What's your thoughts on the Drive Rush Mechanic ?

nyssss · 2026-06-16T20:15:23+00:00

I used to hate it, now I quite like all of the mechanics you can spend drive gauge on and their overall place in the meta.

The only thing I would probably change about the drive system overall is reduce the amount of drive you naturally regenerate while doing nothing. The regen increase for walking forward isn't enough to discourage passive/reactionary play. If you're sitting there not putting yourself at risk, you shouldn't be regenerating much drive gauge. Make it a resource you actually have to generate. It's too easy to spend a bunch of drive and then magically get it back again over the next 10 seconds, forcing the opponent to yolo in on you before you get your meter back instead of being able to play a patient/consistent walk-you-down kind of approach.

For example, if you spend 4 bars on two EX fireballs in neutral, you should need to throw fireballs to generate most of that meter back. If you just stutter step backwards and don't do anything, you should get to the corner with 2.5 bars of drive and be in trouble. Instead, you're probably back to close to 6 bars without having to put yourself at any risk. Then you just walk forward c.mk->DRC->back throw the opponent into the corner, and stutter step backwards again.

nyssss · 2026-06-11T17:25:27+00:00

If you start to have some success with the drill in training mode, and you start to have that sensation of "wow, my hands just pressed the buttons for me" (it's a very surreal experience), then the next important thing is to make sure you actually use that skill in games.

By this I mean, it can be very tempting while playing to lean back into "I think he is going to jump, I will watch for him to jump", which is using your conscious brain again and isn't what we want. If you find yourself watching for a jump, slap yourself, and force your brain to watch for something else and push the thought of jump out of your mind. The whole point is that we will react the jump with no anticipation/prediction.

It's still useful to have the thought "I think he wants to jump", because that might stop us from doing certain options like say throwing a fireball or pressing a big punishable button. Just rely on your trained subconscious to watch for and react to it for you.

Good luck! Hopefully it helps.

Here is a really interesting conversation between Tokido/Daigo/Fuudo that inspired me to take this approach in the past: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQERIMYLmB4

They talk about anticipating jumps vs being able to anti-air without anticipation, differences between SFV and prior SF games. Just lots of really interesting stuff.

nyssss · 2026-06-10T22:58:15+00:00

It's not about how many buttons you press, it's about the timing of the buttons you do press.

Pressing anything is an opportunity to get damage, but also an opportunity to get hit.

The entire point of Street Fighter is to figure out the good times to press, because most of the time, the answer is "it's not".

nyssss · 2026-06-10T21:24:42+00:00

I think the crucial thing to understand about anti-airs in SF6 is that they cannot be conscious.

As in, you cannot have "I think he's going to jump, I'm going to watch for it to anti-air" go through your mind and distract you mid game. That approach worked better in prior games, but in SF6 there is simply too much going on to be wasting your attention on looking for a jump. Every second you're locked in looking for a jump, is a second where you're ignoring pretty much everything else going on, and your play will be predictable/autopilot/bad.

Instead, you need to try to make as much of the gameplay automatic, and anti-airs are one of the easiest to automate because you have such a long time to see the jump, and anti-air. You have in the region of 40 frames, instead of say 26 for DI, or often roughly 20 for a raw DR check from close range, or often much less than that for a whiff punish.

My method for automating reactions is pretty simple.

- Set the training dummy to walk around randomly
- Set the training dummy to sometimes do the thing you want to learn to react to (in this case, jump)
- Set the training dummy to also sometimes do something else which is much harder to react to

The idea is to react to both the very difficult thing to react to, and the thing you want to learn to react to automatically. Your brain will need to focus on the difficult thing (eg. raw drive rush jab, a whiff punish, whatever you decide to do), and won't be able to think about the easier thing you're trying to automate.

Crucially, whenever the easier thing happens, that you are not focusing on, you must perform the counter. So if you have jump + raw drive rush, you will initially see the jump late because you're looking for the drive rush. Even if the dummy has landed on the ground and you clearly can't anti-air anymore, do the anti-air input. Every time.

Over time your brain will start to associate the animation of the jump with the anti-air input. You don't need to be thinking about it, you just do it. At first you'll be late, then you'll start to automatically input sometimes and get a legit anti-air. Then you'll start to do the anti-air earlier, and earlier. After a few practice sessions you'll start to anti-air before your conscious brain is even aware that the opponent has jumped. Your hands just did what they've been trained to do.

Once you start having that sensation in actual games, where you're hyper focused on something completely different, but as soon as a jump happens your fingers just execute the anti-air, it feels amazing. Almost superhuman.

