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Our Biggest Mistake About Android: Netrunner
Jan 03 2014 06:05 AM |
Hraklea
in Android: Netrunner
Android: Netrunner Hraklea
A few days ago, I realized that my group and I discuss a lot more about Corp than we do about Runner. I'm not sure things are like that, but this Corp problematic nature, summed with my previous will of writing about Corps, led me to make this article.Most players in my group (including me), when they started playing the game, had a hard time learning to play Corp properly. As far as I know, this happens everywhere. There must be something I can do to help, right? I like to think there is. Today, I want to talk about one of the most important concepts in Corp's gameplay: work compression.
This concept was introduced by Geoff Hollis in his article "My Secret Love Affair with Jinteki: Personal Evolution". I won't say he invented how to play Corp as we know nowadays, but at least he was the first person who cared about putting into words his conclusion after months of tests, and deserves our respect for that. Here is the key sentence of his article:
Jinteki’s most interesting tool is a form of work compression. If you would like a concrete definition of that, I am using work compression to mean “the ability to use clicks for actions across multiple turns, and then to force the runner to match you click-for-click within the space of a runner’s single turnâ€.
Honestly, I'm not sure if I understood this definition, but I believe I got the idea after reading the entire article. As it happens sometimes, different people have different definitions of the same concept, and this is how I would define what work compression means: it is a process of putting the Runner into a situation where he or she won't have time to do all he or she has to do. Basically, your goal as a Corp is to misguide the Runner to leave him or her without enough credits to run into your remote, for instance, or without cards in hand to take the risk of accessing a Project Junebug, etc.
While the concept itself might sound a little obvious, and maybe silly, the big thing is Hollis' conclusion, which made changes so big in high-level Jinteki gameplan that it stopped being "the scrub faction" to be "the faction that won GenCon 2013": the Runner is more punished by work compression the more agenda points you have. This is huge.
Remember when Android: Netrunner was released, and everybody used to say that Corp players should be as slow as possible, and that drawing cards as Corp was bad because you don't want to draw agendas? Hollis' conclusion (or, at least, my own conclusion after reading his article) turned that logic upside down: in 2012, you didn't want to draw agendas before you had a well protected remote server to install them; now, you do want to draw agendas before the Runner draws his or her icebreakers! You always want to be at the match-point (the point where you only need to score one more agenda to win) as fast as you can, because that pressures the Runner to make non-optimal moves not to lose the game.
Scoring Agendas
The most common strategy nowadays is what we call "fast advance". It is basically to take advantage of some key cards - like Biotic Labor, Trick of Light and SanSan City Grid - to score your agendas as soon as they hit the board, not giving a chance for the Runner to steal them. It doesn't look like you need any sort of work compression, at the first sight.
The main counterattack used by Runners is what we call a "R&D lock", which means they'll access more cards from R&D than the Corp can draw, preventing the Corp from drawing agendas. Once the R&D is locked, all the Runner needs to do to be sure of his or her victory is to check HQ and get the agendas that are there. Now you do need work compression to "unlock" your R&D, and that's the sort of work compression you should focus your deck.
Both Haas-Bioroid and NBN have very particular ways to do that. The former has those advertisement assets that, if not trashed, will give a huge economical boost to the Corp; and a strong set of high cost-benefit pieces of ICE that, while can be broken, will delay the Runner significantly in the long term. The latter can punish the Runner by tagging him or her, which allows the Corp to score an unexpected amount of agenda points throught Project Beale + Psychographics.
Flatlinning
The other two Corps of the game take the flatline path. Jinteki, as Hollis describes in his article, can create a huge amount of work compression if played properly, making the Runner unsafe to run freely wherever he or she wants. If the Runner wants to try to R&D lock you, let him or her do it - if he or she finds a Snare! or a Fetal AI, a pair of Neural EMP and it is done, the match is yours.
