then, I've grown quite good. I only lose maybe 1/8 of the time out of our entire group. We were both in the tournament he got thrashed in and I tabled him there. The fact that he was able to improve with a fleet he went 10-1 against me into a 7-4 was impressive. During our match I talked him through maneuvering and thinking ahead and he was able to start picking out the good choices.

We discussed a more solid fleet, since he hadn't really designed his to do anything just kinda shambled together working bits of upgrades and abilities.

We're gonna do some practice tonight after work.

Quick thoughts on his fleet/play from the pictures:

Like you said, I don't think that was a great list.

He's flying his ships at your ISD. That's almost never a smart move. The ISD is too hard to take down and too good at taking down the smaller rebel ships. The fighters were going to be tied down by your fighters and so can't punch through the ISD enough for his ships to do serious damage.

In the second picture his fighters are too far out. They're inviting fire from the ISD and your fighters. Given that he doesn't have the power to take down your ISD, he needs to keep his ships and win a fighter war at least.

In general he seems too eager to engage. That's how I was when I started playing. I had these ships and I wanted them to shoot at things. You just have to pick the right engages at the right times. Rushing into battle with everything will likely get you over extended and give the advantage to the enemy, especially if it's an ISD vs any smaller ship.

That's what I saw in the images at least. It's hard to know how the game actually went.

20 minutes ago, shadeofdawn said:

Quick thoughts on his fleet/play from the pictures:

Like you said, I don't think that was a great list.

He's flying his ships at your ISD. That's almost never a smart move. The ISD is too hard to take down and too good at taking down the smaller rebel ships. The fighters were going to be tied down by your fighters and so can't punch through the ISD enough for his ships to do serious damage.

In the second picture his fighters are too far out. They're inviting fire from the ISD and your fighters. Given that he doesn't have the power to take down your ISD, he needs to keep his ships and win a fighter war at least.

In general he seems too eager to engage. That's how I was when I started playing. I had these ships and I wanted them to shoot at things. You just have to pick the right engages at the right times. Rushing into battle with everything will likely get you over extended and give the advantage to the enemy, especially if it's an ISD vs any smaller ship.

That's what I saw in the images at least. It's hard to know how the game actually went.

Well I wouldn't say that, he sank 2 ships, and had he activated in the correct order and locked down my jendon/stele combo in time (which he had the chance but used it to trigger sato instead) he'd have won.

His problem is he designed a weak fleet with no real goals in mind. a Sato fleet using Mc30s to trigger long range black crits should have a full wing of bombers to deal a heft of damage before/after the mc30's hit to soften, he ran a screen instead. Made no real sense to me. Then the pelta was basically unused as fighter support, he'd have been better off using VCXs and a couple gr-75s....

That said, we built a fun TRC mc30 akbar fleet for him instead that looks painful on paper, so we'll see.

So we ran the fleet I had him build. It was a pretty simple 2 TRC 90s, one of them jainas light, 2 TRC 30s with gunnery teams, one of them flagship with akbar, ecms, and foresight, and a single gr75 with JF. 3 xwings 2 Zs.

I was running ISD II Avenger with a couple Kittens and a gozanti, Vader as commander. Brought Jendon, stele, and a single Tie Advanced

He really took to the new fleet. Flew perfect circles around my ships dumping 4-8 damage pershot on them. By the end of round 4 he had me completely surrounded (pics below). Had he used his fighter screen a little better he'd of come out much futher ahead but I was able to use Jendon and Stele to rack up a few kills through a gozanti that he let slip by early game.

7-4 victory in his favor.

He's gonna keep trying this fleet.



Pardon the lack of mats, his table is about 6" short on the 6' side so we don't use 'em

On 20 March 2017 at 6:33 PM, Ardaedhel said:

Partners that are willing to swap "constructive" games are a huge help. Find a fleet concept you like, play it consistently, and then get your friend to take different stuff against it. You do the same for him.

Take your egos off the table: these are learning games, not competitive. Give each other advice during the game, talk out your reasoning for what you're thinking about doing or why you did what you did. Consider the pros and cons of a given maneuver from both sides of the table's perspective, and talk about what "I was afraid you were going to do this" scenarios you see.

I also like to play very loose with the rules with these kinds of games, sometimes allowing take-backs of mistakes or tactical missteps if it becomes immediately clear that it's a game-ending mistake. Nobody becomes a better player by exploiting an obvious bad play on the other guy's part.

