How to Be An Expert

“I wanna be the very best, like no one ever was ...”

The first thing I want you to learn is to love losing. Many people fear losing, thinking that it means they’re bad players. What’s the best way to get over this? Use a strategy that you know isn’t optimal. Use a crazy strategy that you know full well is not the best thing you could be doing but which you enjoy using. I assure you, in these games you won’t worry about losing because it’s the outcome you fully expect—the strategy isn’t optimal, after all. And if you win, you know that your skill allowed you to pull out a victory! This is an important lesson.

When you play “serious” games using build orders and strategies that you see expert players using and you lose a game, it doesn’t mean that you’re bad. It means that there’s something suboptimal in your play that you need to correct. Maybe it’s your Conscript micro, maybe it’s your HMG placement, maybe it’s your hotkey use. All of these skills can be practiced and improved, and none of them has anything to do with your intelligence as a person.

The only part of playing multiplayer games that can reflect negatively on you as a person is how you treat your opponent. If you start each match with a “gl hf!” (“Good luck, have fun!”) and end each match with a “gg wp!” (“Good game, well played!”) it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose—you’re on track to becoming a well-respected and competent player.

Another important lesson: Nobody cares how many times you lose, or how you lose—they only care how you win. You could lose hundreds of games month after month, but if one weekend you win a tournament filled with expert players, you’re now recognized as a good player—the past doesn’t matter at all. Obviously, you’ll need to maintain your level of skill after making it to the big leagues, but you’ll always be judged on the quality of your decisions in a game, not whether you actually win all of the games you play.

The Metagame and You

What is the metagame? It’s the game outside of the game that takes place in the minds of players. It dictates which units, abilities, and strategies are likely to be used. Bugs and imbalance have a strong effect on its contours, but the driving forces are the perceptions of players as to what is overpowered or underpowered, and which strategies are good and which are bad.

Following a new patch, the community perception might be that Soviet heavy armor is much better than it used to be, so Commanders that give access to the IS-2 and ISU-152 may substantially increase in popularity. In response, German players begin using the Jaeger Armor Doctrine to gain access to the Elefant as a counter to the Soviet tanks. These two strategies may be dominant for several weeks or months, until a new patch is released that changes unit balance or player perception shifts independent of actual game changes.

For example, Soviet players might realize that because so many German players are centering their late game play on Elefants, Commanders that focus more on infantry and artillery are more viable, like NKVD Rifle Tactics and Guards Rifle Anti-Tank Tactics. In turn, German players may shift to using Jaeger Infantry Doctrine and Assault Support Doctrine if these are perceived to counter the most prominent Soviet strategy. This is the metagame.

To be a good player it’s far more important to understand advanced tactics and broad strategy, but knowledge of the current metagame will give you a competitive edge because you’ll be able to predict your opponent’s decisions to a greater extent.

Strategies for Learning

If you’re serious about improving, you ought to begin by emulating expert players as much as possible. Get into their minds. Watch their replays. Play games using their builds. Do only this until you feel like you can execute their strategies properly. More importantly, do this until you know exactly why their strategies work and how they make decisions. Don’t worry about being innovative and creating an amazing, unique strategy—it’s not important at this point. You don’t yet have the level of understanding necessary and your mechanics are not solid enough to execute your strategy well.

Do you know how scientists are educated? They spend years studying the work of other people until they understand it very well, and only then do they devote themselves to coming up with new ideas. If you think you have an amazing idea and don’t see anyone using it, chances are you didn’t look hard enough or that an expert already thought of the same thing, tried it, and realized it didn’t work.

When you’re just starting out you should find a well-established strategy with its associated build order and capping order and use it game after game until you understand it very well and feel comfortable executing it without any reminders. You should always know what you’ll be building next and when you need to build it, as well as where all of your units should be going in the early game. Until you become a more skilled player, I recommend using a strategy that is common among experts and that isn’t extremely micro-intensive. It’s easier to focus on improving when you know that the strategy you’re using is solid because you only need to focus on executing it better, and also one that doesn’t punish you for micro errors.

As you’re playing, keep the following things in mind, divided into mechanics, information, and knowledge—these aren’t comprehensive lists, but thinking about your gameplay in these categories is useful for self-analysis. The term mechanics refers to giving accurate and rapid commands to your units in executing your tactical and strategic decisions. Information is the data you gather during a game that allows you to predict your opponent’s actions and adapt to a changes in the game situation. Knowledge is your store of information acquired from playing games, watching replays, and reading about strategy, which you’ll use to make the best decision you can based on the available information.

