After the ETC is before the ETC.

Hey Guys
Sadly not everything was going according to our plan and it didn't come out that well.
So we can look out for next Year.

What do we have to change?
Where do we have to improve?
How did the partings go? Was the programm usefull?
What was good and can taken again?

Cheers

lol xD I thought about making the same topic today in the morning too xD

Well first, thanks to our team for everything you invested into this event =) Sadly the effort wasn't honored with a top 10 Place, but I'm sure you all tried your best =)

Second I think we need to know, what basically went wrong...
Were there lots of mismatches, did we leave the dicingskills at home, were our lists not strong enough, or were we just not "good" enough...
Or was it everything togetter =/

I'm looking forward to a feedback from the team and maybe some small battlereports =)

First of all - thanks to the team for your efforts and all the hard work that you have put in. I can only hope that your are proud of having been a part of the event - from my side much respect for all you have done!

Looking forward to a debriefing and hope that those that stay for the holidays will have a nice time!

Hi everyone.
I write from Las Vegas.
Congratulation for you job. I think that the rank is not so high than your work for this year. But the essential is: did you have fun and pleasure to be rhe ETC swiss team 2013?
I haven't seen the training day, the brainstorming for lists. But i m sure that it was really good and interessant.
I hope that I ll be one of the pretender for next year. For me it was a pleasure to organise it last year and i m happy to see 3 of the players of last year team this year. Thanks for that.

See you in Sion next week end. And see you soon for the others.

ABT which hope he will have a bit more time for the hobby this year. But studies before...

What didn't work it's easy: the team. I'm not speaking about the level of the players but about the lists all together. There were some team with 6 lore of death, the average was something around 3/4 I think. Team switzerland? 0.

The biggest problem for our country is that only a few player can adapt to play the army that the team need.




On the other hand Dim's program worked pretty well (except when the computer shut down or it does a miss click for selecting the army we have to throw).


Stay tuned for the battle report

First of all I want to thanks the other members of the team for their work.

I start by analizing my own failure and then I will analyze "the global failure" of the team.
I have to say that I have been the worst player of the team collecting only 36 battle points, which make me think that it may be time to stop playing in the team. (And eventually stay as a coach).

There is an explanations for that: Change of list 2 months before the event implied lack of training with the new list, so I incorrectly thought that Orcs and VC were a not bad matchup (even if you told me the contrary...) I even had never played against VC with the list.

For orcs, if I have first turn it is not bad (10+) against Orcs, but then the two latest game I didn't started and it went really wrong: 4-16. It is in fact a game were things can go go wrong if you have bad dices.
So against orcs, an average of 8.25 pts out of 4 games
Against VC, I make some mistake ---> 0-20

Against HE with deathstar of dragon prince:
The weakness of the list is the number of princes to kill to take away the look out sire: 6. They have world dragon banner, so I have to cannon shot them a lot to achieve that. This is what I do while redirecting him as much as I can and getting some missfire with the steam tank. Since opponent had first turn I did not had time to kill the boltthrowers.

At one point of the game, I have to sacrify my demis, so I took the BSB away from the unit, and placed it ... not in line of sight of the boltthrowers, but away from the archer unit with characters (mistake...) During same turn and first cannon shot with no look out sire on general+BSB of the HE, my cannon decided to blow up and made panic the unit of archers + light congregation, I pay really high my mistake. --> 3-17


For the team, it seems we have not made a proper team building. We gathered 8 good individual tournament lists but that is not what we need.

We need to specialize our lists against other types of list. We have to define against what each player will have to play, for him to build his list accordingly.
I think that the player who would have been told that he has to crush daemons and ogre kingdoms would have automatically chosen death lore, for instance.

Moreover, I think that playing not main stream builds is better, because the opponent will not know the match but you know it, so it is good. I think this is what Poland do in general: specialization and by consequence not main stream builds.

For the pairing software, it worked really well but two incident (as Alan said) in the 4th game and in the 6th gave us a lesser quality of pairing.
I will work this year on giving a graphical interface to my program, for easier use (preventing errors as they occured).