Weyland Consortium, the king of the so-called "tag and bag decks", requires the Runner to be always ready to be a victim of the SEA Source + Scorched Earth combo. If that's not enough, Weyland Consortium can make running a server more expensive every turn, thanks to Ice Wall and its crew. All those harms allied with some of the best agendas in the game leaves the Runner with no room for mistakes.
Surprising
If you're not happy with the ways your favorite faction deals with Runners, or if you don't agree with my ideas presented above, you can thank Fantasy Flight Games for creating the influence system! Look at all those Plugged In Tour champions:
- Kyle Walker thought Minelayer wasn't enough and borrowed Snare! to slow down R&D locks;
- Reid Delfeld scared Runners with Scorched Earth instead Psychographics;
- Sam Southard included Ice Wall and Hadrian's Wall in his Jinteki deck;
- Wesley Kinslow left the tag and bag trend and used Ash 2X3ZB9CY to protect his Government Contracts;
It doesn't really matter how you intend to work compress your opponent as long as you know what you're doing, and equally important, know what you're not doing. You must be always paying attention to what you have not done, take your time between games to think why you lost, take notes, record your matches if you think it will help - do what you have to do, but always learn from your mistakes. That's the only way to get better.
Bluffing
A big part of knowing how to play Corp is knowing how to bluff. Bluffing involves a lot of things, specially body reading knowledge that a lot of people lacks, but an important part of bluffing properly is directly related to work compression.
A smart Runner is expecting you to "work compress" him or her. When you install-advance-advance a remote protected by a piece of ICE the Runner can break, you're basically telling the Runner that what you installed is a trap. Of course, the Runner also knows that you know that and might have installed an actual agenda, betting he or she would not run there. That's the "basic" bluff that you probably made (and got hit too!) a couple of times.
A more efficient way to bluff is to give the Runner the false impression that you believe you set a proper work compression when you actually know you didn't. A famous example was what Benjamin Marsh did against Jeremy Zwirm in the World Championship Weekend finals in 2012: he played a Project Junebug behind his most protected server, baiting Zwirm to Stimhack that server. I lost the count of how many times I baited an Inside Job or a Tinkering into my ambushes. That's how grown man bluff, baby.
Ending
I hope you enjoyed the reading. I'll keep writing articles about Corps as long as they help you guys to have a better experience with our favorite card game. See'ya in 2014, and don't forget to share you opinion and/or experiences in the comments!
João “Hraklea†Almeida is a brazilian amateur card game player, the responsible for the Android: Netrunner league in Porto Alegre - RS -, in partnership with Lojas Jambô, and the writer of Root Cause, a bi-weekly series of articles about playing Anarch.
- Eldil, thedaffodilfish, Kahrash and 5 others like this
8 Comments
That was the only line I disagreed with, and don't get me wrong, clearly he has spent a LOT of time playing and thinking about this game. I also play and follow competitive fighting games and it has always been my experience whether spectating or in person that very strong mindgames can be accomplished without needing, as he puts it, knowledge overlap. There is certainly a difference between Street Fighter and a card game - if you're fighting against Ryu, everyone should know Ryu's moves and what he can do from what distance, etc. That Ryu is not changing from console to console. But if you're playing against Andromeda, there's still some flexibility in how her 15 influence was spent and the remaining make up of her deck.
However that shouldn't stop you from starting spontaneous mindgames and trying to make them work. Really high level fighting game players will accomplish very strong mindgames (that other high level players will succomb to), simply from using a different button in a certain situation. They take their character's six buttons and use them in such a way that you feel like you're not facing a Ryu anymore (or at least not the same one you prepared for). Making these changes in between rounds of a match is what particularly separates the highest level players from the rest. Being able to impose your will on the opposing player is a huge skill, and you just cannot sit back and think about not having knowledge overlap. Whether you call it bluffing or mindgames, I think it's vital to practice. For me it doesn't matter if it's cards or Street Fighter, there will always be times where you play the player, not the cards (or character).
