How did they win world's?
How did the winner fly these in such perfection they were able to beat all the top lists played by top players?!?
Explain plz.
What's the strats behind them?
Control Bots
500+ Games of Practice and Skill
Practice. Watch his stream videos.
Controlbots are a good list. Not an easy list, but a good strong list.
- Skill, plus total control.
- When head to head, Simeon tossed his opponents onto rocks to prevent shots or to improve his positional advanatage.
- When behind, Simeon ioned. Ions remove opponent from the game.
- He maneuvered his ships well to support each other
- Autothrusters and three green dice are wonderful... particularly when your green dice decide to get hot
- Aggressors have a pretty decent dial
having played Jesper's bots countless times over the years, and more recently this version, its all about the self bump, and only stressing yourself when aobsolutely required, and when it is safe to do so. you also need to be self controlled enough to stop yourself taking risky killshots when ion and tractor are better.
They're a really, really strong list against mid-to-low agility stuff as well, particularly mid-to-low agility small ships, which is a huge part of the current meta. Miranda is completely screwed by even a single ion token, for instance, it kills her bombs, it kills large amounts of her manoeuvrability, and it makes her predictable enough that she has to choose between regen and damage a lot of the time. So there's a very real element of meta calling at work, and if you're good with them, control bots are an excellent call for the current meta.
Plus they're tough as nails.
What beats it? Triple X/7 Defenders?
Jesper Hills has been playing them for over a year at least, probably more like two years, and they have informally been known as 'Hillbots' or JCB 'Jesper's Control Bots'.
I've happened to be in tables next to Jesper at a few big events and always kept one eye on how he plays them. That served me well when we finally met during UK Nationals last year, because he plays them very very differently to how you'd expect and a lot of wins come from that unfamiliarity from his opponent. I know he's avoided appearing on any streams up to now because he doesn't want his flying style to leak out, so eat up the couple of games that Jesper and Simeon are on stream from Worlds because there's not really any other examples around.
The Hillbots fly differently to what you expect and they're playing a different game. I don't want to spoil the hallmarks of it because there's a few months left for Jesper and Simeon to play their squad. I'm happy to say that it's very slow and very patient, using the threat of Ion and Tractor to control where you can sit on the board and maneuvering around you to capitalise on that. It takes incredibly precise and patience play and I think most people who pick it up after Worlds are going to struggle to make it work for them because they're going to get sucked into being too aggressive and wind up losing ships.
Playing against the Hillbots, if you are slow in realising what the game is going to be about then you probably lose before you can adjust your approach. Like I said, I already had half an idea what to expect so I approached my match against Jesper very differently to most other matches. Because I had theory not practice I underestimated his ability to force the engage to his liking, so where I thought I'd baited him forwards but avoided an engage it turned out he was able to cover the range and force the engage anyway. I lost Captain Nym without firing a shot. Fortunately for me Jesper made a rare mistake in his follow-up, and because I know his flying style was different I knew how to capitalise on that mistake and I scraped my way back in and won the game.
That's a perfect example of the knife edge the Hillbots walk, though. Jesper was 50% of the way to winning his game against me when Nym went down, but that one mistake meant I won.
They are NOT for the faint-hearted.
Edited by SOTL
16 minutes ago, TasteTheRainbow said:Practice. Watch his stream videos.
Where I can't find them?