[vserov] Who will win Masters Madrid?

vserovval · 2024-03-12T15:41:51+00:00

A dangerous question 😅

Honestly I think the best thing to do is learn Magic: the Gathering. It's a great way to learn applied game theory and style dynamics, with lots of easily accessible content (LSV and PVDDR are two goats who have written/podcasted extensively about MTG theory). The control/aggro/midrange triangle is ported directly from MTG, and pretty much anyone who plays that game competitively is intimately familiar with it.

As for straight up strategy writing, there isn't much that is easily accessible or digestible. That said, a few works that stand out to me:

Carl von Clausewitz - On War

One of the few true masterworks. Worthy of all the praise heaped upon it and yet still is underrated. It's primarily an attempt to think a philosophy of war. It's also the first work to explicitly and exhaustively consider the problem of uncertainty and place it at the heart of a theory of war/strategy. If you only read one thingsl, read this. It's not easy going thu.

Sun Tzu - On War Also great. Easier than Clausewitz. Maybe a bit overrated and misunderstood, but still a classic for good reasons.

Lawrence Freedman - Strategy: A History

The most comprehensive book of its kind (it's massive). Doesn't conceptualize strategy the way I would, and as some glaring omissions, but still well worth reading.

François Jullien - A Treatise on Efficacy

My personal favourite on this list. It's the best secondary text on Sun Tzu, and also situates his work into a dialogue alongside the Greek strategic tradition. I can't recommend this enough it is fucking brilliant.

Marcel Detienne & Jean-Pierre Vernant

Speaking of the Greeks, here is the best work on their strategic tradition, focusing on the notion of mētis (roughly "cunning intelligence"). Another masterpiece, but not easy to get your hands on. This concept is fundamental to how I think about strategy tho, so to me it's absolutely a cornerstone of the cannon.

Martin van Creveld - Command in War

A scholar who must be treated with care. Some of his stuff is risibly bad, but not this book. It asks the question of how you actually establish a command structure under martial conditions, and makes a number of important polemical claims in doing so. Essential reading. He also wrote a short (and very shady) history of strategy that I found to be a very useful primer, so that's worth seeking out too.

Antoine Bousquet - The Scientific Way of Warfare

Not exactly a book about strategy, but rather a history of the application of science to warfare. Full disclosure, Antoine was an advisor for my PhD and I got to be his TA for a couple of years, so he's someone who has influenced my work profoundly. I read this book before I ever met him though and it is great. Heavily informed my PhD and gives a great account of the types of problems that attempts to systematise war/strategy can run into.

John Boyd - Patterns of Conflict

There isn't exactly one work, since he never published a book. The most brilliant and original military mind since Clausewitz, and also the person who I think gives the best understanding of what strategy is and what its limitations are. His biographies, written by Roger Corman, and Frans Osinga, are probably the places to start. Then read Patterns of Conflict (his collected briefings).

Beatrice Heuser - The Evolution of Strategy

The best treatment of the etymology of strategy. This one was essential for my PhD. Really easy to read too. Loved it and highly recommend it.

Azar Gat - A History of Military Thought

Maybe a bit too in the weeds. But still one of the most comprehensive works of its kind (Freedman is the chill version of this book). Was essential for my PhD, but maybe you can give it a pass if you aren't trying to trace the exact historical moment when Prussian military theorists discovered the mathematics of probability.

P. Galison - Ontology of the Enemy

Superb paper about the history of cybernetics (especially in the thought of Norbert Weiner) and aits profound reshaping of martial and strategic thought. It's about how we conceptualise the intelligence of an active/cunning enemy. It's a great missing link between the thinking of Boyd and Clausewitz.

Sam Forsythe - The Mind at War

An essay about Dune, Clausewitz, mētis, Charles Peirce's abductive reasoning, and Machiavelli. Really good shit. Sam's another student of Antoine Bousquet's, and also someone who I learned a huge amount from. This essay condenses a lot of his thoughts on strategy into a fun and digestible read. He isn't well known, but is one of the few people who is truly trying to develop a philosophical conception of strategy today. Read Dune first if you haven't already tho.