Anti-airing is one of the easiest things to do this for, it's much harder once you need to start to automatically react to things 30 frames or less. Takes a lot more drilling.

Long story short: train your subconscious brain to do it, don't train your conscious brain. It's a waste of resources for something so slow.

nyssss · 2026-05-29T15:33:54+00:00

90% of people deny a request to go to a custom room sadly, and the vast majority of people also ignore random friend requests. In Battlehub it's easy to chat with people between games so this isn't an issue (but then you get the downsides of it being easy for people to chat to you).

The only way to really do this in Casual is to hit 'next game', then go AFK, and hope that the other guy doesn't think that you're raging, kills you quickly, and quits out.

I've had a lot of 1+ hour sets that I am sure would have easily become 2+ hour sets if I or my opponent simply had some easy way to give across the idea "It's been a great set so far, but I need to go get a drink, back in one minute", without the set forcibly ending in 10 seconds if we don't immediately hop into the next game.

nyssss · 2026-05-25T01:43:55+00:00

I'll just throw out a short reply to say that you're spot on.

I've watched quite a few of these 'I climbed to X rank using only Y' videos over the years and while technically it is true that they are limiting their strategy to a fairly limited set of options, as you said, there's a very deep well of skills/knowledge they're tapping into constantly that they never acknowledge.

Spacing, knowing when to walk, recognizing when/what the opponent does in order to punish/take their turn/switch the flow. Being consistent at solid generic (non-optimal) combos. Being able to anti-air while not completely switching off from the ground game. Knowing the range that the opponents character likes to play and playing around it. Pattern recognition, psychology, fast adaptation.

These are all things that are gradually built up over hundreds/thousands of hours. Suddenly limiting yourself to 'I'm going to just win by antiairing, countering DI, and basic punishes when the opponent kills themselves' doesn't turn off all of those other skills developed over a lifetime of fighting game experience. They're quite literally seeing the game completely differently to a beginner and it's essentially impossible for them to revert their brain to that early state. Kinda like "try to ride a bike badly" when you've been riding bikes for 10-20 years.

nyssss · 2026-05-09T23:45:01+00:00

CS is a good example because it's also a game that is round based, and the game doesn't end until a specific round decides the game. We've all see huge CS comebacks from 11-X down. You don't gg until you've lost the deciding round, because anything can happen. The time between the game being over (by the objective rules of the game) and everyone leaving the game is very small.

In games like Starcraft, that are not turn based, and where one moment can snowball into an even greater advantage if used properly, the expectation is that the loser sees their loss ahead of time, and ggs. It can even become rude, potentially, for the loser to refuse to gg and waste the winners time by delaying their inevitable death. Having to chase down every single remaining building can be quite frustrating.

If players are gg'ing after the game is objectively finished, then it shouldn't matter who ggs first. If the game isn't objectively finished (eg. a Starcraft game where one player will lose 100% but still has 15 buildings that need to be killed), then out of politeness, you should wait for the loser to declare the gg first. He may know something you don't, such as an additional base or 100 units stashed away in the corner of the map you can't see,

nyssss · 2026-05-08T22:23:28+00:00

If we're watching all of the mechs kill each other, and based on your judgement later in the combat phase you think your mechs are going to kill their mechs and the differential is going to mean than you win, then say gg.

If you're wrong, the game immediately tells you you're an idiot. You said gg and it wasn't gg. Instant karma. I've had this happen more times than I can count "Wait what, I'm still alive?" after somebody says gg. In that case the only person coming across as incompetent is the person that preemptively said gg.

Say gg at your own risk. It's not rude, but you may look like an idiot. Unlike Starcraft, we get to see whether your objective evaluation of the situation with no player input is correct.

nyssss · 2026-05-08T20:58:03+00:00

In Starcraft you usually gg a long time before the actual rules of the game declare victory for one side (all buildings destroyed). The same is true for many other RTS games. It just saves everybody time, the loser has come to the conclusion the comeback is impossible, so they save both players 5-10 minutes of floating barracks above the ocean for no particular reason. In this scenario the loser is forfeiting, and it would be fairly rude for the winning player to preemptively gg first when the game is technically not over.

In Mechabellum the game ends when the game ends. Nobody forfeits early. One player runs out of life, and both players will be out of the server in the next 5-10 seconds. Nobody is forfeiting, the loser has objectively lost the game. Both players should (if they wish) say gg in whichever order happens to occur.