Mechanics

• Macro: Spend your resources. Make sure none of your units are sitting idle. Build units using hotkeys and order them to capture points using the minimap and waypoints.
• Micro: Use unit abilities. Keep your units in cover or moving. Focus fire with your units during large engagements. Move your infantry as soon as you notice the grenade-throwing animation on an enemy unit. Retreat before a unit is destroyed. Select and control units quickly using hotkeys.

Information

• Scouting: The more you know about your opponent’s army, the better your decisions can be. Scouting is how you can obtain the information necessary to make use of your knowledge. If you’re unaware of your opponent’s actions, it’s useless to know that a Panther would be the perfect thing to build now if your opponent is building a T-34.
• Mind Games: Your opponent relies on information as much as you do to make good decisions. What if you spread a bit of false information? Make your opponent think that you’re building an infantry-heavy force when you’re actually building heavy tanks—you’ll have quite the advantage when you finally reveal your true intentions.

Knowledge

• Build Order: know exactly what you’re building next and when, know the situations in which you might deviate from your build order.
• Commander Selection: Know which Commander you’re intending to select depending on the situation, and how long you’re going to wait in a game before the selection. Try to predict which Commander your opponent will use depending on the information you gather about his other choices during the game, like how aggressive he’s playing, which units he’s building, and which “holes” might he be leaving in his army composition that he’s intending to fill with Commander call-in units.

Practice and Fun

To become an expert, you’ll need to practice. For practice to be effective, you first need to feel comfortable with the game and view it as a source of fun and fulfillment. Fulfillment will only come once you begin improving, but you can work on having fun even as a total novice.

Start playing 4 vs. 4 matches and talk to your teammates. If you find someone nice who tries to play as a team, send that person a message after the game and suggest queuing for a few matches together. This is how you’ll build up a group of friends to play with if you don’t already have some. Team games with friends are so much fun! When I (Golradaer) started playing Company of Heroes, I played large team matches for months before ever trying competitive 1 vs. 1. Still, do your best to improve! It’s so much fun to improve. I loved the feeling of leading my team to victory when all seemed lost. A better player in team games can often fight of two weaker players single-handedly and position his teammates to make a comeback.

When you decide to get more serious about improving, once per week work on refining a single aspect of your play. Play for fun all of the rest of the days of the week, but set aside one day for refining. Don’t set goals for how many games you’re going to win, set goals for how many games you’re going to play. The more games you play, the more experienced you’ll become.

Ideas for Improving

• Play a best of three or a best of five against someone you know who is similar in skill. Create a mini-tournament with a group of friends.
• Pick one day of the week to be a session night. On this day, play serious games for at least two hours.
• Refine a single strategy. Use it over and over until you’ve faced a broad array of different strategies.
• Save at least one replay from each of your play sessions. Every couple of weeks, go back and watch one of your replays from a while ago. You’ll probably laugh at the mistakes you used to make and you’ll realize how much better you’ve become.
• Get involved with an online fan community so you have people to talk to about strategy. You can post your replays to receive feedback on your play, find replays of expert players to watch, and meet potential practice partners.

How to Watch a Replay

Watching a replay for fun and watching a replay to learn are quite different. When doing it for fun, you’ll often watch it straight through at 1x speed with fog of war off and focus on the main action, occasionally looking at how the rest of the map is fairing—similar to a match with commentary on Twitch.tv or YouTube.

Analyze your replays in terms of mechanics, information, and knowledge. Where did you succeed or fail in those areas? When watching an expert replay, keep the fog of war on and watch a game from just one player’s perspective. Constantly ask yourself “why did he just do that?” Think of alternative responses and how well those might have worked. The expert didn’t have perfect information while playing the game, so to replicate his playing experience for yourself as closely as possible, you need to limited your available information to only what he could use while making decisions. Watch a replay of yours and immediately after watch one of an expert using the exact same build order as you. What did he do differently?

When watching to learn you should be pausing often, restricting your focus to certain areas of the map even when there isn’t much going on, and watching the same replay multiple times with fog of war on. Focus on different areas of the map each time, or watching from a different player perspective. You should also go into the replay with a list of things in mind that you’re trying to work on personally to which you’re going to pay special attention.

For example, let’s say you have issues countering a fast T-34. Watch a replay with fog of war on and follow the German player right when he sees the fast T-34, then pause. Think to yourself “given the map position, your resources, and your available units, what’s the best course of action?” When you’re playing you don’t have the luxury of objectively considering your available options and the best response, you need to make a snap decision and act before your units are destroyed and you’re pushed back into your base. By watching how the German player in the replay responds, you can get some ideas you might replicate in your own games. Now, go back and watch the early game until the T-34 comes out from the Soviet player’s perspective with fog of war on. Imagine that you were the Soviet player here: Given what you’ve seen about the German player’s army composition and positioning, where should you send your T-34 to do the most damage while ensuring that it isn’t destroyed by an AT gun or disabled by a mine? Then, watch what the German player actually does.

