Ace Emerald
Inkling
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Lately, I've been making an honest attempt at really learning a fighting game for the first time in my life. As such, I've been watching a ton of fighting game content and game theory, and as I've been using it to improve my FG skills, I've also been considering what I can apply to competitive Splatoon as well. There are certainly plenty of differences between a 1v1 fighting game and a 4v4 movement shooter, but on a fundamental/theoritical level, many games share a lot of concepts. Resources, options, lines of play, asymetrical matchups, and (the topic of this thread) neutral gameplans, are all concepts shared not just by shooters and fighting games, but many other genres of competitive games. I'm writing this thread primarily for my own benefit, as a way of organizing my thoughts for discussions with my team, but I really hope I'm able to get some feedback from high level players on my thoughts and theories. I'm far from a master at any genre of competitive game, so in the event that I am misunderstanding or misusing a concept, I'd love to hear about it!
This thread is entirely based off this video, a reaction video of a video explanation of an article. Its short and worth a watch, and the referenced video and article are both good as well! To summarize the summary of the explanation, we can identify 3 different states of play in a neutral situation: 1) Establishing your offense, 2) Passively waiting, and 3) Preempting your opponent. These 3 states form a kind of Rock-Paper-Scissors triangle where active offense beats reactive waiting, reactive waiting beats preemptive reads, and preemptive reads beat offense. This triangle is the starting place for this theory, and we can start to flesh out gameplans and theories by bringing in matchups and understanding how different options lend themselves to different parts of the triangle. The goal of this theory is to then consider your opponents habits, consider you matchup tools, and mixup your neutral plays to best get ahead of your opponent. Seriously, just watch the video and tune out the fighting game specific stuff :)
Lets first bring this triangle from the FGC world to the Splatoon world by considering a 1v1 Splatoon fight. After all, what is a Splatoon engagement but a mini fighting game where players have less moves and health, but more movement? Establishing your offense is diving the opponent, getting in your preferred range to strike quickly. Passive play is, well, passive, commiting only to lateral movement and watching your opponent. Preemptive play would be prefiring a location where you anticipate your opponent moving into. With these 1v1 analogs, we can see that the same triangle theory holds: quick dives generally beat an opponent standing still, waiting while an opponent prefires a location you are not in lets you punish the end lag and ink recovery, and prefiring an opponent diving before they get into range will win you the engagement. We have the same complexity around asynchronous matchups, as an example, shooters and dualies will be harder to punish for bad prefiring thanks to their movement options, but they will also get less value from prefiring as their aim requirements are more precise. Everything is affected by matchup!
While the 1v1 perspective is interesting, Splatoon is a team game and we try to avoid 1v1s, so I'm much more interested in applying this same style of thought to the actions of teams as a whole. If we shift our focus to the actions of the team as a whole, I think we can use the same traingle on the team level. A team that pushes up immediately and aggressively can get caught by surprise if their opponents guess their movements and get an early lead with smart positioning, a team that moves in anticipation of their opponents can be read and punished by patient enemies, and a team that sits around and waits too much can get frame 1 zooka blasted by a more aggressive team. In the same way that a player wants to shift their individual neutral plays for the specific matchup and opponent, I think teams could benefit from considering: what are our neutral plays for this matchup, and how do we need to adjust them over the game to keep the advantage.
As for how specific team plays fit into the triangle, that's where my knowledge hits its limits. My team is still pretty low level, and gameplanning is an active site of improvement for us. I do hope that we are able to use this framework to better think through our matchups and gameplans, and I hope its helpful to others as well :) let me know your thoughts in the thread, especially if you are a high level player!!
This thread is entirely based off this video, a reaction video of a video explanation of an article. Its short and worth a watch, and the referenced video and article are both good as well! To summarize the summary of the explanation, we can identify 3 different states of play in a neutral situation: 1) Establishing your offense, 2) Passively waiting, and 3) Preempting your opponent. These 3 states form a kind of Rock-Paper-Scissors triangle where active offense beats reactive waiting, reactive waiting beats preemptive reads, and preemptive reads beat offense. This triangle is the starting place for this theory, and we can start to flesh out gameplans and theories by bringing in matchups and understanding how different options lend themselves to different parts of the triangle. The goal of this theory is to then consider your opponents habits, consider you matchup tools, and mixup your neutral plays to best get ahead of your opponent. Seriously, just watch the video and tune out the fighting game specific stuff :)
Lets first bring this triangle from the FGC world to the Splatoon world by considering a 1v1 Splatoon fight. After all, what is a Splatoon engagement but a mini fighting game where players have less moves and health, but more movement? Establishing your offense is diving the opponent, getting in your preferred range to strike quickly. Passive play is, well, passive, commiting only to lateral movement and watching your opponent. Preemptive play would be prefiring a location where you anticipate your opponent moving into. With these 1v1 analogs, we can see that the same triangle theory holds: quick dives generally beat an opponent standing still, waiting while an opponent prefires a location you are not in lets you punish the end lag and ink recovery, and prefiring an opponent diving before they get into range will win you the engagement. We have the same complexity around asynchronous matchups, as an example, shooters and dualies will be harder to punish for bad prefiring thanks to their movement options, but they will also get less value from prefiring as their aim requirements are more precise. Everything is affected by matchup!
While the 1v1 perspective is interesting, Splatoon is a team game and we try to avoid 1v1s, so I'm much more interested in applying this same style of thought to the actions of teams as a whole. If we shift our focus to the actions of the team as a whole, I think we can use the same traingle on the team level. A team that pushes up immediately and aggressively can get caught by surprise if their opponents guess their movements and get an early lead with smart positioning, a team that moves in anticipation of their opponents can be read and punished by patient enemies, and a team that sits around and waits too much can get frame 1 zooka blasted by a more aggressive team. In the same way that a player wants to shift their individual neutral plays for the specific matchup and opponent, I think teams could benefit from considering: what are our neutral plays for this matchup, and how do we need to adjust them over the game to keep the advantage.
As for how specific team plays fit into the triangle, that's where my knowledge hits its limits. My team is still pretty low level, and gameplanning is an active site of improvement for us. I do hope that we are able to use this framework to better think through our matchups and gameplans, and I hope its helpful to others as well :) let me know your thoughts in the thread, especially if you are a high level player!!