Then after the game sit back and assess big picture. What were the critical points of the game? What were each of you trying to do, and how successfully did you accomplish those things? That will help you identify weaknesses in strategy vs weaknesses in execution.

And yeah, just practice with consistent list archetypes. A broad range of fleets will give you insight into the other guy's strategies, and there is value in it, but mostly playing a focused "regular" fleet will help you learn how to use your own strategy to exploit his. It doesn't have to be completely unchanging, but keep it relatively consistent with only incremental changes until you're comfortable with it.

I think everything you need to do to support someone to improve is covered by the above quote... My main practice partner is my brother and most of our games are based around developing our game play (we both want to win each game as we struggle with brotherly rivalry but neither says that out loud and we do sometimes bicker over judgements) we often spend a good 30mins after reach round talking about what happened and what could have happened over a cuppa, we also will offer roll back a movement and try something different as we are looking to experance different outcome... Most round 5,6 are fast played without much accuracy as you can tend to see how the chips have fallen by that point.

When we are trying to prep somebody for a tournament, we do a lot of decision-out-loud strategizing. So a lot of "If you activate A, what am I going to activate in response?" It helps identify potential and missed opportunities. We work through a lot of action-reaction so that they are now not just thinking about the current move, but the next 3-4.

We we also have them pick a list to start with and have it play multiple opposing archetypes. It lets them see strengths and weaknesses.

Darth Sanguis, where did you get those squad plates? I would love to get my hands on them. I have some ship plates I grabbed off of shapeways that I like, but those squad plates definitely look way cleaner and appear to be far less cumbersome when adjusting squad hp. I get used to holding up fingers and counting while someone else attacks the same squadron multiple times just so I don't have to pick it up, change the value then replace the unit.

On 3/20/2017 at 1:28 PM, Ginkapo said:

STOP BREATH.

Who wrote the article on this? Its basically, stop and breath.

Do you mean this?

https://intelsweep.wordpress.com/2017/01/23/pick-your-battles-a-thought-system-for-star-wars-armada/

@Captain Weather

Great article.

58 minutes ago, CaribbeanNinja said:

Do you mean this?

https://intelsweep.wordpress.com/2017/01/23/pick-your-battles-a-thought-system-for-star-wars-armada/

@Captain Weather

Great article.

Cheers CNinja!

(I swear I will write more things soon. I can't maintain the article writing rage like those Can't Get Your Fleet Out boys once life starts getting busy and in the way).

Just for OP. I went through and read the comments and honestly it sounds like you guys are doing everything right to help each other improve as players.

To echo what others have said, having a constructive testing / practice partner is really important as it engenders an environment where you just learn a lot of useful stuff. My second article ( https://intelsweep.wordpress.com/2017/02/05/winning-the-post-game-the-air-cycle/ ) goes through a lot of what 'good practice' should entail, or at least what you should be mindful of.

Really at this point though I think the important part is to maintain that practice and ensure you guys are getting consistent sessions in.

Whether or not it applies to all players, I will say that I've noticed its also often helpful to plan it around a tournament season. Have lots of consistent practice leading into, and during say store champs. Then take a bit of a break so you don't burn out. Do the same for regionals. Then take a break, and so on.

58 minutes ago, CaribbeanNinja said:

Do you mean this?

https://intelsweep.wordpress.com/2017/01/23/pick-your-battles-a-thought-system-for-star-wars-armada/

@Captain Weather

Great article.

Cheers CNinja!

(I swear I will write more things soon. I can't maintain the article writing rage like those Can't Get Your Fleet Out boys once life starts getting busy and in the way).

Just for OP. I went through and read the comments and honestly it sounds like you guys are doing everything right to help each other improve as players.

To echo what others have said, having a constructive testing / practice partner is really important as it engenders an environment where you just learn a lot of useful stuff. My second article ( https://intelsweep.wordpress.com/2017/02/05/winning-the-post-game-the-air-cycle/ ) goes through a lot of what 'good practice' should entail, or at least what you should be mindful of.

Really at this point though I think the important part is to maintain that practice and ensure you guys are getting consistent sessions in.

Whether or not it applies to all players, I will say that I've noticed its also often helpful to plan it around a tournament season. Have lots of consistent practice leading into, and during say store champs. Then take a bit of a break so you don't burn out. Do the same for regionals. Then take a break, and so on.