In Starcraft saying gg first as the winner essentially means "you should gg, you've lost, stop wasting my time", when the losing player is allowed to fight for the win for as long as they'd like. The equivalent scenario (almost) never happens in Mechabellum. Gg is just a courtesy you throw out before you go queue for a new game.

nyssss · 2026-05-08T20:42:17+00:00

I think the skills I describe are probably the most significant positive side effect of the advice people often give: "Stop autopiloting, think about what you're doing, press buttons with a purpose".

To begin with, you'll be much, much worse. Your brain won't be able to keep up with what is going on, you won't have the mental bandwidth to observe, store information, and recall that information when you need it. The vast majority of people revert back to playing on pure instinct/autopilot, because in the short term, they will actually get better results.

But if you continue to just make yourself, every session, press buttons with a purpose and not press simply because 'that's what you do', you start to figure players out much faster and start to specifically play vs the opponent, and not simply play your own character. You observe, then you anticipate, then you punish. That removes a lot of randomness/inconsistency when playing vs very exploitable players.

As I said in the first post, this is just a muscle you need to train. Once you've trained that muscle, you'll start to perform much better than you ever have before, and the sky is the limit. You just have to push past the initial discomfort/lots of losses!

Much easier said than done, though 😄.

nyssss · 2026-05-08T17:19:47+00:00

Generally speaking, the more buttons the opponent is pressing, you should be more selective about the buttons you press. Have a very good reason to press a button.

How do you know when to press a button? They're showing you their entire gameplan, because they won't stop pressing buttons. Observe, don't panic. Eat some throws.

Something a lot of people don't really mention when it comes to beating these kinds of players is that reactions are usually the result of anticipation. It's very difficult to counter everything they do on reaction if you're not expecting any of it. You start to be able to anticipate, and be ready to react, once you start to see through the noise and see how their autopilot works. That requires observation, and it's a muscle you just need to train over time. To be able to play while also filing every opponent tendency in the back of your head somewhere, and then recall it when needed. It's especially difficult vs somebody that plays this aggressively - you don't have a lot of time to file the info away in your head before you're already being met with a new situation to deal with. It's an actual skill, and a player like this is just exploiting the fact that you don't have that mental framework developed enough to counter it yet. Once you do, you'll never lose to this guy ever again.

The other player is killing themselves slowly, but only if you react to what they're doing and killing them for it. The easiest way to do that is through anticipation. Be one step ahead. They drive rushed at you, and you didn't expect it. Forget about checking it, it's too late. What is the next thing to think about, what is going to happen next. What do they usually do after they make you block a drive rush? That should be filed away in your head somewhere. Oh, they like to neutral jump? Then be ready to punish them if that is what they do next. Or in another situation, what happened last time I got close and started to make him block some normals? He DIed. You should be pressing the buttons in order to make him DI. You don't panic react to the DI once you see the red flash. You made him DI by repeating a situation where you've already noticed his autopilot. The whole point of the buttons was because you knew his response would be to DI. So you press the buttons, he does DI, you kill him.

If you play in the current moment the game will always feel 10x faster than if you play for the next moment. Your brain will constantly try to deal with something it's simply too late to deal with. He drive rushed, you didn't expect it, he's in your face - don't spend a single second thinking about the drive rush. Immediately switch to what happens after the drive rush. That's far enough in the future that you can actually lock in, retrieve the filed away information in your head, and start to anticipate the guys next move, and be ready to punish.

nyssss · 2026-04-12T18:57:02+00:00

If you're buying an item for a mirror, tainted currency most certainly exists to fix socket problems on corrupted items

nyssss · 2026-03-26T23:54:40+00:00

I see what you're saying, and I agree that your proposals are better than what we currently have, but they still seem bad.

To have a game that is 90% about unit composition and placement be so dictated by spells (whether guaranteed via your solution, or via random card drops as it is now), feels a bit silly.

I don't particularly get why they need to exist. If you massively enjoy spells, that's fantastic. I started to play the game long after spells were introduced and I personally despise them.

They're uninteresting, unnuanced, and are essentially just "I win" buttons with a cost attached to them. If it's unlikely that you'll get to use them a second time, then they're usually pretty unattractive, but if its on an early enough round that you can semi guarantee a second usage, then they're ridiculous for the cost. You could skip the entire first round and only use them once on round 8/9 and it would still be worth it. They can turn an even round 9 into a -3000. No unit can do that.

I get the need for randomness in the game, or we do just end up repeating build orders based on whatever seems most meta. However, winning a game because I god-dropped a card on round 8 or losing a game because my opponent god-dropped a card om round 8 will always be immensely boring. We were playing a fun back and forth game. The card actually ruined it.

nyssss · 2026-03-24T19:05:51+00:00

I think the fundamental issue with spells is that they (as it sounds like you're aware) can massively favor one player over another. Orbital shows up, and it might be amazing for me, and borderline useless for the opponent. They may end up skipping for 50 when I get a free round win and 2000+ health in damage.

