Tournaments:

Greetings all,
After hearing about the CMU 1 vs UPenn Tourney on Saturday, I figured a post was in order. For all you captains out there, with the only exceptions MAYBE being Berkeley, I'd advise paying attention and asking questions to n.a.g.x before starting your tourneys. I'm doing this solely so that CMU doesn't have a total walk to the finals.....no, that's not arrogance, they genocided Upenn in ~10 minutes yesterday with ping times of around ~30 for them. This is by no means a reflection on UPenn's skill level, but rather their inexperience in Tourney settings....the same reason the CMU All-Stars were able to (with the help of horrendous lag for UCB) genocide Berkeley. Ok, here goes....

• Initial 5 ~ 10 Minutes:
  The optimal (and currently popular strategy) is to have 7 Assault Ships and 1 SB. As Roms, the SB picks 25 armies off Tau and then protects Rom and Drac. As Feds, the SB picks off Alp or Alt depending on which is NOT agri (or if neither are, whichever he appears closest to). The Fed SB then protects Earth and the other of {Alt, Alp}. The current strategy that my team has been trying is to have 6 AS's, 1 BB and 1 SB. The BB protects the two planets the SB will protect while the SB is picking armies off the 3rd planet. This BB player has to be a good cloak phaser, and a good planet taker since he will usually get the first kills of the game.
  For the bombing part, have your 6-7 bombers know what planet they are assigned to bomb. An alternate method is to assign halves, and let the players use commen sense while bombing (ie. If there is a cloak on Ceti, fly by and go bomb Beta). There have been 2 tourneys where the enemy SB was killed before bombing began, but both of the teams that did that lost...you can use your own judgement on that one.
• Mid-Game:
  The team that does the best job of protecting it's own armies will usually win. This includes preventing scout bombing AS WELL as escorting planet takers. In this part of the game, the SB should continue to sit by Rom and Drac (using Romulan examples from now on) and NEVER move forward. NO BASE CAN (ah, SHOULD) LIVE IN A TOURNEY SETTING EVEN REMOTELY NEAR THE FRONT LINE!! If you move your base near the front line against a CMU team, I guarentee that it will die...no matter who it is. Again, this is not arrogance but rather experience from blowing up Balton again and again in tourneys (and he's head and shoulders above the rest of us base players here at CMU.. like a 90 ratio with over 100 SB deaths).
  Each person should have a clearly defined role, and if unable to fulfill that role, be able to recieve help from the "freelancers". Generally, each team will have 1-2 (2 being more popular today) full time scout bombers. These bombers can also double as assistant oggers, which you should also have a few of. Planet scum are necessary, as well as escorts. NOTE: Don't try to define roles too distictly....Netrek is a game that has to be played by the flow of the tide.......you need to be able to switch from one task to another at the spur of the moment. When people pick up armies they should ALWAYS announce it! If they don't seriously consider kicking them off the team.............. (well, maybe just not letting them play the rest of the game if you have subs available). The SB should just protect armies until it is completely out, at which point it should either sacrifice itself or simply turn the base in to get a real ship :). A SB with no armies is a detriment to a team.....which brings us to the next topic...
• Ogging SB's:
  When the enemy continually has armies (due to bad scout bombing on your part), and you KNOW the SB is carrying it is generally time to ogg it. YOU MUST TIME THIS RIGHT! You don't want to use more than 2 waves to kill the SB, and you MUST watch enemy planet takers during this time. You must also be able to judge your teams coordination and lethality to determine if they even have a chance to kill the base (this is location dependent, since a Romulan base at Romulus is a hard kill...but definitely not imposible). Expect to lose at least 1-2 planets and fall behind in bombing while killing there base....you must be able to overcome this or ogging the base is the wrong tactic.
• End Game:
  When the timer gets down to 30 minutes left, you should consider hoarding armies on a base for a last push. This is a tactic usually only used if your behind, but I've seen it down with even games and has turned the tide occasionally. At this point it is VERY VERY important to escort your planet takers here. You should also consider stepping up the scout bombing to prevent the enemy's from accumulating them. Even if you are down 3-4 planets at this point, as long as you are careful and protect your base, you have a chance of coming back.

A few random comments, none of which is important:

• The opening is important; the first bombing wave often eliminates about 150 armies per side, and this a significant fraction (perhaps 1/4) of all the armies that will ever exist in the game. But I guess there are many good opening strategies other than the one Sun Tzu suggests. I'd be kind of disappointed if everybody uses the same old defend-75-armies-with-the-base strategy.
• Some of the tricks that work in average pick-up games don't work in tourney games. When everybody is good, you can't get free kills by picking on the ensigns. Lobbing torpedos from a distance is usually a waste of fuel. Runner-scum dogfighters may find themselves completely ignored. It gets harder to keep track of the key enemy players, because they're all key. And you'd better get a phaser on that cloaker if you want to have much chance of killing him.
• The pace of a tourney game is much faster. Players are usually flying to some planet at maximum warp, whether to take it, bomb it, defend it, pick up armies, or even just to refuel (though some players prefer to die rather than take the time to refuel). Planet takers will probably want to commandeer an escort or two, and this had better not take very much time to set up, because the planet that looks open now may not be open ten seconds from now, and anyway the planet taker may not live that long.
• Establishing roles for the players is helpful. There's so much going on that it's hard to figure out where to fly, so I like pick one region of the galaxy to concentrate on. But certainly one must be flexible, alert, opportunistic, and sneaky.

Be sure to show up early. If the game is scheduled to begin at 9:00, it begins whether you have your full team there or not.[Herbert Enderton]