Here’s the key part: When you’re thinking as the German player in that situation you often feel vulnerable and worry about getting completely overrun—how could you possibly deal with such a fast T-34? Mines and AT guns feel so unreliable and they can cover only so much territory. But, when you’re thinking as the Soviet player, you worry that your large tech investment won’t pay off because an AT gun could be hiding just around the building and there are so many choke points that look like great spots for mines—if I’m cautious with the T-34 it’ll be of little value, but if I charge in it could be destroyed in seconds!

It’s crucial to realize what your opponent is likely thinking and feeling at any given point in a game, and to know just how many AT guns and mines he could reasonably have, as well as where they could reasonably be. By watching the replay in this fashion and going through these thought exercises you’ll come away having learned far more than by watching a game without fog of war and without pausing to reflect on how you’d approach situations if you were playing.

Company of Heroes 2 looks so simple without fog of war—“don’t drive onto the mine!” you think while watching—but the reality of play is intense. You feel like you’re wandering through a forest full of wolves at night with only a candle and a dagger, even though you realize at some level that there’s really only one wolf and he’s just as scared as you are.

When you’re looking for lessons while watching replays of games you lost, it is not effective to say “Oh, I didn’t spend my Munitions enough, I should spend more Munitions.” This is way too vague to be useful. What happens next time you play, assuming you remember your lesson? You think to yourself “I should spend more Munitions” and perhaps you upgrade an Engineer squad with a Flamethrower, or use Oorah! more often, or upgrade Molotovs earlier so you can spend Munitions on those. While you are making better use of the resource, you are not doing it in a directed way in line with your strategy or the game situation.

When you see that you aren’t spending your Munitions, look at various points in the game to determine when it would be best to spend them and what things you should be spending them on. For example, as Germans, if you struggle a lot against HMGs in buildings early game and you float lots of Munitions, a flamethrower on a Pioneer squad is a great idea! However, if you find that you’re generally overrun by Conscripts just as you finish building Tier 2 is it still a good idea to get that early flamethrower? What about upgrading an LMG42 on your first Grenadier squad? Or, what about saving all of your Munitions until you reach Tier 2 so you can build a Half-track as your first Tier 2 unit and immediately upgrade it with Flame Projectors—this is certainly a good counter to lots of Conscripts. What if your opponent gets fast Scout Cars? Should you spend Munitions on Panzerfausts to destroy them, or try to avoid them until you can build a Scout Car from Tier 2?

These are the types of decisions regarding spending your Munitions that you need to be thinking about. Certainly, make an effort to not float Munitions, but go into a game telling yourself “I’m going to upgrade my second Pioneer squad with a flamethrower, and I’m going to always save my next 60 Munitions in case I need to use Panzerfausts against early Scout Cars.” Or as Germans using the Assault Support Commander, “I need to spend my Munitions late game on strafing runs any time I see a concentration of three or more infantry squads and I have units nearby that can engage.”

• Before a serious play session, write down specific, measurable learning goals like “I will maintain four Conscript squads at all points in a game, if one squad dies I’ll immediately build another as a replacement.”
• Look for patterns in your mistakes or lost games. Keep a document of notes! This might sound crazy, but if you have trouble identifying these patterns, look back at your notes for several of your replays. Sometimes you need to look at several smaller sets of information, like notes, rather than several huge sets of information, like entire replays, to notice patterns.
• Ask a friend to watch one of your replays to get an outside perspective. Do the same for him! Talking to other people about their tactical and strategic decisions is one of the best ways to improve your play and develop innovative ideas.

Habits of Experts

When the novice gets a lead, he takes a break. This gives his opponent a chance to catch up. The master player is like a snowball: If you make a mistake you’re going to be crushed because he’s not going to slow down until the game is over.

Calculated Attack

Experts are able to determine at a glance how well their force is likely to do against a group of enemy units, meaning they will only engage in fights they know they can win or when they know that they’ll lose but for a good reason, like delaying an opponent from capturing an important point. For them, the Retreat command is a tool used to quickly return units to their base for reinforcement rather than a response to an “Oh ****, my units are dying!” realization. Experts rarely lose units in their entirety because they realize both the importance of veterancy and recognize exactly how long a unit can remain in combat under fire before it’s in danger of destruction.

While experts often place a lot of pressure on their opponents beginning early in the game, they realize that as long as they preserve their units they’ll likely win in the late game. Why? Novices and average players start losing their ability to predict effectively and fail to divide their attention appropriately among different areas of the map. Early in the game, a player can often get away with memorizing a few build orders and focusing on one area, but neither of these techniques are effective later on.