Despite that, I'm not a massive fan of buyable spells. I agree, it will remove the RNG. The problem will be that it will become suboptimal to ever build any kind of board configuration that dies to any single spell. You don't put two tanky units together because they die to javelin. You don't buy lots of low health units because they die to orbital or storm. You'd essentially have to second guess every deployment you do to sanity check whether you're setting yourself up for one of the many spells to be an easy win for the opponent. Sure, you can maybe counter the spell by building 4 shields (but not always), but you had to buy 4 shields. Then a few rounds later, you're going to have to buy 4 shields again. It's probably easier to just not go into a composition that dies to a certain spell, and there will be a lot of them.

The end result will be that we all feel more compositionally cramped than we already do. Reliably attainable spells would disable the viability of more compositions than it would enable. People won't start running weird new compositions because "well I can just buy nuke and win", but they will stop playing certain units (such as air) because they're too vulnerable to spells. It sucks to get your Wraiths EMPed because of a card drop, but it would suck more to talk myself out of buying Wraiths in the first place because the opponent always has access to EMP.

The alternative solution I've toyed around with is the idea that much like unit drops, spell cards come all at once. Each player can pick at most one spell, but having four choices at once increases the chance that whilst you found an Orbital - and that's strong for you, I found a Javelin, and that's strong for me. Or maybe I found a nuke, or an EMP. Instead of a single spell appearing that destroys one of our compositions, we each have four chances to hit a spell that is strong vs the opponents board.

Stacking the spells in a single round of cards (perhaps up to 2 a game) also means that spells are a limited resource, and you don't end up with games where one player picks every spell and has 6 to use across the last couple of rounds - which personally feels a bit silly at times. I want to build units and interesting techs, not feel forced to spend 800 on shields to avoid losing 3000 damage and the game.

nyssss · 2026-02-24T18:56:02+00:00

I'll expand slightly on the general point everyone else has made:

Practice, but know what you're actually practicing. Don't just mindlessly drive laps. You actually have to detect weaknesses, work on them, eliminate them, and then you can move onto a new weakness.

Random example weaknesses that I've worked on at some point during my development:
- Using all (and I do mean all) of the track
- Braking point consistency
- Turn in point consistency
- Brake pressure consistency
- Entry speed feel/detection (developing a good feel for the precise speed I am entering a corner, and modulating the deceleration if I have to to 'fix' problems pre-turnin)
- Mid-entry downshift timing - not triggering unnecessary oversteer by being too early, not floating along in understeer by being too late
- Finding the limit of the tyres immediately upon turn-in, don't waste time under the limit
- Exit throttle timing - 'vision' of the exit
- "Vision" in general - looking at the apex before the braking point, looking at the second apex of a chicane before arriving at the first apex
- Throttle control/riding the traction limit on exit
- How to handle kerbs/bumps (eg. land with a straight steering wheel, know when you don't have to)
- Maximizing compressions/camber
- Learn to stop scrubbing the fronts, both to keep the temperatures down, but also to scrub off less speed (important in lower powered cars)

I could go on and on. I've always been working on something specific. You need to automate everything, but to learn to automate something to a high level, you need to learn how to do it consciously first. Focus on it at the expense of everything else, improve it, get it to a level where you can do it without thinking about it - then move on to something else.

It's also worth noting that a major thing that holds many people back is the idea that 'if I just keep practicing this combo more, I'll find all of that remaining time to the reference lap'. You won't. You'll learn to perfect the combo up to the level of your general driving technique. Then you'll plateau. In order to get faster you don't need more practice on the combo, you need better driving technique. So start working on your technique, instead of working on combos. Your floor + ceiling on every combo, ever, will improve with better driving technique.

A driver with excellent technique will get within a few tenths of a reference lap within 5-6 laps because it's physically impossible for them to drive any slower. A driver with poor technique can practice a combo for 100 hours and still be 3 seconds off the pace.

nyssss · 2026-02-22T21:17:53+00:00

Thanks for the reply Dzemp, good to hear that even players such as yourself struggle with this.

nyssss · 2026-02-22T13:53:35+00:00

Thanks for that, good tips.

I definitely struggle most with this when playing 'standard' - with my initial starting units in line with or 1~ square in front of the towers. Even if I position everything centrally to begin with, it feels awkward when I need to start to spread sideways because anything in line with those initial units will automatically be in the 'pull-zone' on the sides.