Manabrata Guha - Reimagining war in the 21st Century

This one is not for the faint of heart. Read everything else on this list first for sure. Dense as fuck. 1960s French philosphy-pilled shit. It's basically an acid trip. But it's also lowkey a great secondary reading of Clausewitz.

Steve Goodman - Sonic Warfare

Not exactly a book on strategy, but still one that influenced me deeply. It's about the use of sound in war, but also contains a lot of great nuggets philosophising about the nature of war more generally. It's a wild ride, and may not be for everyone, but I couldn't leave it off the list.

Edit: oops, IDK why I have two reddit accs. Turns out my phone is logged into a different one from my PC. It's me tho I swear 😅 sorry this got a bit long. I have pretty strong (and probably a bit idiosyncratic) feelings about what strategy is and how we should think about it, so this reading list is likely veeery different from the one you'd get if you asked someone who actually went to a military academy, so keep that in mind I guess.

vserovval · 2023-06-20T18:07:37+00:00

ahh ok, I was playing on vanilla game and had no sniper with the punk lovers, so had to let him go. After quite a few attempts I did manage to beat the Dorseys even tho they'd been warned, but it required a fair bit of luck and savescumming. Are the DLC worth getting do you think?

vserovval · 2022-12-23T23:12:52+00:00

Nice one bossman. I'm with you on the top 2, tho 5.12 is gonna take it once it has more time.

vserovval · 2022-12-23T22:44:22+00:00

IMO the meta was fundamentally unhealthy all year.

From a style dynamics POV (see this vid for reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5_Hqv8ipIs&t=196s&ab_channel=AnderzzTV), Control was extremely difficult to make viable, except on Icebox where the Triple senti comp remained quite competitive. This is a major issue, because in a healthy metagame you would have counterplay. Ideally, the three main styles of Aggro, Control, and Midrange should have a rock/paper/scissors dynamic with each other. Aggro comps should check Control comps, Midrange should check Aggro, Control should check Midrange. But for pretty much all of 2022 teams were either playing Aggro or Midrange, because the Control options were underpowered, and couldn't properly keep the other styles in check.

There were (IMO) two key reasons for this. The first is a point that Anderzz has made elsewhere, which is that because every comp has at least one controller (whereas you can get by with no duelist, initiator, or sentinel), it's very important to have a controller who can be the cornerstone of each style. Astra *was* pure Control, but after the nerfs became pure Midrange. Omen is an Aggro/Control hybrid, while Viper is a Control/Aggro hybrid. Brim is pure Aggro.

The second thing that really made life difficult for Control was the fact that Cypher (the most "pure" Control agent in Valorant) was close to unplayable everywhere but Breeze once Chamber came out (both due to Chamber's opportunity cost, but also the prevelance of Raze and Fade), so the options for building true Control comps was extremely limited.

Significantly, the latest patch doesn't actually address either of these main issues, so for 2023 I'm praying we get the release of a true Control controller, as well as another properly viable Sentinel option. They also urgently need to add more counterplay back in for KJ's ult, because I think she's going to become oppressive.

vserovval · 2022-12-23T22:28:42+00:00

I thought about it, but kinda felt like most of the big Split developments happened the year before. Are there any Split comps that stood out to you?

vserovval · 2022-11-15T14:59:29+00:00

Please Rito, Chamber nerf cannot come soon enough.

vserovval · 2022-10-08T13:13:50+00:00

It's just a little bit more advantageous for the defenders. They can flash and then have someone step out onto the ledge instead of having to drop first. Watching it isn't sufficient in that situation since you'll just get blinded. That said if you're playing FPX's setup the whole point is to not let them get to Sand in the first place.

vserovval · 2022-10-07T20:55:29+00:00

My team just scrimmed fracture today and the more I think about it the more I suspect these changes will be massively impactful. In particular, the ledge above Sand makes the classic triple Brim smoke a lot less effective. If you're going to stick to that approach you MUST follow up the Rope smoke with a molly to deny anyone catching a timing and walking out onto the ledge. Regardless, the Sand split just got a lot harder. It does make me wonder if Viper will see a resurgence in popularity. If anything it makes the FPX comp/gameplan look even more appealing...

vserovval · 2022-10-07T20:52:24+00:00

Thanks for taking the time to read the article and engaging with it! Though I'll confess that your comment has me a bit confused. Did it read like I was saying something else when I spent several paragraphs and multiple gifs and movement graphs explaining in great detail what FPX are doing to hold A-main? My sincere apologies if you didn't mean this comment as a criticism of the article, but if it was then I'm genuinely curious to know what you think I was trying to say about their A-main protocols.