And we have to play tournament outside of switzerland, also, to learn things.

For the Tournys outside of Switzerland. Xavier, stefan and i are plannig to go to the biggest tournys in germany 100+ players. You are welcome to join us.

For the lists Overall. I really liked the italian setting with 6 aggresiv lists and 2 blockers to secure points.

Or as dim said. Stay outside of the meta and let others do mistakes.

Dim we had the same problem last year. Good indiv lists but not built for the team. And also the problem that we didn t know how pairing.
Thanks for your honnest feedback.

@Dim
Wow, thats an honest feedback, thanks for it.

I'm looking forward to more feedback of the team and some battlereports. 

@Eldorte
Tournaments in Germany sounds cool, and I would like to attend some of them too. So if you ppl don't minde, it would be great to get informed here over the tournaments you planed on going.

Since my "wife" is from Germany and has her family there, I might help out with sleeping places, if a tournament is somewhere near the family.

I think it would help also a bit, to play some tournaments in Germany, also some teamtournaments. The Germans have a big community with lots of skilled players, and getting some experience by playing against them would help.

Thanks for the feedback DIM & Alan - much appreciated.

If you don't mind a few questions?

What impact had our lists and the problems with the pairings on the overall results? Or in other words - if everything would have been perfect, what place do you think, we could have achieved?

Most or you could say all of our opponents were not the top Warhammer nations - do you think that we could compete against stronger opponents?

I think our lists made us start each pairing at something 75-85 before pairings. (Supposing everyone is pairing perfectly)
After pairings and the software working, in general it was at least 80-80 or even a bit better when the computer worked. The two times it failed gave us a -5/-7 points.

The team that crushed us on the last game (combination of bad pairing and bad luck) is 12th so this is definitively a rank we could have reached. I think top 10 is a good objective, after 4 years below 20.

The thing is that 8th edition has made smaller the difference between team because luck can do a lot, and thus even top nations can loose sometimes against "not top nations". Ireland captain told me that they won 100-60 against Denmark on the training of thursday, for instance, and on the second round Spain won 89 - 71 against Denmark. So we can still hope to hold a 70+ against top nations I think.

First of all, I'm thankful to everyone for the awsome experience: afterall it still remains a wonderfull experience!!!




I agree with Alan about the army team composition as the main bad point: and the death lore is a perfect example. We maybe built 8 good lists, but we missed a concept in the armies composition, we didn't faced how the warhammer playing were evolving, therefore we didn't reacted.


Although the pairing program is a great tool, I'm not sure if it's always good to reach the good pairings we're looking for: imho it's somtimes better to think about the possible pairings in order to avoid some (too bad matches) or to have a "moderate" sacrificed match in order to get another one where is possible to score higher. I didn't followed the pairing system during the etc, but looking at the final matches (especially in the last 2 rounds) I just had some thoughts about that....
Don't you think that maybe integrate the mind in the process should be a benefit?


As third point: does everyone knew what to do and how to interpretate the match, compared to the overall matchups of the team before and during the game? a huge point we missed imho was to know before the match who's going to push, the "sacrified" and the blockers, and how the things evolved during the matches. A "leading person" who takes the responsibility to take the decisions: an essential point we missed imo.



Pulps

I will come back on the 5th and 6th pairing to explain to Filip what happened.

First of all, 5th pairing was good.

Pairing against Finland (5th game):  Estimation before pairing (assuming they do perfect pairing: 75-85)

Swiss                          Finland                            Estimation  Actual result:
Orcs & Goblins          Dark Elves                       10-10          9-11
Bretonnia                   Empire                              12-8            8-12
Empire                        Orcs and goblins           11-9            4-16
Vampire Counts        High elves                        11-9            16-4  
Skaven                       Warrior of Chaos            10-10          10-10
Dwarfs                        Skavens                           12-8            14-7
Daemons of Chaos  Chaos Dwarves               13-7            20-0
High Elves                Ogre Kingdoms                9-11           7-13
                                                Total:                    88-72         88-72

So in this round :
-I learn that against Orcs and goblins, things can go wrong if I don't have first turn (15-5 and 10-10 the two match before),  (-7)
-Xavier makes a counter performance because of this damn hellblaster and some bad luck with the demis not going out of the table (see his report) (-4),
-Andy suffer more that supposed (-2),

But Raphael (+5), Alan (+7) and Paul (+2) corrected by their good performance.