If "editing pass" means what I think it does, I apologize. I do my best to post the articles without errors, but I still have a lot to learn about writing in english. I'll pay more attention next time.
I agree with you that Hollis' statement was, at least, incomplete. I would say that you need to understand how your opponent is thinking in order to bluff. It is not simply a matter of knowledge overlap, but a matter of reading your opponents, regardless of how much he knows.
I remember reading once in a Justin Wong's article (probably on EventHubs) where he said that, when facing someone he doesn't know, he uses the first fight to see how the opponent will react to his baits. I really hate the current Android: Netrunner tournament system because we just can't do that.
I'm still very new to Netrunner but have been very lucky to attend 3 tournaments now, and I have come to the same conclusion about the current match system. In fact, it made me drop my Runner deck (Kit) because while it was loads of fun to play, I just felt it was not a smart deck to bring to tourney when it's pretty much best of 1, then side switch.
Also, your writing is still very coherent but Keen makes a fair point and I would be happy to edit your pieces for spelling/grammar.
In my experience, the most important difference in trying to pull off the "mind games" in A:NR and Street Fighter is that in Street Fighter, you always have every move available to you, and in A:NR, you're limited to the moves available in your hand. In A:NR, even if you know that the right move right now to "play the player" is to install X card in Y position, you may not have X card in your hand even if it's available in your deck, and by the time you draw the X card, the game state may have changed in a way that makes you need the Z card instead and still don't have the proper play.
If you want to take advantage of mind-games in A:NR, the best way to do it is to focus on strategies for using them to put the Runner in a disadvantageous state (and subsequently taking advantage of it) and not tactics for making a particular play to jedi-mind-trick the other player.
Hollis' work compression is an example of this: once his deck gets to match point, every install he puts down in a remote is Sophie's Choice: do I run this and potentially flatline, or do I let this go and potentially let him win? Since there are several combinations of tactics that reduce in this case down to one specific strategy (achieving a game state where any installed remote server card can present a two-state, now-or-never, life-or-death decision for the runner), once the deck reaches this state, it no longer suffers from having the right tactic available to it at the right time, because the underlying threat of the strategy is what makes it dangerous, and not a particular card in a particular place.
You can look at my Never Advance for another example of this strategic versus tactical advantage: the "masquerading" that the agendas, assets, and upgrades all do to disguise each other creates a very similar lose-lose situation where any branch of the Runner's decision tree could be wrong instead of some subset of branches that the Runner can prune out by examining the game state. In this way, even though I might not have all of my "moves" available to me based on the cards in my hand, I can at least establish the threat of whatever move I need whenever I need it, since every maneuver is launched the same way.
To reiterate though, that is a function of the inherent strategy of the deck - it gives the player the tools it needs to achieve a real bluff. A player incapable of using hidden knowledge to pull off such a bluff still won't be magically empowered to do so simply by having a deck with the requisite strategic vector in hand, but on the other hand, a player that is capable of making such bluffs can very easily fail to pull them off without having such a deck in hand. Those ideas are always the source of my consternation with players that have overoptimistic/delusional/etc. ideas about the powers of mind games, and I suspect they're the basis of Hollis' similar feelings that he mentions in his article.
May I offer some complementary reading:
http://www.boardgame...ry-rush-hybrids
You are talking about high level players, who you can assume have a significant knowledge overlap. You guys talk to the same people, read the same blogs/books/etc. so you are confident that the other guy will understand the signal you are sending.
If that overlap does not exist, mindgames are really hard. The other guy just might not get the signals that you are sending. You over-advance a Junebug to signal a Ronin but the other guy might just be thinking "Why is he advancing that Junebug so much?" and you just wasted a lot of resources on a mindgame that went over the other guys head.
This is what Hollis was talking about with that sentence. Sure there are situations where you can play mindgames, but building a deck on that assumption is what he was warning against.
Edit: ChantC was quoted twice for some reason. Removed second quote.