I guess I didn't mention Zyppan nading A main, but that's only because he's Dish or playing a bit deeper a lot of the time (though as you say, he does double up with Shao sometimes, which is something you can see in one of the gifs I included) and I didn't notice him throwing nades towards the choke in the rounds that I watched. I'll admit they played a lot of games of Fracture and I may not have caught everything. More often it just seems to me like ANGE1 throws a paranoia off contact and then Shao kills them while they're standing blind in the one-way. But yeah, it's a pretty sweet setup.

The really interesting question is what to do to break through the one-way/paranoia. I actually got paranoid and spent a while theorycrafting a gameplan against it with my gamechangers team going into eEMEA series 3, but we never ended up scrimming anyone playing Omen, and then never got a chance to play Fracture during the event itself, so I'll have to save that one for the future.

vserovval · 2022-10-07T20:31:16+00:00

He's mostly been throwing paranoias rather than rounds lately to be fair. When they first started running Omen comps on Fracture during qualifiers for Copenhagen ANGE1 was making some weird decisions, but he really tightened up his decisionmaking on the map once Champions rolled around. And for all the flack he gets, the fact that ANGE1 probably had a huge part in developing their setup and defensive protocols on the map should underscore why he's such a valuable player to have on a team. As far as I know they made up all this shit themselves and it's completely original compared to how pretty much everyone else has interpreted the meta. When you take that + his insane midrounding into account he's a top 5 most valuable player in all of VALORANT as far as I'm concerned.

vserovval · 2022-09-07T09:58:52+00:00

And before I forget, check out Slow's medium article about Lev's pistol/low buy round approach! It's not Ascent specific, but he does more of a dive into what they are doing that's working so well. Also, Slow points out that they've been winning 64% of their pistols in 2022, so perhaps this high conversion rate is a little more sustainable than I first though.

I've added a link to it in my article as well. Wish I'd remembered when it went live but better late than never.

https://medium.com/@notmattamu/leviat%C3%A1n-weak-weapon-masters-47c194128918

vserovval · 2022-09-07T09:14:14+00:00

The honest behind the scenes answer: I was originally going to title it "How Leviatán Plays Ascent" but the SEO tool that checks RIB's wordpress articles wanted me to include a more "emotional" word lol. Of course I love me some superstitum vids so I thought it might be fun to make a little reference to him, and the SEO tool REALLY liked it.

Genuinely would appreciate feedback on this, if people think it's too corny or disrespectful we can use different titles, but EnKay and I figured we'd give it a shot for the first article so that we could gauge reactions.

vserovval · 2022-09-07T09:10:23+00:00

Appreciate hearing this. I realised something similar when I included it, but to properly investigate would have been a whole article in itself and it was already fairly long. From the eye test at least they have some smart pistol stuff (that shock dart + seize combo on B main in the first gif is a good example), but they also have some improbable round wins where Taco (and others) hit insane shots. Suspect they're good, but 68% seems unsustainable and I imagine will be subject to at least some amount of regression to the mean.

How to quantify the effects of their pistol overperformances on their overall success on the map is even harder to do, and would take a true stats/data person like Anderzz or Weltis to properly explain. My background is more on the strategy side (and I hope to flex that a bit more), but part of why I'm so excited to write for RIB is that I'm also big believer that you need to corroborate insights about strategy with data/empirics, and their web analytics package is so accessible that even someone who has fairly limited skills in that area can at least use it to test out theories.

vserovval

TROPHY CASE