Lethal - A Winning Strategy
If there is any gamer out there that is not familiar with this concept, you are really going to enjoy this. This will take your skill to another level, and is guaranteed to improve your win percentages in basically any game. Fighters, Board games, Card games, MOBAs, Shooters, you name it. Allow me to introduce you to the concept of Lethal. Note that there are probably other words used to describe the same concept, but this one is the best, thanks Hearthstone.
I'm going to start with Chess as the example and you don't need to be very experienced with Chess to understand. So picture you are playing Chess, and you are assessing your options. You recognize that you have a couple of ways you could potential secure Checkmate. One way can be done in 4 moves, another can be done in 5 moves and yet another in 3 moves. Now this might seem like a stupid obvious question, but which path do you take?
Obviously the three move checkmate right? Although it's obvious, many players don't think in this way and are not really optimizing a play to win strategy. Anything less than an optimal play is opening yourself up to a loss. Some of you are shaking your heads and are still not convinced. Let's continue further.
Hopefully there are some Settlers of Catan players out there reading this. In this game, you are in a free for all race to get 10 points. A lot of people who are not strategic gamers will play a little bit on auto pilot and only think and act short term. They become narrowly focused on small wins and forget the big picture. Again, even if you haven't played this game, you'll understand what I mean.
Say you have a bunch of resource cards, you need to spend these resource cards to buy things, including points. If you are two points away from a win and you have insufficient resources to buy those two points (aka settlements or cities). You might, if you were on autopilot, feel like just buying something for the sake of buying something (like a road). You feel like you are making progress by using your resources and buying things but really you should be thinking about what exactly you need to save up for to get what matters, the two point and the win. Try for specific trades, hoard specific resources, bide your time. If you think it'll take you two full rounds before you get enough for those two points, be patient and wait those two rounds, even if you end up performing zero actions on your turn. Ultimately that patience of waiting two rounds IS your lethal (and optimal) move to win the game.
Fighters. I'll be useful smash brothers melee here to make the point. I play Captain Falcon, but this applies to any character in any fighting game. In this game, if you know your character well enough, you know exactly what % range you need your opponent to be to get a finishing blow. If I grab Marth at 80% and upthrow him, I know I can land a knee on him and send him flying to his death. Seems like the obvious thing to do right? Unfortunately a lot of players, who are once again on autopilot, might instead throw out whatever moves just to feel like they are racking up damage and making progress and end up over damaging Marth and putting him past that 80% optimal range for a clean kill. If you overshoot the optimal percentage, even if you do grab him, the combo will not connect anymore. It is once again better to be patient and create an opportunity to grab him. Learn the percentages where you can make finishing blows, damage your opponent to that percentage and go for the kill.
MOBAs. Although I would like to reference League of Legends here, I feel like the original Dota would make this more clear. It's a team game and even in team games, the concept of lethal is very real. My buddy and I would play Sand King and Lina in the bottom lane back in the day. We knew that with out combined character abilities, we can stun lock an enemy and deal exactly X amount of damage if executed correctly. And so as we are playing the game, we wait for the enemy to reach say 100 health, we know that is lethal if we play it out right. So I initiate an attack, followed by my ally, followed by me, and my ally again, and 4 moves later, we deal out exactly enough damage to kill the opponent. If we instead tried to attack when the opponent had 120 health, he might get away with 20 health and heal up, and instead of getting a clean kill, we just wasted our energy on nothing.
Shooters. I'm going to reference original Halo for this one. The pistol in the game was a famously loved weapon. You got it pretty frequently, but if used well, could secure you a lot of kills, if you were looking for lethal. The pistol can kill a full health player with exactly 5 shots, as long as the last shot is a headshot. (Might be 3 shots, I forget, but you get the point) Now if you weren't thinking of a lethal, and you have 4 bullets in the gun, would it be worth even engaging an enemy knowing you literally cannot kill him? Probably not. You should retreat and create other options.
The examples are near infinite because this concept is universal. That is, if you are playing to win. And if you know me, you know that's what I'm here to do.
Until next time, keep looking for lethals. Good luck have fun, let's get lost in play.