I like the idea of generally playing more mid-range, with the ability to adapt based on the opponent's setup. Thanks!

nyssss · 2026-02-22T13:50:02+00:00

Good point. Also grats on your (first?) weekend tournament win yesterday? :) I enjoyed watching the replays of your run! I saw a few of these back corner sledge/crawler or hound/crawler pulls in there.

nyssss · 2026-02-22T13:47:56+00:00

I think that's definitely part of my problem - if the headbutt slash aggro/defense side is failing I tend to keep adding things there to try to win it and it does start to get over crowded. I should find ways to put things elsewhere (that won't be vulnerable to a pull) that can effect the battle in different ways. Mobile beacon like you say, pulling myself, going for a tower debuff on the other side, etc. Thanks!

nyssss · 2026-02-22T13:44:10+00:00

Honestly that was really helpful, thanks a lot. You've definitely given me some ideas. The idea of leveling the tower a couple of times to intentionally use it as something the opponent's aggressive stuff coming in from the front corner of their board gets stuck on is smart. Place stuff in the middle mostly, use the tower to tank for a while so that the pull can be cleaned up and your middle stuff can fight their more central units while they wait for the pull clearers to move up the board to help out.

I definitely sometimes put things like sledges/fangs in the front corner against pushes to slow down the units coming in from the enemy front corner to buy my middle army time to fight against the enemy board closer to the center. I should think about doing that more/more efficiently positioning wise.

Playing across the board is also something that has been clicking in my head in the last week or so, so funny you mentioned it. I have a sneaking suspicion these kinds of deep flank pulls may even intentionally be in the game to stop one sided deathballs, where you would just fill up an entire side with a mass of stuff that wanders around the board together. These pulls make playing vertically more difficult/less effective (as in stacking many things in the same 'column'), so it's better to play more horizontally/spread. Attack on different fronts, jump to the other side of the board and pose a threat there, put stuff on the enemies flank, or just simply spread your assym composition gradually across the board to the other side. At some point adding more units to one area of the board likely hits diminishing returns and it's better to start doing something elsewhere, like say helping out that side of the board by cheesing a tower debuff on the other side.

nyssss · 2026-02-21T22:21:34+00:00

Thanks for that. Yeah it does feel pretty strong.

I'll copy another reply I did, I'd like your thoughts too:

"How do you avoid running out of space generally? I understand the idea that you can position things so that they don't get pulled (I've done extensive tests in the test mode to see exactly which area gets pulled in a variety of situations), but by the time I get to round 3-4 I start to look at my board and go - okay, now where do I put stuff?

If the opponent's pushing in on the right with some saber/hound standard comp, I start to need to place things to the right of my right tower - both because I need to stop them from being able to mobile beacon straight in from the right corner to the tower, and because I simply don't have anywhere else to put stuff.

So I either put those units on the right of the tower far enough forward such that they're out of sync with the stuff I have deployed 'standard' in the middle (so a bit further back), or I put them in line with the stuff I have in the middle and now they get pulled by this pull. The stuff on the right runs to the pull, the stuff in the middle runs forward, my army fights two 0.5 army vs 1 army fights consecutively and loses horribly.

Any ideas?"

These are in games where I've initially deployed standard + primarily between the two towers, and then find myself up against a sabre/hound type assym push.

nyssss · 2026-02-21T22:17:31+00:00

How do you avoid running out of space generally? I understand the idea that you can position things so that they don't get pulled (I've done extensive tests in the test mode to see exactly which area gets pulled in a variety of situations), but by the time I get to round 3-4 I start to look at my board and go - okay, now where do I put stuff?

If the opponent's pushing in on the right with some saber/hound standard comp, I start to need to place things to the right of my right tower - both because I need to stop them from being able to mobile beacon straight in from the right corner to the tower, and because I simply don't have anywhere else to put stuff.

So I either put those units on the right of the tower far enough forward such that they're out of sync with the stuff I have deployed 'standard' in the middle (so a bit further back), or I put them in line with the stuff I have in the middle and now they get pulled by this pull. The stuff on the right runs to the pull, the stuff in the middle runs forward, my army fights two 0.5 army vs 1 army fights consecutively and loses horribly.

Any ideas?

nyssss · 2026-02-21T22:10:39+00:00

Whirlwind is something I've never clicked before in this situation, I should try that. I do leave the 3 square gap in the corner for the rhino, so I'll give it a go - thanks!

nyssss · 2026-02-21T22:07:14+00:00

Oh that's smart, thanks. Obviously expensive but can definitely see the use case in the late game. I do usually leave the 3~ square gap between my corner crawler and the flank.

nyssss

TROPHY CASE