FINAL NOTES:
In hindsight, the main reasons for my severe shortcomings in the final game (mostly the obvious missed moves, which are very painful to discover when going through the game notes line by line to try recreating them) are the following:
Lack of a partner. Gen Con’s format is 2v2. I do not like this format as I believe A&A is best played 1v1, but I did not go solo to “prove a point” or anything like that. It just happened that everyone I knew who could have teamed up with me had other commitments and couldn’t make it to the convention. Maybe another time. I even agreed to be paired with the only other solo player at the convention to reduce bracket size, but in the end that would have caused an odd number of players, so we both went solo (I believe the other solo guy lost in round 1, which was sad as he seemed nice enough).
Overdoing it on practice right before the tournament. In short, the night before I drove out to Indiana I stayed up until about 5:30 AM doing last-minute practice work. This accomplished nothing but trashing my sleep schedule before the convention. If anything, it’s remarkable I played as well as I did in the early games (although there are still plenty of minor piece movement mistakes and sub-optimal attacks that I should not have taken).
Not bringing snacks into the floor. I did all my eating at the stalls outside, as for some reason I convinced myself that foodstuffs weren’t allowed in the actual hall. I really should have known better, since I was drinking water basically constantly and opponents were drinking water/soda/etc. with no issues. My opponents in the last round had energy bars, so they were clearly better prepared than I was.
Playing too fast. I was a bit nervous during my games due to wanting to 100% make sure to play 6 full turns, since that’s the turn count I practiced for. Against my Round 3 opponents, I even especially made sure to play as fast as I could to force the game to go for extra turns (if you check my report, you’ll actually see that I was technically losing on turn 6. It was only during turns 7 and beyond that the Allies really started to overwhelm the Axis). Similarly, I feel that the Semifinal game could have become a win if I had a 7th turn to work with (this isn’t a complaint, we mutually agreed during the very start of J6 that it would be the final turn, and my opponents were even generous enough to let me modify my US unit placement to accommodate the fact that it was the final turn).
That being said, me playing fast caused me to miss a lot of obvious errors across all my games. I got away with it during the early rounds, but in the semifinal things like missing the Soviet sub movement R1, miss-counting the size of my own US Navy A3, and miscounting the range on the Japanese Air Stack during the final turns basically cost me everything. If I had played more slowly/carefully, I probably would have noticed at least some of the more obvious blunders.
Letting my physical fitness decline in the month before the event. Self-explanatory. I cut gym days to grind A&A instead and it probably impacted my ability to play/think effectively for longer stretches of time. You may think this is a strange thing to comment on but at least personally I need to keep good cardio to be able to put out A&A-levels of focus for multiple 5.5 hour stretches without getting tired or distracted.
I am attaching three files here. They are my best efforts at recreating the 3 games I played off-camera in TripleA. They’re based on notes + memory, so they are likely not 100% accurate. You should mostly just use them as a visualization tool to follow along with the summaries above.
Shout-Outs and Thanks
Even though I lost in a very sloppy fashion at the Semifinal, there are still two people I would like to thank.
First, @The_Good_Captain, for always being a friend and at least dipping your toes into F2F-style play for a fewrounds (since we both know your true calling is strict Online Play). You listened to my crazy ideas/theories much more than you really needed to, and were a good support system while I was between matches at the convention. You also put a lot of work in for pre-gaming Battle Calcs on a lot of common fight patterns (Without which I would not have been able to play as quickly as I did during Round 3, and I would have likely lost the tournament right there). One day when our actual lives are more settled we’ll have to actually make a team and sweep through.
Second, and more importantly (sorry TGC), @Slip-Capone, who spent almost as much time as I did labbing out the strategies for both sides, stayed up with me until God-knows what time discussing strategies, hypothetical counters-to-counters-to-counters, and even ran his own solo games to test strategies he would never even get to use personally (If it comes down to it one day, I will pay to fly you up here from Australia so we can team up properly). If anything, this performance was a disservice to the sheer amount of blood/sweat/tears you selflessly put into helping me prep, and I owe you the world for it.
@djensen tagging you because at Gen Con you asked for my write-up/calcs sheets during our game so you can have a more complete data set for whatever you’re getting up to with the one YT Channel (BGN?) that was taking recordings. They’re in the relevant section on our Semifinal Game. Thanks again for the fun match even if it was stressful at the time.
(6/6)
genCon-Round-1.tsvg
genCon-Round-2.tsvg
genCon-Round-3.tsvg