I have to agree that the 6th pairing went wrong, basically because:

1) I thrown myself first. I click wrong on the computer so that the computer think I thrown Alan, so when opponents response is OG/High elves, the computer says take OG! (of course).

After some reflexion with Xavier, we decide I take it (estimation was -2 at this point for me), very bad idea!

2) At some point we have to click dwarves of chaos and computer says Vampire counts-Daemons.
Andy tells us that he thinks in fact his estimation is wrong and he can crush Dwarves of chaos, so finally we throw High elves-Daemons in an attempt of integrating the brain in the process... bad idea.

Even if he actually scored some points against chaos dwarves, it was a bad idea because our High elf would have been better in our hand than daemons at that point. (To block High elves, for instance, that annoyed us a lot in the third pairing round)

Pairings against Norway (6th game)  Estimation before pairing (assuming they do perfect pairing:  81-79)

Swiss                          Norway                         Estimation  Actual result:
Orcs & Goblins          Dark Elves                       11-9            12-8
Bretonnia                  High Elves                       7-13            1-19
Empire                        Orcs and goblins           8-12            4-16
Vampire Counts        Lizardmen                        14-6            0-20  
Skaven                       Warrior of Chaos            10-10          10-10
Dwarfs                        Dwarfs                              11-9            9-11
Daemons of Chaos  Skavens                           10-10          10-10
High Elves                 Chaos dwarves               14-6            13-7
                                                Total:                    85-75           59-101

So for this 6th pairing, the thing to remember is: vampire lord explosion (-14)  crown of command destruction (-6)  Me (-4) and nothing siginificantly better than expected, so we got crushed.

Thanks Dim for the datas.

I have one question left. I saw the result sheet scannings and in you 3th (?) match Raph had a 10-10 with 0 points on both sides. What happend there?

Both of them were planing to have a 10-10 so they agreed on this score without doing the game.

4th pairing: Computer shut downs for the third step fo the pairing due to a bug while entering a choice.

Pairing against  Ukraine(4th game): Estimation before pairing (Assuming they do perfect pairings 80-80)

Swiss                          Ukraine                           Estimation  Actual result:
Orcs & Goblins          Dark Elves                       11-9            10-10
Bretonnia                   Empire                              7-13            16-4
Empire                        High elves                       11-9             3-17
Vampire Counts        Orcs and goblins             5-15            7-13  
Skaven                       Warrior of Chaos            10-10          10-10
Dwarfs                        Skavens                           13-7            13-7
Daemons of Chaos  Vampire counts               13-7             6-14
High Elves                Ogre Kingdoms                9-11             9-11
                                                Total:                   79-81         74-86

Very difficult pairing against Ireland (good meta)

Pairing against  Ireland(3rd game): Estimation before pairing (Assuming they do perfect pairings 75-85)

Swiss                          Ireland                          Estimation  Actual result:
Orcs & Goblins          Daemons                       7-13              0-20
Bretonnia                   Dark elf                            12-8             20-0
Empire                        Vampire counts              12-8             0-20
Vampire Counts        Skavens                          10-10           10-10
Skaven                       lizardmen                        6.5-13.5       8-12
Dwarfs                        Chaos dwarfs                  11-9            10-10
Daemons of Chaos  Warrior of chaos              13-7            11-9
High Elves                 Empire                               8-12            3-17
                                                Total:                   79.5-80.5     62-98

Combination of : bad estimation of orcs/dameons and combination of bad estimation, bad play for empire/vampire counts and panic test with dragon-> dragon dead for High elves.
Xavier and victor saving 2 points for us