Prediction and Adaptation

Experts have an extensive knowledge of the game and the tendencies of players. This allows them to predict with high accuracy what their opponents will do and how to adapt to any changes in the game situation. An example of this is an expert Soviet player who thinks his opponent might soon bring out a Half-track with Flame Projectors. Depending on the German player’s control over any Munitions Points on the map, the construction of any Munitions Caches, and the number of Munitions-based weapon upgrades or unit abilities used, the Soviet player can get a sense for how much time he has to prepare a counter. Perhaps he ought to upgrade AT Grenades for his Conscript squads and build an AT gun. Maybe his Fuel income has been very strong and he’s close enough to building a T-70 that he decides not to invest in any other anti-tank weapons. Waiting for the T-70 is the riskier option and it takes solid prediction skills to do it with some degree of security.

Adaptation occurs in response to actions that were not predicted, either due to inaccuracy or there being multiple likely options. For example, to expand upon the prediction scenario above, let’s say the Soviet player chose to delay for the T-70, and soon after attacking the German Half-track with Flame Projectors, his light tank runs over a German AT mine and is destroyed. Oops. A novice might want to give up at this point, viewing that the game is lost, but not the expert. Because he just spent all of his Fuel on the light tank, it’s going to be a little while before AT Grenades can be researched, so how can he deal with the Half-track? Here’s one adaptation: Spread units out as much as possible to force the Half-track to travel farther to attack each one, minimizing its impact while using Combat Engineers to lay one or more mines on major travel paths near their base. The Soviet player should also be building an AT gun at this point, and saving Fuel for AT Grenades. When the Half-track gets near a unit, Retreat the unit. Eventually the Half-track should make its way toward the Soviet base and notice the Combat Engineers. By controlling these appropriately, the Soviet player can bait the Half-track to drive through a mine. This won’t destroy it, but it should put it out of position and delay it further, giving you time enough for your AT gun to move up and finish it off.

Map Awareness

One of the most important skills in real-time strategy games is map awareness. In Company of Heroes 2, this often means keeping an eye on all of your units that are in combat to dodge grenades and artillery, to respond to flanking maneuvers, and to note which points your opponent is capturing. The natural tendency is to carefully watch one battle that you consider the most important and completely forget about what’s happening elsewhere. It will take time to force yourself to change your focus of attention even when you think you should still be watching a unit, but as you gain experience you’ll be able to rapidly assess exactly how much attention each unit requires depending on the tactical situation.

Experts avoid tunnel vision. Novices love to focus on a single task and do it perfectly. Experts realize that simultaneously performing several tasks “good enough” is superior. Novices focus on the main screen. Experts are constantly glancing at the minimap, tactical map, and unit bars. Ask yourself at different points in a game: What should I be looking at to see the most relevant information at once?

The Master’s Attitude

Learning orientation: if you aren’t an elite player and you aren’t playing in a tournament, you should view each game as an opportunity to get closer to your desired skill level. Viewed this way, stomping a noob is actually a waste of time in terms of learning. What good is climbing the ladder a few spots if you don’t have the skills to compete against the top players? The fastest way to improve is to play against people slightly better than you because they challenge you to be at the top of your game and you know that if you play a solid game you can win, but that your mistakes will be punished. You need someone to make you realize when you’re making mistakes; noobs won’t do this for you.

Don’t try to improve at everything at once. Focus on a single aspect of play that you find difficult and you’ll see steady improvement over time. As soon as you’re comfortable, you need to change your focus! It feels good to be comfortable, but it’s actually a signal that you’re no longer learning as much, which means you’re stagnating.

Be aware of your emotions and take control. You are going to be faced with situations that piss you off so much you want to break something—accept that this is going to happen. It will. The important thing is knowing what you need to do when you’re irritated. If you just lost a close match against a major rival, you need to distract yourself until you’re calm enough to analyze the situation reasonably. Walking away from your computer is a good idea.

Blaming yourself is a good thing! If an extremely lucky artillery shot finishes off a squad of yours and costs you the game, don’t think “I would’ve won if I hadn’t been so unlucky.” Instead think “I can’t believe I let the game get so close that a bit of chance caused me to lose.” There is always something you could have done better, maybe not in that specific situation, but earlier on in the game to avoid that type of situation entirely or to mitigate its potential impact. Expert players try to remove as much chance from their games as possible. They don’t rely on low probability events to win games for them (“If I could just get a lucky grenade hit, I’ll be fine!”), and they do whatever they can to avoid situations in which low probability events could absolutely ruin them (for example, if their opponent has artillery, they never bunch up their units while in its range, even when it would be useful—it’s just not worth the chance of being hit by a lucky shot).