Easy pairing against Wales

Pairing against  Wales(2nd game): Estimation before pairing (Assuming they do perfect pairings 81-79)

Swiss                         Wales                             Estimation  Actual result:
Orcs & Goblins          Tomb kings                      11-9             9-11
Bretonnia                   Skavens                           12-8             12-8
Empire                        Orcs and goblins            11-9             10-10
Vampire Counts        Dwarfs                              10-10           10-10
Skaven                       lizardmen                        12-8              16-4
Dwarfs                        High elves                       11-9             13-7
Daemons of Chaos  Daemons of chaos         13-7             13-7
High Elves                 Bretonnia                          10-10          14-6
                                                Total:                   90-70           97-63

Good pairing against Netherlands

Pairing against  Netherlands(1st game): Estimation before pairing (Assuming they do perfect pairings 80-80)

Swiss                         Netherlands                     Estimation  Actual result:
Orcs & Goblins          Vampire counts               6-14             6-14
Bretonnia                   Lizardmen                        8-12            10-10
Empire                        Orcs and goblins            11-9             15-5
Vampire Counts        Daemons                         12-8             12-8
Skaven                       Dark elves                       12-8             11-9
Dwarfs                       Chaos dwarves               12-8              0-20
Daemons of Chaos  Warriors of chaos         13-7             14-6
High Elves                 Ogre kingdoms                15-5            10-10
                                                Total:                   89-71           78-82

I compensate Andy's bad estimation, Pulps saves the points (they were a bad estimation there) and Paul dies with bad luck against chaos dwarves (-12).

@Dim: okay 5th pairing looks pretty good for us: as I said, I didn't followed the pairing process  



Maybe I'm wrong, but I remember at some point you asked me if I'm fine against DE, I told you it was ok for me, but the norway HE was still unpaired: I'm just wondering if maybe it would have been better for me to play against him in order to give a better matchup fo Xav. And I didn't really understood the explanation but nevermind   

But as I alreay told, I'm totally for the pairing tool:) 



Pulps

The pairing tool is only as good as the estimations we feed to it.
Imo there is much room for improvement in this regard. To my knowledge only 1 player took the time and made the effort to rate each possible matchup individualy. Mind you - I am not against clustering - but sometimes small differences in the estimations can easily have huge impacts for the pairing.

That's completely true, but it is also very difficult to rate a match when you never did the game, or not often enough. I think this as been our major problem this year. (Real training starting around 10th of July) For comparison, in the French team they played at least one game by week from April, and they finished 7th.

Pulps wrote:

As third point: does everyone knew what to do and how to interpretate the match, compared to the overall matchups of the team before and during the game? a huge point we missed imho was to know before the match who's going to push, the "sacrified" and the blockers, and how the things evolved during the matches. A "leading person" who takes the responsibility to take the decisions: an essential point we missed imo.

Pulps

So, did we have this year a "non-playing-coach"? Or did we want to have one, but didn't get one, becouse of Stefan and Hammer couldn't come?

I think this is also a very important role in the whole team. Someone who has an oversight over the games and can give orders to the players to push more or to go back to defence. But it shouldn't be a player... The players should concentrate on the games.

We had even 2 coachs!

But maybe what we need is a non playing captain (but I am not sure we can afford to).

I think that the only case were you want to have "push" orders is when you loose below 60.
In all other cases, you still wants the points you can have (65 is still better than 60) without taking silly risks.

Well 2 coaches which are bought playing... I think a non playing captain/coach/whatever would be great.
The germans had one and he is giving lots of infos to the community about his work and how the games went, and it seems a real good experience, to have one with the team. The team had some profits out of him.

I mean, we had 2 non playing coach.

Ah sorry, then I might have misunderstood the post of pulps... I thought the idea behind the non-playing coaches was what Pulps criticized...?
To have someone who knows how all games are standing and so on...

Our coach were not "leading coach", like giving orders, but more helpers. I think that's the point of Pulps.